Students want drug awareness week

It was a relatively quiet meeting for the Near North District School Board (NNDSB) Wednesday as the board gets ready for the holiday break.

One note of interest, however, was the suggestion of a board wide ‘Drug and Alcohol Awareness Week’. Student Trustee Chaylene Grieve-Saunders made the suggestion following a meeting she recently had with the Student Senators.

“We don’t have much detail yet, actually it is just in the making, but we want to do something where we have different workshops going on to teach students… not telling them ‘Don’t do drugs,’ but telling them the effects of using drugs,” she says

“We want to do it youth to youth because we find it’s more powerful than principals and teachers and adults speaking to youth … they listen more.”

Grieve-Saunders says the senate is made up of different students every year and therefor the focus is different, but this year she wanted to see attention paid to the repercussions of student drug use.

“Last year they had a different focus than we do this year. We are trying to unify and make the board aware, and have different workshops, so it was something that I brought up cause I’m interested in it,” she says.

“Actually, they were very receptive towards it and excited about it and they want to take the initiative and actually do something about it. It’s not just something we’re going to talk about and then not take action for it … we actually would like to do it … all the senators.”

Grieve-Saunders also says that as student trustee she is working to further develop ‘Leaders Today’ and the Craig and Marc Kielburger models of peer to peer initiatives. She says the model has been to be useful, productive and powerful for students and has structured her meetings with the senate and NNDSB Trustees accordingly.

“So when I do my meetings I’ve been telling them (NNDSB) it would work better this way and they have the understanding that yes it would and that youth to youth is powerful and it has much more action and gets people inspired. So they do feel the same way as I do in that aspect.”

Board chair Alan Bottomley agrees that developing further peer to peer programs in the board is important to student success.

The awareness week is still in development stage and the senate hopes to have it come to fruition by spring of 2007 and partner with DARE in making it successful.