School official goes into classroom to take on student marijuana use
(Published Friday, March 2, 2007 11:52:36 AM CST)
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
By Frank Schultz Gazette staff
Marijuana: The harmless drug. A mellowing agent. An herb.
Carrie Kulinski tossed those ideas to her class at the Rock River Charter School this week.
Ever hear that kind of talk? she asked.
They had. One student had heard it another way:
"God made weed. Man made alcohol. Who do you trust?" he recited.
Kulinski was out to convince her students that "weed" is no good for them. She knew she had a hard audience. Surveys have consistently shown that only alcohol is more popular among local teens.
Carrie Kulinski emcees a drug education memory game with students at the Rock River Charter School during a class earlier this week. Kulinski is Janesville School District's coordinator for drug-abuse programs and has created an anti-marijuana curriculum for middle and high school students.
Bill Olmsted/Gazette Staff
Kulinski is the school district's coordinator for drug-abuse programs. Drugs are a regular part of the district's health classes, but teachers told Kulinski several years ago that middle-school students were asking for more information about marijuana.
The district's main anti-drug course, called Prime for Life, focuses mostly on alcohol. Kulinski searched for an anti-marijuana curriculum but couldn't find one tailored for teens.
So she set out to create one.
Kulinski spent a year researching her subject. Then she created Delta-9, a marijuana curriculum for middle and high school students.
The part-time Kulinski is the district's only Delta-9 instructor, and she has taught it only to small groups at the charter school and the Truancy Abatement and Transitional Education Center.
The schools have beefed up the marijuana information in Prime for Life, but Kulinski has heard from students who tell her that Delta-9 is needed in the high schools.
While Delta-9 is a small project in Janesville, Kulinski's work already has made waves in other school districts. After Kulinski spoke at a meeting of alcohol and drug coordinators of Dane County, five districts placed orders for their own Delta-9 curriculum.
The Janesville district is selling the course at $200 a pop. There's no marketing campaign, but Kulinski expects she'll sell more when she presents her work at a state conference next year.
But does Delta-9 work? Kulinski said it seems to, at least in the short term.
She gives her students a questionnaire at the beginning and end of the course. Answers indicate that students are more likely to believe that "weed" is harmful after they take the course.
And many students who smoke marijuana indicated the course has prompted them to consider quitting.
Kulinski said she's a realist about Delta-9's ability to change minds, however: "They may never believe me. I tell them I'm here to give you the information, and what you do with it is up to you. …"
"This is just another tool in the prevention box. That's how I look at it."
Lesson 2 of Delta-9 includes a game that divides the class into two teams. Students at the charter school seemed to enjoy it.
One boy imitated a buzzer sound when the other team picked the wrong answer.
One shouted "booyah!" when his team scored.
As they played, the game ensured that the messages were repeated, over and over:
-- Marijuana use in Wisconsin is 20 percentage points higher than the national average.
-- One marijuana joint affects your lungs as much as four cigarettes.
-- Marijuana harms more than the individual who smokes it. A national survey found that frequent users are four times more likely to commit violent acts and five times more likely to steal.
"Is that from smoking marijuana?" one boy asked.
"It harms other people if you're becoming violent and stealing," Kulinski replied.
New research counters old notions about weed Delta-9 creator Carrie Kulinski said an upsurge in research on marijuana in recent years produced results that contradict common notions.
For instance, studies have found it to be addicting, damaging to the brain-especially younger brains-and containing larger doses of cancer-causing agents than cigarettes.
"You breathe in pretty deep, and you hold it in your lungs. You think it's doing some damage in there?" she asked her students.
"Probably," responded a boy somewhat grudgingly.
Any Internet search will turn up plenty of Web sites that challenge the studies and claim marijuana is a relatively harmless substance, but Kulinski said she trusts the science she has read.
"And maybe the marijuana you were using way back then was not as strong," she said. "You know, today's marijuana is so strong. I think that's why we're researching it so much in the past few years."
"I'm not the expert," she said. "I'm just reading the research and trying to state the facts."
-Frank Schultz
The Delta-9 files
Facts about the Janesville School District's anti-marijuana program and its creator:
-- The name comes from the scientific name of the active ingredient in marijuana, delta-9-tetra-hydro-cannabinol, often referred to as THC.
-- One of the most surprising things students learn in the course is who smokes the most marijuana. They tend to believe that boys smoke more than girls. Instructor Carrie Kulinski points to surveys that show no gender difference among youth, although adult males tend to smoke more than adult females.
-- Another surprise: White students tend to believe blacks smoke more than whites, while the black students believe that whites smoke more. The black students are correct. Kulinski cites a 2002 national survey showing about 15 percent of white youths smoke marijuana, while it's 13 percent for Hispanics, 9 percent for blacks and 6 percent for Asians.
-- A recent memo by Karen Schulte, director of student services, had this to say about Kulinski, the district's Janesville School District coordinator for ATODA, or alcohol, tobacco and other drugs of abuse:
"She is one of our school district's most valuable employees. Her expertise, dedication and commitment to ATODA issues are well known across the state of Wisconsin. Carrie was one of two school personnel in the state selected to be on the Department of Public Instruction's Safe and Drug Free Schools Data Project Advisory Team."
The memo goes on to note that Kulinski wrote a successful grant proposal that will bring in $174,000 over the next two years to pay for district ATODA efforts. She also obtained a $20,000 grant that will fund anti-tobacco programs.
