Safe and Drug Free Schools

SDFS History

The Anchorage School District Safe and Drug Free Schools was started in 1986 with the Congressional passage of the 1985 Drug Free Schools and Communities Act. The law passed on federal grant dollars to each K-12 district in the country that would implement alcohol/drug prevention and intervention programming and curriculum.

In conjunction with the former Alaska Council on Prevention, the ASD Drug Free Schools efforts focused around the Here’s Looking at You 2000 curriculum for all students, Developing Capable People for parents and teachers and a major effort at providing Student Assistance services to ASD high risk students. Modeled after the employee assistance system, assessment, intervention and follow-up support after alcohol/drug treatment were offered to any student who needed it. Drug Free School staff provided an extensive system of prevention and intervention support groups.

In 1991, Congress changed the Act to the Safe and Drug Free Schools Act in an effort to stem the tide of increasing school violence. Around that time, 6 ASD elementary schools combined funding to bring Linda Lantieri to Anchorage to train their staff in the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program (RCCP). This was a conflict resolution program started in the New York City school district based on concepts from Educators for Social Responsibility. The program had only been used in the New York City Schools, and the staff there initially doubted that what worked in New York would work with students in Anchorage Alaska. RCCP was well received by the 6 schools who helped to further build and expand the program. Today, RCCP is used in over 45 ASD schools and is one of the most widely used, most successful conflict resolution programs in the country.

During the early 90s, the results of the resiliency research began to emerge, and necessitated a shift in safe and drug free school programming. This research is best summed up by the work of the Search Institute in the form of the Developmental Assets Framework. Starting in 1996, ASD Safe and Drug Free Schools efforts began to base all of its programming on one or more of these 40 developmental assets.

About the same time, Safe and Drug Free Schools programming nationally underwent increasing public scrutiny as to its efficacy. In response, the U.S. Department of Education issued The Principles of Effectiveness, which were to be followed by all districts using Safe and Drug Free School funds. These principles have helped school efforts become more outcome and results based. All ASD school-based efforts comply with the Principles of Effectiveness.