Ellwood City School District On New Pennsylvania Required Prevention Program

In April, Ellwood City School’s attended the Blueprints Conference at Penn State University. The conference presented a slideshow focusing on new required opioid education for Pennsylvania students grades 6-12 on prevention, risk, protective factors and effective prevention of the opioid epidemic.

Ellwood City received a 5-year grant for Life Skills Training in 2013. The grant allowed the school to further implement a prevention program to its students.

LST is a Blueprints program that is part of the grant ECASD received from the University of Colorado, Center for the Prevention on Violence. The grants were sent out through the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency and the ECASD has received the grant twice to implement the LST curriculum in grades 6-8.

LST is considered a universal prevention program that the EPISCenter recommends. LST recently came out with a specific lesson on opioids which ECASD has not implemented yet.

“We have a representative from Lawrence County Drug and Alcohol present to students in grades 7,8,11 and 12 and we have a recovering addict speak to students in grades 7-8,” Ellwood City Area School District Superintendent, Joseph E. Mancini said.

“As part of the law —PDE is supposed to give districts a model curriculum…We have not seen that as of today.”

The Pennsylvania Department of Education and Health would be required to jointly develop a model curriculum which school districts may, but are not required to use providing the newly required instruction on opioid abuse prevention.

LST also deals with gateway problems like tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, peer pressure and media pressure etc.

“If we can get to those issues first, and then add the opioid lesson, I think we will be on track.  Having implemented LST for the last five years in those grades has put us ahead of the curve,” Mancini said. “The goal is to increase protective factors and decrease the risk factors which are becoming more and more difficult.  Sustainability of the LST program is a priority for us.”

The school plans to look at alternative funding throughout the 2018-19 school year to make sure they can continue the program. The school recently wrote the PCCD grant on the prevention of violence in schools.

“We looked at the program called Positive Action. We could not write the grant to continue LST because it did not allow for us to write a grant for something that we are already implementing,” Mancini said.

“Positive Action is a social-emotional learning curriculum that not only helps with students coping and resiliency skills but also their academic skills. If students can find a way to learn how to handle all of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE’s) then they can focus on learning.”

The grant was written for grades K-6 to be taught in every classroom. There are additional family, community, school climate, drug and alcohol prevention and bullying prevention supplements that the school wrote into the grant.

The school plans to continue looking for grants to implement these programs into the curriculum.