Frank Lewis | Daily Times Area students participate in a seminar about drug abuse Thursday at the Scioto County Welcome Center in Portsmouth.

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By FRANK LEWIS

PDT Staff Writer

In one room at the Scioto County Welcome Center, about 80 students from area schools assembled Thursday morning to learn about drug abuse issues. One room over, adults were gathering from all walks of life to learn about organizing, then passing on what they learn to the students.

“Today we’re doing a two-part workshop put on by the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America. One part is teens, and we had eight teams of high school kids here brought by their schools to spend four hours learning about drug addition and drug abuse, and learning some resistance skills,” said Lisa Roberts, R.N., of the Scioto County Prescription Drug Abuse Action Team. “They will go out to their schools and become peer influencers to influence other kids to make good decisions about drug experimentations.”

The second part of the program dealt with adults.

“They’re going to do a workshop on community recovery,” Roberts said. “This workshop is about strategies that work in evidence-based kinds of strategies that will guide us toward fixing our drug problem that we have here in Scioto County.”

The second day of the two-day workshop is today at the administrative offices of The Counseling Center on Findlay Street.

Speakers for the event Thursday included Dr. Erin Winstanley from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, and two trainers from the Community Anti-Drug Abuse Coalitions of America.

“We are in the process of facilitating a community problem-solving process to hopefully help facilitate some solutions to the challenges that they are experiencing in their community around substance abuse,” Catherine Thatcher Brunson, one of the trainers, said. “We’ll be doing some community mobilization and we also walk through a public health model, which we call the Strategic Prevention Framework, which is really just a five-step process that takes you through strategic planning through the communities capacity to develop strategic and action plans.”

The workshop was paid for by a $5,000 grant from Eastern Tennessee University through the Appalachian Regional Commission.