The proposed project expands long-term evaluation of an ongoing community- based drug abuse prevention program (Midwestern Prevention Project) that has emphasized intervention during early adolescence, by initiating intervention earlier in childhood. The proposed program is tailored to the changing developmental needs of children and adolescents and includes school, parent, and community components. The original community program yielded significant reductions in monthly, weekly, and daily use of tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana, and lifetime use of some illicit drugs from adolescence to early adulthood. However, process and formative evaluation research suggests a need for stronger programs that are initiated earlier in elementary school and continued at least through middle school. The study will evaluate short-term and long-term effects of comprehensive school-community programming in Indianapolis that is initiated during elementary school and is implemented from grades 4 through 7. Feeder middle schools will be stratified according to current participation in DARE and then randomly assigned from within strata to a comprehensive elementary+middle program or middle program condition, both with parent involvement and community support revised from the original community intervention to include a focus on academic and social competence, and violence as well as drug abuse prevention (N=48 elementary schools, 24 middle schools, 2400 individuals measured from all classrooms each year from the 1996 fourth grade cohort as it moves through time). Measures include annual surveys of students, parents, teachers, community leaders, and individuals knowledgeable about local policy; expired air; and school archival records on drug-related infractions, absenteeism, policy and achievement. Regression, growth curve, and causal modeling analyses will be used to evaluate program effects. The proposed project continues and expands the scope of the current project by testing the efficacy of a combined elementary and middle school year program with parent and community components. The results of the study should yield important information about the incremental effects of a community program initiated in childhood compared to programming focused only on adolescents.
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