Page 420 - NIXBOOK

D.A.R.E.

Drug Abuse Resistance Education. A popular national program designed to educate kids about the dangers of drugs; taught by
police officers in school classrooms.

From 1995 to 2000 I was a DARE Officer. The DARE program had been invented and implemented starting in Los Angeles in
1983, and it became a nationwide program about 10 years later, present in almost a majority of school districts and police
departments. By the early ‘90’s all of the police departments in our county had a DARE Officer; a patrol officer assigned to a
specialty assignment of youth drug education. Even though I had not yet met the minimum time in service for being a police
officer, I was given a waiver and accepted into the Washington State DARE Officer Instructor program. And after my successful
completion of that course I was state certified to go into classrooms and teach students about the dangers of drugs. Here’s me
at the training, front and center.

The Drug Abuse Resistance and Education program kept me busy for five years. I taught the 17-lesson curriculum to the local
5th and 6th graders at three elementary schools. 17 lessons to about 46 different classrooms of kids. The grand total of students
I taught was a little over 1,300. Scheduling several different classes in multiple schools on the same days was always a challenge
and doing the high-energy classroom presentations were usually pretty mentally demanding. It gave me a pretty good
appreciation for the jobs that school teachers have to do. When the teachers got familiar with me and saw that I could handle
the class on my own for an hour or so they’d sometimes leave me alone with the kids, which was usually rewarding. I took pride
in learning how to keep the students focused for long periods of time using a variety of techniques, most self-taught. And over
the years I became acquainted with most of the teachers and principals and staff in the local schools and at the school district
administrative buildings.

As a DARE Officer I got assigned a special DARE vehicle, which in my case turned out to be a not-really-so-special used Ford
minivan that a car dealer had donated to us. In the bigger police departments the first DARE vehicles were fancy cars like
Camaros or Corvettes or Hummers that had been seized from drug dealers and converted to department use. Not every
department could get flashy cars though so a trend was started to give “different” (non-police) vehicles to the DARE programs,
or they would just take old police cars and put colorful graphics all over them to make them look different. Anyway the best my
department could do was to get an old donated black and gray Aerostar minivan. To make it look a little better I got a local car
stereo shop to donate red and blue neon tubes under it. I never saw any other police or DARE cars with neon lights (probably
because they broke pretty easily) but for a while I had the only vehicle around that could legally operate on the roads with neon
tubes on underneath. Since I could call them “emergency lights” I could use them when I was pulling people over.

My official police trading card from that era: