The Big Sandy Mountaineer -

Big Sandy Schools is participating in Red Ribbon Week this week, an annual event where schools work to inform students of the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse. Dianna Keane, the school counselor, is organizing this year’s activities. She explained, “Red Ribbon Week would be a week that we use to help students give them facts and awareness about drugs and alcohol and how that it can affect them. We use it as a way to create awareness, but then also provide some tools to help kids. Things like refusal skills, emotional regulation tools, the facts, so that they’re armed with them.”

“This year, I have a counseling leadership team of juniors and seniors that have volunteered to help with Red Ribbon Week.” The leadership team will go to classes at the High School and Elementary School where they will be talking with students about the Facts of the Day for each day of the week. The various facts are aimed at raising awareness of the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse. The Chouteau County Health Department has provided Facts of the Day for students to learn, as well as hand outs for the schools and other materials.

“They also provided a bunch of Quit Line t-shirts that have Pioneers on the back. So this year, we’re going beyond just the Red Ribbon Week. We’re launching t-shirts at ballgames. We’ve already done one volleyball game and one football game. We’re gonna do the basketball games. Those are in partnership with the Health Department and the Quit Line.”

The student leadership team chose some of the activities for the week, including a Wednesday assembly. “On Wednesday, we’re going to have an assembly with the 7th through 12th grades. We’re going to watch a video on the dangers of vaping, and we’ve got a video on fentanyl. The fentanyl video is about how a lot of pills are fake. When kids misuse prescription drugs, sometimes they can be fentanyl, and they don’t know it.” On Wednesday, students will also be encouraged to wear red.

Diana explained how they will be approaching Red Ribbon Week at FE Miley School. “We’re gonna have the sixth graders tell me a positive life goal that they have. They will announce that life goal to the whole school over the PA system. We take turns doing that throughout the week. Then they talk about what we’d rather focus on than doing drugs or alcohol. What do we want our life to be instead of making decisions that can kind of derail that? So in the elementary school, we’ll be sharing basic facts, healthy choices, positive goals, emotional regulation tools, those kinds of things. And we’ll do that at the high school, too; we’ll focus on emotional regulation tools, refusal skills, and awareness.”

This year, Red Ribbon Week will also be sharing websites for parents with useful information on drug and alcohol abuse. Parents can watch for information shared on the school’s Rooms app. “Parents have a huge impact on what their kids believe. So if parents are talking about the dangers of drugs and alcohol to their kids, they listen. You might think that they aren’t listening, but they listen.”

The annual event came about through a grassroots movement following the death of a DEA agent in Mexico at the hands of a Drug Cartel. Officers began wearing red ribbons on their uniforms to honor Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. The practice soon grew into a grass roots movement that eventually became Red Ribbon Week.