By PAMELA ROBINSON, Register Staff Writer Gainesville Daily Register The Daily Register Sun Oct 10, 2010, 11:47 AM CDT

Gainesville — Editor’s Note: The Cooke County United Way serves 18 agencies and the Register will spotlight each of them between now and the end of the year.



Children and youth in Cooke County have prevention education on their side to guard against the abusive of substances such as alcohol, tobacco and drugs. Those education programs are provided by the Substance Abuse Council.

The Substance Abuse Council is a private non-profit 501c3 organization established to provide the prevention and education programs required by Texas Education Agency for schools in the Texoma area and is a United Way agency.

“The purpose is to intervene in the process of alcohol, drug addiction and the use of tobacco and alcohol by minors,” Neva Lovelace-Yeary, Substance Abuse Council Executive Director, said.

Right now the programs are focused on Cooke County students from the sixth through eighth grades.

“The program follows through a three-year program,” Lovelace-Yeary said, “and we work to reach every student in those grades.”

The programs are science based and tested, Lovelace-Yeary said for students in this area.

The primary program used in Cooke County is Project Northland.

“The goals of the program are to delay the age when young people begin drinking, reduce alcohol use among young people who have already tried drinking, and limit the number of alcohol-related problems for young people,” the council literature reads.

“Project Northland’s focus on the prevention of the early use of alcohol also reduces the likelihood that teens will progress to the use of illicit drugs like marijuana, since the vast majority of teenage drug users begin their experimentation with the more readily available legal drugs of alcohol and tobacco,” the literature reads.

The research on adolescent alcohol and drug use suggests that factors within a teen’s social environment, personality and behavior are all important determinants of substance abuse, so they are addressed.

“It’s a process that has worked well with tobacco,” Lovelace-Yeary noted. “If you start young enough, kids are much more likely to pick that up (education) and continue on with it.”

She said her daughter “got the message” through her school programs that tobacco is not a good habit to venture into.

Lovelace-Yeary said the program also teaches the students to change their behavior and bring safety to themselves by focusing on what they can do if they are with other people that smoke. For instance, if someone is smoking at home, you can go outside or go to your room to protect themselves from the hazards of cigarette smoke.

Each campus has a liaison that coordinates the education process.

“We actually go into all of the school districts in Cooke County,” Lovelace-Yeary noted. “We don’t have enough people to get to everywhere all at once. We also lost our funding for our kindergarten program about two years ago.”

Cooke County United Way helps in many ways, Lovelace-Yeary noted.

“United Way provides 10 % of our Cooke County budget,” she said. “It also helps us keep our state money.”

While the council covers the Texoma-area counties of Cooke, Fannin and Grayson, each county is responsible for coming up with their own United Way funding.

“The money received by the Cooke County United Way is used in our Cooke County schools,” Lovelace-Yeary said.

Another function of the council is retail monitoring.

“We go to all the stores to make sure that their licenses are up to date that they have posters, to ensure it doesn’t