Program on life choices an ‘eye-opener’

HOULTON – Suzanne Lilley, an assistant district attorney for Aroostook County, was blunt Thursday when she talked to a group of eighth-graders at Houlton High School about the legal consequences of distributing drugs.

“As a juvenile, you’re going to get stepped on pretty hard and get sent to a facility,” she said.

Lilley was one of several area professionals who spent Wednesday and Thursday talking with the school’s 110 eighth-grade pupils about making good choices.

Topics ranged from tobacco and drug use, and alcohol abuse, to domestic violence, date rape, underage sex and bullying.

“We’re going to start getting tougher [in the legal system], because what we’re doing isn’t working,” Lilley said. “It’s serious and it’s going to end.

“We don’t want dead kids,” she said.

The two-day conference on choices – a first at the school – was the result of two months of work by the school’s eighth-grade teachers. Carol Jordan, a veteran teacher of 32 years helped coordinate the event.

“These are no longer closeted issues,” Jordan said of the topics presented. “These are issues our students have to face today.

“Instead of listening to parents and teachers, they’ve had the opportunity to listen to experts, the people trained in these fields,” she said.

For many pupils, the speakers gave them information they didn’t have before.

“I think it made a lot of people think,” said Jerusha Benn, 13.

Alex Mooers, 14, agreed. Eighth grade “is a turning point,” he said.

“We’re not adults, but we’re not kids anymore either,” he said. “We’re not as naive and unknowing as we were when we had the [Drug Abuse Resistance Education] program” in fifth grade.

Sarah Putnam, 14, said pupils at the school today have more knowledge about problems around them. The two-day choices program, she said, provided them with useful information that would help them make sound decisions.

Some of that information came on Wednesday from the Aroostook County Jail, when the pupils toured the facility.

Describing the jail as “depressing,” Putnam said the tour was “a real eye-opener. It showed people that they didn’t want to go there.”

During the tour, pupils didn’t have any contact with prisoners. That didn’t stop one inmate in the holding area from offering some advice to them.

“This is a bad place,” he shouted through the thick glass in the door of a holding cell. “You listen [to the guard]. You listen and you won’t be in here.”

Jordan said Thursday that the warning from the inmate shocked and startled the pupils, who talked about it when they returned.

“The experiences outside the classes help them see what can occur from making the wrong choices,” she said.

She said Houlton High School in not unlike other schools across the state, and what pupils see at school is a reflection of what goes on in the community.

“This is not a protected environment,” she said. “This is life.”

For teachers, the program offered hope that they can help the pupils live a better life.

“This was reality,” said Sandra McGary, a social studies teacher for 10 years. “These weren’t just fun little assemblies.

“If this helps only a handful of students out of 110, it’s worth all the effort that’s been put into it,” she said.