Congratulations to the fifth-grade students who graduated from the D.A.R.E. program on Tuesday, May 21, 2013. They all learned a lot along with new D.A.R.E. instructor Deputy Ben Hallberg. Left: Receiving special recognition were essay writer Mason Liljestrand, poster contest winner Ian Parker, and essay writers Sam Sietsema and Alyssa Spry. Parker’s poster earned third place in the state.
If Sheriff Deputy Ben Hallberg was nervous about hosting his first-ever D.A.R.E. graduation, it did not show. Before an audience of students and parents at the Arrowhead Center for the Arts on Tuesday, May 21, he explained what the D.A.R.E. program is all about.
Hallberg said he had to go to Minneapolis for D.A.R.E. training, where he spent two weeks taking turns being the D.A.R.E. instructor or pretending to be a fifth-grader. That brought a round of laughter from his D.A.R.E. graduates.
Hallberg said in training he easily managed to follow the 45-minute planned curriculum. However, he grinned, it was not so easy in the Cook County classrooms. The students had great questions and there was really good discussion, he said. “I appreciate all of the fifth-graders sticking through this.”
A difficult thing, said Hallberg, was selecting two students to receive recognition for the final assignment, their D.A.R.E. essays. Hallberg said what they learned about decision-making, about weighing positive and negative choices, was reflected in their essays. Hallberg was unable to select just two; he picked three students, whose essays were shared at the graduation.
Hallberg also called forward Ian Parker, who represented Cook County extremely well in the statewide D.A.R.E. poster contest. Out of about 100 entries, Ian finished third.
“I’m so grateful to have this chance,” Hallberg said. “I look forward to seeing these kids grow up drug and alcohol free.”
Alyssa Spry
DARE is really fun and it helped me learn a lot of information. DARE taught me about many things like reporting bullying and making responsible choices. There is also the DARE decision making model. Define – Define the problem. Assess – what are your choices? Respond – Make a choice. Last, Evaluate – Review your decision. Did you make a good choice? The DARE decision making model was a fun and easy way to act out a problem. We all worked in a group and used the DARE decision making model to help us with a problem we were assigned. I will use all of this information to keep myself out of trouble. I will respond to pressure by thinking of positive ways to work the problem out. I’ll use confident communication to make my friends or whoever to stop asking me to do something that makes me feel pressure. DARE is really fun and I learned a lot starting from Day 1.
Sam Sietsema
In DARE I learned that smoking, doing drugs and drinking can harm you, even kill you. Deputy Hallberg taught us to withstand peer pressure and say no to drugs. The DARE decision making model: The D stands for define where you look and find the problem, the A stands for assess where you look at your options, for example, you could tell the teacher or try to stop them yourself, the R stands for respond, where you choose your answer, the E stands for evaluate where you see if your choice was good. I have used the DARE decision making model before and I will again in the future. And this is what I think DARE is all about: I think DARE is all about keeping us (kids or anyone) safe. Thanks for keeping us safe, Deputy Hallberg.
Mason Liljestrand
Right when I heard that we were going to start DARE I started to get excited. I learned so much from DARE. We learned how to stay away from drugs using simple methods. I like using the DARE decision making model. It helps me with the problems in our DARE booklet. It helps me Define, Assess, Respond and Evaluate. I want to make good choices from what I learned from DARE. I hope my classmates and I will never get involved with drugs of any kind, because I never want to hear when I am older that someone I know had died from drugs. We also learned about bullying. Our class also learned about the five Ws. They are who, what, when, where, why. That’s what you tell an adult when someone is getting bullied. If someone asks me if I liked DARE I would say yes, because it’s fun, and I liked the videos and activities.
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