Youth Safety Parent Night to raise substance abuse awareness

Date: 1/22/2015

EAST LONGMEADOW –  A Youth Safety Parent Night will take place at Birchland Park Middle School on Feb. 25 from 6 to 8:30 p.m. to raise awareness about substance abuse.

Diana Gomes, a school counselor at Birchland Park Middle School, told Reminder Publications an Opiate Awareness Committee was formed in April 2014 consisting of Police Chief Douglas Mellis, school leaders, health teachers, school counselor, and Birchland Park’s resource officer after a professional development meeting.

The committee was formed as a response to former Gov. Deval Patrick’s public health crisis announcement in March 2014 related to opiate deaths throughout the Commonwealth, she noted.

“We’ve been meeting since then to try to raise awareness in the community,” Gomes said. “One of the first things that we did is; Chief Mellis introduced us to Marie Graves, who is the program director of the Springfield Public Health and Human Services Department and she has been able to help us in developing surveys that we can give students both in the Middle School, the eighth grade students, and in the high school.” 

Gomes said the surveys focused on the misuse of prescription drugs and medication.

“Some of the data that we’ve got back is what's helped us to move forward and to be able to think about putting together a parent night here in town,” she added.

The data showed that there is a misconception about misuse of prescription drugs at the grade 8 level, Gomes said. A large number of students stated that the misuse of prescription drugs was high, when in fact it was relatively low.

In addition, the amount of data received from the high school was less than grade 8, she said. In the future, the committee will be surveying high school students again.

Gomes said there will be three different 25-minute breakout sessions focusing on different topics of drug abuse awareness hosted by speakers.

The first consists of a presentation by Mellis and the East Longmeadow Police Department alongside a representative from the Hampden County District Attorney’s Office, she said. This presentation would focus on raising awareness about opiate and other forms of drug abuse, prevention measures, and statistics within the town.

Within the past year, there has been an increase in heroin related deaths in the town in the age group of 19 to 27, Gomes added.

The second session will consist of a presentation by a local pediatrician regarding how to monitor youth and keep them safe from substance abuse, she said. 

“A local pediatrician would talk about different ways to keep your kids safe in terms of how to store your medication, how to talk to your kids about substance abuse [and] about the misuse of prescription drugs and medication,” Gomes added.

For the third session, Graves will speak about risk and protective factors as well as treatment options for addiction and substance abuse, Gomes said.

“Once we’d reconvene in the cafeteria, we’d also have parents fill out an evaluation form about how the evening went; what they liked [and] what they wished they could have liked to hear more about,” she added.

The purpose of the evaluation form is to help with planning another event, likely sometime in April, which would have speakers whose lives have been effected by substance abuse and addiction, Gomes said.

The goal is to have the community start talking about substance abuse and to have parents know that there are support resources that they can reach out to, she added.

“It’s something that we’re hearing a lot about and just recently we checked the Boston Globe and there was 185 deaths in Massachusetts alone from opioid overdoses,” Gomes said. “It’s a growing issue that everyone really needs to be talking about and needs to be discussed to keep our kids safe. This is the first step that we're taking to try to raise awareness and to be able to help with this.”