Star-Journbal Editor
The students at Hillsboro Elementary did a lot to fight drugs last week during the school's Red Ribbon week.
Students wore wacky socks, walked around the track, ran around the track, colored posters, put up door hangers, wrote poems, wrote paragraphs, and role played saying no to their peers - all against drugs.
This past Friday in an all-school assembly, some of the boys and girls read their poems and paragraphs, and others performed role-playing skits.
The atmosphere in the school gym seemed almost Pentecostal. As one charismatic student after another rose up to speak out against drugs, other students clapped and cheered.
Even for the clean-cut, clear-eyed children of Hillsboro, the anti-drug message of Red Ribbon week is still necessary, according to school counselor Mike Moran.
Experience tells Moran that some of the children cheering so loudly against drug and alcohol abuse would be going home to parents who were getting drunk and/or getting stoned.
"We definitely have kids here where alcohol and drugs are used at home," Moran said. "Right now, in the case of alcohol, I know that for sure."
In addition to getting mixed messages from parents using drugs or alcohol, children also are confused by parents and grandparents who smoke, Moran added.
But the Red Ribbon program has proven effective in curbing smoking among young people, Moran said. Children learn to make healthy choices for themselves regardless of the bad examples they see at home.
The national Red Ribbon anti-drug awareness program began in 1985 to honor a DEA agent who was murdered in Mexico.
Each year, from October through mid-November, Moran teaches an age-appropriate anti-drug curriculum to students from kindergarten through fifth grade. Last week's assembly marked the end of the program for another year.
Even though most children growing up in Hillsboro will not be exposed to drugs as children, Moran knows that in any year, in any all-school assembly, there could be another girl like the one he encountered in a small group discussion a few years ago.
"The topic of our discussion was 'What do your parents like to do? What are their hobbies?"' Moran said. "This little girl said, 'Mr. Moran, I'm not sure I want to tell that' and I said 'Well, whisper it in my ear
"She said, 'My mom likes to smoke marijuana."'
Moran called the girl's mom.
"I told her this is what your daughter told me," he said. "I asked her what it was going to be like when she gets in middle school, and how she was going to handle that. She just said thanks and hung up.
"They moved away," Moran added. "So I don't know what ever happened to them."
