Our Partners
The Community Roundtable supports and piloted the Alcohol Enforcement Team (AET) in the school district. Five law enforcement agencies in the District are permitted to cross jurisdictional lines to conduct compliance checks, party prevention, party patrols, community policing, etc. The AET concentrates on direct access and social access to alcohol.
Most District Five students don't drink, but those who do usually get the alcohol from older friends, siblings, or their parents.
LRADAC also offers merchant education and sends a quarterly newsletter about AET efforts, training opportunities, and laws regarding sales to minors to all merchants in the area.
The Community Roundtable of Irmo, Dutch Fork and Chapin views young people not as problems but as the creators of solutions to problems faced in the community. Youth Development, an asset-building approach, has the following elements:
- Focusing on the positive
- Taking personal responsibility
- Being proactive
- Viewing youth as resources
- Hope that change is possible
- Cooperation within the community
- Mobilizing the public as well as all youth-serving organizations in a community
- Unleashing the caring potential of all residents and organizations
In order to encourage youth development, a Youth Advisory Action Council (YAAC) was established at each middle and high school. These young people go through leadership training and are involved in community service and prevention activities.
Social Norms are perceived standards of acceptable attitudes and behaviors prevalent among members of a community. During the needs assessment, students and parents greatly overestimated the number of young people who drink alcohol, leading to the assumption that "Everybody drinks."
The fact is, most District Five students don't use alcohol, tobacco or other drugs.
The premise of the Social Norms Model is that most people are motivated to behave by what is considered "normal behavior" by people in the community. Research shows that when norms are changed in a community, the behaviors of those community members also change.
By using a variety of techniques to promote the actual norm that most District Five students don't drink, the number of young people who do drink should decrease. These results have been achieved in similar projects implemented in communities in other parts of the country.
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