Just say 'in the know'
Revere program drastically cuts teens' alcohol, drug use
Revere had long been a place where teenage drinking was widely considered a rite of passage. Police who broke up parties would do little more than pour out the beer and send the kids on their way.
That has changed, and the current sanctions for teens caught drinking - under the law and in school, as well as from parents - represent more than a shift in enforcement. Over the past decade, Revere has seen significant statistical drops in the percentage of middle school and high school students who use and abuse alcohol, coinciding with what local officials, parents, and students themselves say has been a shift in attitudes about drinking.
That's no accident. Since 1997, Massachusetts Gen eral Hospital and Partners HealthCare have spent $4.4 million to fund a program called Revere CARES, designed to reduce teen drinking and substance abuse in a community where adults themselves abused alcohol and drugs at considerably higher rates than the state as a whole.
The number of high school students engaged in frequent binge drinking - five or more drinks in a row, on six or more occasions in the past month - dropped from 14 percent to 7 percent between 2001 and 2007. The portion of high schoolers who admitted to binge drinking statewide dropped from 8 percent to 5 percent during the same period.
In 1997, 59 percent of Revere's middle school students said they had experimented with alcohol and 54 percent had smoked. By 2007, the number who had reported drinking dropped to 42 percent, and those who had smoked fell to 28 percent.
"There's really been a culture change," said Carol Tye, a former Revere teacher and school superintendent who now serves on the city's School Committee.
The progress, city leaders and community members say, is attributable to the clout and financial support of MGH, to the persistence of Kitty Bowman, the director of Revere CARES, and to commitment from top officials - including the mayor, the police chief, and the superintendent - as well as thousands of parents and students.
They say the success, hailed with the release of a decade of statistics at a 10th anniversary celebration earlier this month, could not have happened if Revere CARES was a one-shot advertising campaign or a single classroom curriculum, nor would it have worked as a fixed plan handed down by the hospital system. Rather, Revere CARES (Community Awareness, Resources, and Education to Prevent Substance Abuse) is a coalition that has designed a variety of strategies and campaigns to curb substance abuse.
The success serves as a model for the state, said Michael Botticelli, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health's director of substance abuse services.
"What's impressive is that these are across-the-board improvements" in Revere, said Botticelli, whose agency has funded Revere CARES and provides multiyear grants of $100,000 annually to about 30 similar community coalitions.
Not every statistical category has shown continued improvement, but in many areas Revere has made dramatic gains and narrowed gaps with the state for student substance use, and surveys show that more teens are talking with their parents about their behavior and finding it difficult to obtain drugs and alcohol.
The data show particular improvement among middle schoolers' behavior in the five years since Revere CARES launched a campaign called the "Power of Know," which included getting more than 1,000 parents of adolescents to sign cards pledging to talk with their children about alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, listen to their kids, and get to know their children's friends and their parents.
"It's a different attitude that pervades in the city about substance abuse, and much of it is due to the attention that Revere CARES has brought to these issues," said Mayor Thomas G. Ambrosino, who has a daughter in ninth grade.
Revere CARES has taken the lead on some initiatives, such as working to ban smoking in restaurants before the statewide ban was enacted or challenging liquor licenses for convenience stores. It also works with other organizations and citizen initiatives.
Some of the Revere CARES investments directly address substance abuse; others, such as investing in a farmer's market and a youth sea-kayaking program, are indirect. And the MGH money has attracted other grants, totaling more than $2.5 million, plus city spending.
Michael Bonanno, a Revere High alumnus who teaches at the high school, said the community evolution has been "enormous."
Some of that could be attributed to societal changes everywhere or state and federal campaigns, but Revere CARES has been a clear catalyst in uniting citywide effort where once there was only spotty parental involvement, Bonanno and others said.
"I think people just needed a bus to jump on, and they were there," said Bonanno, who advises the school's Power of Know club, promoting healthy lifestyles.
Amanda Hittinger, a student leader with the club, said she feels little pressure to use drugs or alcohol. "It's not like you have to drink to fit in," the Revere senior said. "Yeah, some students do it, but I don't think it's very popular. And there's no peer pressure that I've seen."
Hittinger's club, coupled with a related antiviolence group, has attracted nearly 1 in 4 Revere High students to at least one of its extracurricular activities, where messages about resisting drugs and alcohol or making positive choices are directly or indirectly incorporated into events as varied as a lecture series and a charity pie-eating contest.
As one measure of the students' growing respect for the club and its ideas, Hittinger said, no one rips down Power of Know posters when passing through the halls.
When Revere CARES began, the city had 40 percent more alcohol-and-drug-related hospital discharges and nearly double the rate of death from substance-abuse-related illnesses of the state. It's too early to predict what will happen, but the program has made progress in helping young people avoid behaviors that will become "hardwired" for life, said Dr. Eric Weil, MGH's associate medical director for primary care.
Weil, who practices in Revere and is active with Revere CARES, has witnessed the change first-hand. "We have not achieved perfection," he said. They have, however, exceeded expectations, he added.
"What students consider to be normal now is probably very different than what they considered to be normal five or 10 years ago," he said. 