Healthy Alternatives for Students

Effective prevention requires school administrators to broaden the focus of their prevention efforts from users to non-users, from those students whose drinking and drug-taking behavior consume disproportionate amounts of faculty time, energy, and emotion, to those students whose decision to remain drug-free contributes to the health and well-being of the community.

Encouraging Non-Use
FCD has developed many strategies to help schools create a school climate that reinforces non-use as the community norm. We can show you how to:

Challenge the perception that drug use is the "norm" among teenagers
Support students who are making healthy choices
Mobilize non-using students as a powerful and untapped prevention force
Encourage students to make explicit commitments to not use alcohol or other drugs at this point in their lives
Train teachers, advisors, and dorm prefects on how to reinforce non-use as the community norm and support students making healthy lifestyle choices
Recognize the subtle ways in which schools may inadvertently condone student use
Develop a reproducible peer leadership model for promoting non-use
Create non-use support and education groups
Provide non-using students with conferences, workshops, after school activities, and other alcohol- and drug-free events
Raise the school community's awareness of the significant number of young people and adults who choose not to use.

Natural Highs
One of the best ways to keep kids off drugs is to teach them to get high—in healthy, positive ways. When teenagers take drugs, it's not necessarily because they want to "do drugs" or introduce a toxin into their system. It's because they want to stop feeling bored, angry, hurt, worried, harassed, afraid, inadequate, ostracized, lonely, or anxious. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to relax, seek a thrill, take a risk, "escape reality," bond with friends, or disappear into a state of meditative bliss. Getting "high" isn't the problem. How you do it is.

Healthy Choices
Adolescents, whose bodies and life skills are still developing, are especially vulnerable to dependency if they begin to use substances as a means of coping with feelings, stress, and social insecurity. If we want to help young people stay drug-free, we need to recognize that kids use drugs to satisfy certain desires or needs, and guide teens towards alternative, constructive ways to satisfy them.

Workshops
FCD offers a series of workshops to expose students to healthy ways to relieve anxiety, relax, achieved an altered state, or pump up the adrenaline. These workshops, which can be tailored for faculty, parents, peer leaders, and elementary, middle, and high school participants, cover such topics as:

Food and mood
Tips for getting a good night's sleep
Exercising for energy
Relaxation techniques
Visualizing confidence and success
Developing a personalized stress-reduction program
Reducing test-taking anxiety