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Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine Witnesses Brain Power Program Demonstration
By BRUCE WALTON
BOARDMAN
Ohio’s attorney general took a seat with middle-school students to answer questions about the district’s Brain Power Drug Education program.
Ian Head, fifth-grade science teacher at Center Middle School, demonstrated the impact of the program Friday to his students and Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine.
While touring the state to find programs focused on drug treatment or education, DeWine discovered what the school district’s program has done and visited to see it firsthand.
DeWine said the epidemic of drug abuse, most notably opiate addiction, has gripped the state, and his job is to help local law enforcement deal with the problem. But the attorney general understands the government can’t just “arrest their way out of it.”
“The program that we’re looking at here in Boardman – one of the reasons that it makes a lot of sense – is that it’s integrated into the science courses, it’s integrated into the health courses,” he said. “So we’re not asking a school to add one more thing.”
Brain Power works as a K-12 program that implements drug education through teaching the science of drug use in classes to give students the knowledge to make educated decisions on their own later in life.
Boardman’s schools first were introduced to the program at the end of the last academic school year and accepted it with lots of positive feedback from the staff, school Superintendent Frank Lazzeri said.
When the Mahoning Valley Hospital Foundation provided a grant for the school district to afford the program, instructors started receiving training in August just before the current academic school year started.
In addition to Boardman, more than a half-dozen Mahoning County school districts have implemented the program.
Nancy Pommerening, Brain Power Drug Education program coordinator, said she’s seen the need for a program such as Brain Power in schools. Many area schools lack both the funding for drug-awareness programs or the time to apply them.
“We all know what happens,” she said, “When the rubber hits the road, schools don’t have the time to cover subjects like illicit drug use.”
Head said it’s been a challenge adding the drug-awareness program to the curriculum and fitting every other subject his students should learn as well as preparing for testing. But he believes the importance of the program outweighs the added effort.
“I think that this is a very important curriculum to be taught, and my feeling is if you’re a good teacher, then you’re able to teach anything,” Head said.