The survey covers topics from a student’s perspective, such as drug and alcohol use, bullying, mental health, and gambling.
The PAYS results from 2015 show promising, positive results concerning drug and alcohol prevention efforts in Clarion County, reinforcing efforts to control and ultimately stop drug and alcohol abuse among county students is working.
In the fall of 2015, nearly 1,000 students across the county participated in PAYS, which is an anonymous survey designed with a system of checks to greatly reduce the amount of fraudulent surveys.
The county data has a margin of error of 1.26 percent overall, so results gathered from the survey are very close to accurate.
Because the survey is administered with anonymity, students feel comfortable being honest with their responses, thus supplying valuable, accurate data for schools, communities, and prevention planning.
Because the PAYS has been administered in the county since 2005, a data set ranging back approximately ten years is available for examining trends and to use as a tool to see if prevention efforts are working in our communities and schools.
The most commonly used substances are as expected: alcohol, cigarettes, and smokeless tobacco. However, all three are showing a downward trend over the past few survey periods.
Binge drinking, for example, which is defined as having five or more drinks in one sitting in the past two weeks, has gone from 39 percent among 12th graders and 16 percent overall in 2005 to 17.7 percent among 12th graders and 7.1 percent overall in 2015.
Driving after drinking alcohol was another area of concern that saw a spike among 12th grades in 2009; nearly 27 percent of students in that grade reported DUI, which was nearly twice as high as the state reported that year.
Through concentrated prevention efforts by local agencies, this number was decreased in 2011 to 18.1 percent, and as of the 2015 report, it is down to 5.8 percent, showing a substantial drop in this risky behavior.
Regular cigarette use among students in grades 6 to12 has declined slowly, from 16 percent in 2007 to 12 percent in 2013. While there is a concern students replaced smoking with e-cigarettes (which has been reported to be just as harmful), just under 15 percent of students reported in 2015 to be using e-cigarettes/vaping regularly.
There is hope that further concentrated prevention efforts will continue to drive down regular cigarette use among county students.
Smokeless tobacco, which has always shown higher use percentages in Clarion County than the state, has also shown an overall decrease of four percent since 2011 and, specifically, an 18.3 percent drop among 10th graders.
Both drops in tobacco product use are likely due to the excellent prevention efforts being performed through local agencies and schools.
Less than two percent of county students reported regularly using inhalants or prescription drugs; this is down from the peak of six percent and five percent, respectively, in 2009.
“Hard” drugs, such as heroin and cocaine, have never been a huge problem among county students, and, in the 2015 report, there were virtually no reports of regular heroin or methamphetamines use and a negligible percentage reporting regular use of synthetic drugs, ecstasy, hallucinogens, crack, or cocaine (less than 0.3 percent).
In past years, the highest reported was a two percent regular use of cocaine in 2007.
The strong decrease in the use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs among county students shows a lot of promise toward concentrated prevention efforts; however, there are still areas of concern such as bullying and mental health.
While it is promising to see the numbers for drug and alcohol use dropping across the county, localized prevention efforts must continue to keep those numbers from going back up.
The Clarion County Family Net, a collaborative board comprised of county agencies, community members, and school representatives, uses resources such as the PAYS to pinpoint where new or further prevention efforts are needed and to work on ways to address those needs together as a county.
These topics will be presented to the community in future articles.
The PAYS is used not only as a gauge to see where gaps exist in student services and prevention programming, but also as a measurement tool to see how Clarion County’s agencies, communities, and schools are doing. While not the only source of information, it remains a very valuable one.
For more information about the PAYS, contact Clarion County’s Promise at (814) 223-1590. To access the full report, visit www.clarioncountyspromise.org and click “Community Resources.”