Corbin schools get $1.2 million grant to combat teen drinking

The old saying goes: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Officials with the Corbin Independent School District are hoping a three-year, $1.2 million grant program directed at preventing student abuse and experimentation with alcohol will prove the old saying true.
Officials announced the district received the grant at the regular monthly meeting of the Board of Education last Thursday.
“It’s a research project that designed to target prevention of underage drinking,” said Mark Daniels, Director of Support Services for the school district. “It’s very difficult to monitor how much of something you prevented, but we were able to have good statistics on this. If you can take your baseline and start to show reductions in that, then you can determine if the program works or not.”
Daniels said Corbin’s school district got the grant primarily because it had well-established statistical data regarding alcohol use among students. That data, he said, was garnered thanks to a state program called the Kentucky Incentive Prevention Project (KIPP) – a project that provides anonymous questionnaires annually in order to measure the degree of drug, tobacco and alcohol use among student populations. Daniels said KIPP was primarily focused on middle school students, all of who are in high school now. The newest grant program will consist of curriculum and instruction at the high school level.
The grant, which provides $400,000 to the district for three years, was funded through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMSHA), which is under the U.S. Department of Education.
Daniels said surveys have shown a 20 percent drop in the district in substance abuse and experimentation with tobacco, alcohol and marijuana among students.
“There’s always going to be experimentation among all youth,” Daniels said. “With this, we are hoping to put that angel on their shoulder telling them to stay away from those situations when they arise.”
The program will begin at the high school this year.