Narconon Arrowhead Congratulates AmeriCorps Volunteers to the Boys and Girls Club
The Boys and Girls Club is a wonderful place for young boys and girls to come and hang out, play sports and games, after school hours under watchful supervision.
Given the multiple threats to our young people, it’s great to have such a facility in McAlester, Oklahoma. Among those threats these days, we all know, is drugs—like ‘friends’ offering some pot to smoke or a pill to take, or even just saying, “I got a beer from my parents’ refrigerator. Wanna drink some?”
There was a time when we would only worry about high school students having to confront this. Then it went down to middle school age. But now we have to make sure even our elementary school age children—5 to 11 years old—are protected.
For this reason, Narconon Arrowhead has for a long time reached out to offer drug education talks, geared to the specific age of the listeners. Narconon Drug Education is a registered evidence-based program. Recently, at the McAlester Boys and Girls Club, a Narconon drug educator spoke to 80 young children, mostly between 6 and 9 years old. Usually, talks to such an age group are about the first ‘gateway’ drugs – alcohol and tobacco. But this class offered up something different. The educator asked a simple opening question, “Can anyone give me an example of a drug?” Instead of saying what’s usually heard from elementary school kids, “beer…tobacco” voices piped up instead with “Methamphetamine… heroin… pills… cocaine… crack.”
“I was shocked and saddened,” said the Narconon drug educator. “That some of these children would know such words might likely mean that they had seen such drugs around them. It is a warning sign if ever there was one.”
Later, the Narconon drug educator returned to give a more adult talk to some volunteers come to help out the McAlester Boys and Girls Club throughout this coming summer. AmeriCorps is an outgrowth of what used to be called the Vista Volunteers from many years ago, young people wanting to contribute to the community. These were ten young people, 18 years old and up, come from across the country, including New York, Oregon, one from as far away as the Marianas Islands in the South Pacific! Most of them had already been volunteering on post-catastrophe public construction projects in Louisiana and other states. Now they were here In McAlester on the American Great Plains.
The Narconon drug ed talk concerned basics about drugs and the even more important subject of how to talk to kids. “If you don’t get them willing to listen to you, really willingly,” they were told, “it doesn’t matter what you say. Your ideas will just bounce off their foreheads.” The young AmeriCorps volunteers were truly interested and expressed thanks for some of the new ideas.
We’re lucky to have young people like this, willing to look after our young kids. Indeed, it is a bit of an American tradition. We hope they—and our kids—have a great, drug-free summer.
For more information on Narconon Arrowhead drug education, call 918-339-5880.
Reference:
AmeriCorps: https://www.nationalservice.gov/programs/americorps
Narconon drug education: http://nrepp.samhsa.gov/ProgramProfile.aspx?id=71
