D.A.R.E. teaches Your children from kindergarten through high school that popularity can be found in positive behavior. Belonging need not require them to abandon their values. Self confidence and self worth come from asserting themselves and resisting destructive temptations. D.A.R.E. teaches them not just that they should refuse drugs and alcohol, but how to do so.

D.A.R.E. gives Your children the tools they need to build a better, fuller, more satisfying life.

The program was created in 1983 as a joint venture of the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Unified School District. D.A.R.E. sends a highly trained police officer into fifth grade classrooms every week for 17 weeks to teach students how to refuse drugs and alcohol.

In Quincy, D.A.R.E. officers are assigned to several schools during each school year. They try to visit their assigned schools at least one day per week.

Nationally, D.A.R.E. officers reach hundreds of thousands of students every year.

The program follows a carefully structured curriculum, focusing on topics such as personal safety, drug use and misuse, consequences of behavior, resisting peer pressure, building self esteem, assertiveness training, managing stress without drugs, media images of drug use, role models and support systems. Separate components have been developed to introduce kindergarten through fourth grade students to the D.A.R.E. program and to follow up in junior high and high school classrooms, spreading the D.A.R.E. message throughout the schools. By getting the message from a street-wise police officer. One who's been out there. One who knows how drugs and alcohol can destroy lives. Kids take that message seriously. And, by getting kids when they're most vulnerable to social pressure, when they're 9, 10, and 11 years old or sooner, D.A.R.E. helps them build the willpower and the belief in themselves that they need to stay on track as they forge their futures.

D.A.R.E. has been doing its job for nearly a decade. And its succeeding.