Coalition promotes safe, healthy community; Alabama: Hoover City School District.

With the establishment of the Hoover City School District in 1988, school leaders knew that having safe and healthy students was a prerequisite for academic success. Their first goal was to assess the prevalence of drug use through a survey, which revealed a pattern of alcohol, tobacco and marijuana use.

Leaders responded by enlisting the community's help to address the problem. The school district formed an advisory committee, which began to study research on youth drug prevention. After some success with prevention in its first few years, the committee decided to expand its membership to ensure that all sectors of the community were represented and that the panel reflected community demographics.

This was the beginning of what is known today as the Hoover Coalition Promoting a Safe and Healthy Community. The coalition is a department of the Hoover City School District and is co-chaired by Hoover's mayor and the school superintendent. A federal drug-free-communities grant helps support operations.

The coalition includes students, school officials, parents and representatives of religious organizations. It also includes employees of law enforcement, judicial, and local government agencies; local businesses; health and mental health organizations; higher education institutions; organizations serving young people, and local media. All coalition activities include students, who are involved in project and activity planning and implementation.

The group's mission is to develop partnerships and strategies to reduce substance abuse within the schools, families and the community and to accomplish that goal through projects and activities. While some programs are based in the schools, others are carried out through community partners.

A partnership with the Hoover Parks and Recreation Program, for example, reaches all participating athletes with drug-prevention messages. Each athlete is given the opportunity to sign a drug-free contract and receive a uniform patch stating he or she is a drug-free athlete. The contracts are developed by high school students serving on the coalition.

Also under the auspices of the coalition, a Latino After-School Program was started more than two years ago after school district employees became concerned about the need to meet the expanding Latino population's English-language learning needs. The coalition received local and state funding to implement the after-school program for those students.

The program's success is primarily a result of the trained high-school peer tutors who provide individual help to participating students. The after-school program also assists parents in helping their children to be successful in school, teaches the parents how to talk to their children about substance abuse and works with them to improve family-management skills.

The coalition worked with religious leaders to encourage drug-prevention messages in their programs and with community employers to distribute parenting information to the employees through workplace bulletin boards, newsletters and paycheck stuffers.

It also worked with local pharmacies on a campaign to fight prescription drug abuse. The coalition printed 40,000 fliers containing tips for preventing abuse of prescription drugs for the pharmacies to distribute.

Comparative surveys in 1989 and 2003 among seventh, ninth and 11th graders show improvement in the percentages of students not using cigarettes, beer, liquor and marijuana.

In 2004, the Hoover City School District and the Hoover Coalition received recognition from the Office of National Drug Control Policy for their success in reducing youth substance abuse. Funding for the efforts has almost doubled over the past three years.

For more information, contact Superintendent Connie Williams at Hoover City School District, 2810 Metropolitan Wag Hoover, Ala. 35243, or call [phone]. By e-mail, write to [e-mail].