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At the quarterly meeting of the Partners for a Drug Free Chisago County, Kevin Spading, a Chisago City resident who is a project director with the Minnesota Prevention Resource Center, spoke about bringing the community into balance by looking at things through the eyes of youth. What does a community need to offer to embrace and protect its children. The prevention of youth drug and chemical abuse is a multi-layered effort, there's no single fix.

Spading stressed that through the Drug Free partnership Chisago County is developing the right approach, offering many messages throughout many levels of a child's life, that good choices make a difference.

Spading said the public health people here, the judges, the mentors in schools, all "get it," and he commended this area for its programs and workers enforcing those strategies that will be successful over the long haul.

Some of these strategies are visible in youth drug court, in the Not A Drop law for teen drivers, the .08 DUI limit, in doing compliance checks to make sure minors aren't accessing cigarettes and alcohol, and in cracking down on adult providers of alcohol to minors.

Other strategies that Spading spoke highly of are those that simply connect youth with "significant adults" who can be role models or just friends. In all the surveys the main thing that is cited by youth who were successful in defeating or avoiding drugs and alcohol was having an adult in their life who cared about them.

Spading brings to his profession an "intuitive understanding" of these issues. He has four children, but he also was separated at a young age from his siblings when his mother died and his father was absent. He was adopted by a family rife with chemical abuse and domestic problems.

As he exited grad school, he said he was geared towards working in the treatment field, but soon devoted himself to prevention. "The local community and the local community connections-- this is where prevention matters," he told the quarterly meeting of Partners.

The Minnesota Prevention Resource Center is in Mounds View at the Minnesota Institute of Public Health, and offers all sorts of trainings, speakers, materials, etc.

Visit www.emprc or contact the offices at 763-427-5310.

The Partnership for a Drug Free county is overseen by the Community Partnership with Youth and Families organization, in North Branch, headed by Tom Koplitz.

Koplitz mentioned at the quarterly meeting that the annual grant funding expires end of September 2008, so the next several months are going to be important as far as re-structuring what's being offered now.

A planning meeting January 17, 2008 will be when all involved in the drug free effort will need to put their heads together. "This is really a golden opportunity to make a difference," Koplitz added, noting that the silver lining is the grant funds carried restrictions and limitations. "Now we can take this where it needs to go" minus some of the paperwork and constraints related to grant monies.

In other news: it was announced that Sunrise River School in North Branch has a mentorship program now. If you are interested in connecting with younger kids, contact the school for info.

~ The Baptist Church in Taylors Falls (across from the elementary school) hosts a Crime Watch neighborhood gathering Saturday, October 27, at 6 p.m.

~ Rep. Jeremy Kalin also spoke briefly about efforts to revamp the incarceration programs so treatment can become more successful and available. Numbers of repeat drug offenders in the state system keep growing, and the current way they are being handled is not turning things around, he said.

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