Lodi Community Action Team

LCAT is Moving!

sricks — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:49:06 +0000

That’s right, LCAT has formed a new partnership with the Lodi Sports and Recreation Center. Our meetings will now be held every third Thursday of the month at the Lodi Sports and Recreation Center (LSRC) from 5-6 PM starting in September. If you have not attended a Community Action Team Meeting, this would be a great time for you to come by and see what’s happening. After the meeting be sure to check out the rest of the facilities.

This is just a start, so look for more to come from this LCAT and LSRC partnership!

Know! Times of Transition Increase Risk

sricks — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:36:16 +0000

There are specific times in a child’s life that place him or her at increased risk for using alcohol, tobacco and other drugs…heading back to school is one of them. If your child is entering middle school, high school or moving to a new school, you will need to be especially vigilant. But even a change in grade level, teachers, coaches or friends may be cause enough for added stress that can also lead to experimentation with alcohol, tobacco and other drugs.

Know! To Examine Your Parenting Style

sricks — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:00:21 +0000

Did you know your parenting style can affect your child’s choices surrounding alcohol? A recent study reveals the relationship between four basic parenting styles and how each style impacts a child’s drinking behaviors.

First of all, consider what type of parenting you practice:

(Support refers to your availability and the warmth you display toward your child.)

(Control refers to discipline, accountability and how closely you monitor your child.)

Authoritative: High Support/High Control

Authoritarian: Low Support/High Control

Indulgent: High Support/Low Control

Neglectful: Low Support/Low Control

If you fall under the description of indulgent, you may want to reconsider your parenting style.

LCAT Meeting for June ’10

sricks — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:44:42 +0000

The Parents Who Host campaign was another success. Curt told the group that a resent survey suggests that the PWH campaign is one of the most recognizable programs that CESA is a part of. Yard signs should be taken down and will be collected over the next week. Thanks to everyone who hosted a sign.

The mission statement, beliefs and Strategy was submitted to the group for approval. Only minor edits were suggested and accepted. It was decided by the group that what we have at this point is very good to start with. The Group adopted the submission with the suggested edits. See the complete statements below.

Steven will add the statements to the website and create a single page broacher to be used when meeting with various groups.

Steven will also contact the newspaper with this new information.

Recruitment of active members was discussed at length. We have a large group of people who follow what we do and help out on occasion. We have a small group of people who attend meetings and take on a majority of the planning and organization. It was decided that we need to make an effort to engage more people who can help with the planning and organizing. We also need to determine if there are any strategic areas that we need to specifically find people to help with. One area that continues to come up is in the area of sports and athletics. We currently do not have any active member who is part of the athletics organization in the school district. Kristina was tasked with talking with Coach Pals at the high school to see what support he could lend to the group. It was proposed that a more open meeting environment may be a key to getting more people to meetings. Patrick will look into using the Rec Center for our monthly meetings. He will also see if we can advertise these meetings in their facility.

Staying true to our mission statement we are going to start a campaign to reach out to all the groups in the Lodi Area that work with the youth. We want to get them on board with our mission and working together in a coordinated effort. Susan will create a list of these groups and we will make an effort to meet with them individually. Our goal will be to get them to buy into their group supporting our mission and working with other groups to put on events that address youth health issues, specifically involving alcohol and other illicit use of drugs.

The first event we hope to do working in conjunction with these other groups would be a Youth Health Summit in early October. At this summit we will present the information from the Choices Survey and hold a discussion on what and how to address these issues. We will then old a second meeting with the groups involved and make plans based on the feedback received at the summit.

Steven will put together a draft agenda for the Summit. He will also create a talking paper for use in working with the various youth organizations.

Mission Statement

The Lodi Community Action Team promotes the creation of a healthy environment that fosters alcohol and other drug free choices among our youth.

Beliefs

We believe that easy access to alcohol and illicit use of prescription drugs are a major obstacle in teens making healthy choices.
We believe that for teens to make healthy choices they must live in an environment that emphasizes the positives of healthy choices.
We believe that active and involved parents are a major component to developing teens that make healthy choices.
We believe that the community at large is a major influence in developing habits of the communities teens.
We believe that legislation, policy change, and education can change our environment and ultimately influence behavior.

Strategies

We will provide and support programs that educate and connect the community in creating a healthy environment for our children, such as Parents Who Host, Lose the Most, Local Drug Round Ups, and the Parent Pledge Program.
We will develop working partnerships with schools, government agencies and local organizations to coordinate efforts in promoting healthy lifestyle choices.
We will maintain a Speakers Bureau for presenters and presentation that address drug and alcohol misuse and promotes healthy lifestyle choices for use by community and school groups.
We will hold an annual town hall meeting to educate and inform the community at large on our progress in the areas of teen access to alcohol and other drugs.
We will conduct monthly LCAT meetings that are open to the public.

Yard Signs

sricks — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:01:55 +0000

It is that time again to start our Parents Who Host Yard Sign campaign. You have probably noticed signs going up around town and wished you had one of your own to put up in your yard. Well, the good news is that we have plenty would be happy to drop by and put it up for you. If you would like a sign, just drop an email to sricks@mac.com or call 608-566-5614. We are looking for people in high traffic areas and areas out of the City of Lodi, but we have enough for everyone.

Stewards of Children Sexual Abuse Prevention Training

sricks — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 14:09:47 +0000

Take advantage of a GREAT opportunity!
Hope House of South Central Wisconsin, in partnership with the Columbia County Family Resource Center, is hosting
Darkness to Light’s Stewards of Children Sexual Abuse Prevention Training
Tuesday, April 20, 5-8pm Family Resource Center 2946 Red Fox Fun, Portage

Stewards of Children is a comprehensive sexual abuse prevention training program that educates adults to prevent, recognize, and react responsibly to child sexual abuse. The Stewards of Children program is designed for organizations that serve children and adolescents, providing prevention training for staff, volunteers, parents, and other interested adults.

Core Features of the Stewards of Children Training:

A video integrating segments of sexual abuse survivors relating their stories of violation and healing, with segments from the author of the curriculum and from professionals who interface daily with the problem of sexual abuse.
An interactive workbook for each participant.
Discussion about critical issues in sexual abuse prevention and the relevance of these issues within organizations that serve children and adolescents. Led by an authorized facilitator.

Cost: Free, registration required:
Please RSVP to the Family Resource Center at 608-742-8482.
For more information about the program, visit www.darkness2light.org.

April 20 Stewards of Children training poster

Benefits of Teen Drinking Do Not Outweigh the Dangers

sricks — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 13:53:45 +0000

Here is a very interesting article from the HomeWord website, on the so called benefits of social drinking and teen girls. The full article can be viewed here.

Benefits of Teen Drinking Do Not Outweigh the Dangers
Author: Jim Liebelt
Not long ago, I came across a news report entitled, “Beers With Friends May Help Teen Girls”. Given my convictions about teen at-risk behaviors like teen drinking, I’d rather ignore headlines like this. But, as one who keeps track of youth culture items, I feel obligated to write about research that points out both current dangers and positive trends, and studies that fit my convictions as well as those that do not. This is one of those times.

As you can easily decipher by the excerpt title, research done by Purdue University has found that there are some benefits to high school girls who sneak out for some beer occasionally with their friends. My first response is to reject the notion for a whole host of reasons, some of which I’ll note below. Still, it’s important to note that often research doesn’t deal with morality and values, just behavior and effect. So, taken at face value, I can see how the study reached its conclusion.

According to the excerpt below, it seems the study focused on the outcome of high school girls who occasionally sneak a few beers with friends. Researchers found that the girls who do this are less depressed due to the ability to “blow off steam, get together, have fun, joke around with their peers.”

Okay, again on face value, teen drinking is typically a social behavior. Not many occasional teen drinkers are going to be found pounding beers by themselves.

So, couldn’t another legitimate conclusion have been reached had the study not focused on beer drinking, but rather the outcomes of teen social interaction, or even other behaviors that foster teen social interaction? In other words, I would argue that teens who get together “blow off steam, get together, have fun, joke around with their peers” are likely to see the same benefits regardless of what they do when they are together.

Perhaps someone will come up with a better analogy, but what follows is simply what I thought of first. What if the focus of the behavior that resulted in the beneficial teen social interaction had been texting while driving? Teens text a lot today. According to surveys, many teens admit to texting while driving. If texting while driving allows them to “blow off steam, get together, have fun, joke around with their peers,” would it then follow to be a good idea to do so even if the result was that teens would be found to be less depressed? I don’t think anyone will do research into this, for the obvious dangers of texting while driving outweigh any potential benefit!

I would argue the same for high school girls sneaking out to have some beers with friends. First, doing so is against the law (generally — unless there are some very old high school girls.) Call me old-fashioned, but this in itself, makes the behavior wrong, no matter what the potential benefit there might be socially. Further, there have been studies which have shown that teen drinking can lead to dangerous consequences, such as driving while drinking, and making it more likely that occasional drinking can lead to heavier drinking, drunkenness, alcoholism, and other at-risk behaviors.

As a result, I’ve concluded that the potential dangers of teen drinking far outweigh any potential benefits.

My advice to parents: stay the course in setting clear expectations with your teens regarding drinking. There’s a good possibility that your kids will experiment with alcohol before they graduate from high school, but hang in there. Doing what you can to help prevent your kids from drinking is the best course of action.

Further, help your kids find alternative, safer ways to “blow off steam, get together, have fun, joke around with their peers.” There’s no doubt in my mind that kids benefit from healthy social interaction with their peers — and with a little homework and communication with your teens, you surely can find better options than drinking beer!

Here’s the excerpt from the article which appeared in the Ottawa Citizen, “Beers With Friends May Help Teen Girls”:

Sneaking an occasional beer with friends could actually be a good thing for teens — especially girls –according to new research that upends typically negative views on teens and alcohol.

Timothy Owens, a sociology professor at Purdue University in Indiana, found that high school girls who drank once or twice with their friends in the past month were less likely to feel depressed than those who didn’t.

“The realistic explanation is that teens drink for a lot of reasons, and one of them is to blow off steam, get together, have fun, joke around with their peers,” Owens says.

“Getting out with their friends and maybe having a few beers can actually have a positive effect on some, especially girls. It can loosen them up, but even more important, it gets them interacting with their peers.”

And because girls especially value building and maintaining social relationships, it seems to have a positive effect on how they feel,” he adds.

“We forget a lot of that in our research because most research is oriented toward addressing a problem, rather than looking at the normal experiences of teenagers,” Owens says.

“We wanted to look at it open-mindedly.”

The research included more than 1,000 high school students, and the results are published in the Journal of Adolescence.

Source: Ottawa Citizen

K.I.D.S. Town Hall Meeting

sricks — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:45:16 +0000

Thanks to everyone that was able to make the town hall meetings. I believe that it was a very successful event. The Panel was awesome and were able to answer some very difficult questions and gave out lots of very good advice. I know that I learned a lot from the evening and it was time well spent. We will look at doing more of these type of events in the future and if you have any ideas for issues that you would like us to address, just leave a comment, send an email, or give me a call.

Thanks to everyone that put this together and participated and a special thanks to both the Lodi Sports and Recreation Center for hosting it and to the Kalahari for providing the door prize.

PRESCRITION DRUG ROUND UP SATURDAY MAY 15TH 10AM-2PM

sricks — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:00:19 +0000

Lodi area community members will have another opportunity to safely dispose of unused and expired medications by bringing them to the Lodi Police Station at 142 S Main on Saturday May 15 from 10:00am to 2:00pm. The first drug round up was a huge success and we collected over 500 containers of medications. The Lodi Police Department will assume control of the drugs and they will be safely disposed of at no charge. Please leave the medication in its original container but cross out names while still keeping the name of the medication legible.

There are numerous reasons why it is important to safely dispose of unused drugs:

-Medications flushed down the toilet may contaminate our lakes, streams and ground water causing harm to humans, wildlife and vegetation.

-Medications thrown in trash can cause poisoning by accidental ingestion by young children, pets and even wildlife.

- A survey of teenagers by the Partnership for Drug-Free America found that 1in 5 teens has tried Vicodin, and 1 in 10 have tried OxyContin, both powerful narcotic pain relievers. 1 in 10 teens has abused cough medicine. One of the most common means for young people to obtain drugs is by getting them from grandparent’s medicine cabinets

-Misuse and abuse of prescription drugs is growing throughout the U.S. and is negatively impacting millions of youth, adults and families.

What can you bring?

All prescription and over the Counter medication will be accepted including: pills, spray, liquids capsules, inhalers, ointments, patches, and creams.

This program is being sponsored by: LCAT; Lodi Community Action Team, LATV; Lodi Area Teen Vision, Lodi Leadership Council in LHS, and the Lodi Police Department.

Let’s all work together to create a healthy safer community.

Saving our youth

sricks — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:26:57 +0000

The Lodi Enterprise has an article on the K.I.D.S. town hall meeting. Several of our members are included in the article and it is a very good representation of what we hope to get.

“I want parents to know that this is not a meeting to say ‘parents, you should not be drinking yourselves,’ or ‘parents you’ve been doing a bad job’, that’s not what this is about,” Persike said. “This is just a bunch of people getting together and saying here are some questions we have as a community. Where can we improve, where can we focus our time and energy and funds?”

Follow the link for the complete story.