St. Mary School is home to a passionate and dedicated group of individuals hoping to educate peers and prevent them from making destructive decisions.
SADD (Students Against Destructive Decisions) is in its fourth year and held its annual retreat Thursday, Oct. 13, to decide the future events the group will hold.
“I think that the unique position that SADD is in is that it’s students talking to students and there’s not another organization like it,” said Derek Brown, SADD advisor and assistant principal at St. Mary School. “It allows us to fill a whole that I think there is in our schools and in our community.”
The group is made up of nine students from Grades 8 to 12, all of who want to make a difference in their school and community.
“There’s SADD in the traditional sense that’s Students Against Drinking and Driving, but in Alberta, there’s more and more chapters going with the larger concept,” Brown said. “When we started things up, we wanted to have more of a general purpose.”
Brown was the co-creator of the group, who along with Connie Barabas, thought it was a fantastic cause and one that could benefit St. Mary students.
“I wanted to provide students with the opportunity to develop leadership skills, to make a difference in their school community and in the Westlock community,” he said, adding that it also reaches a different kind of student who might not be involved in sports, students’ union or band.
When asked what they want to do as part of SADD, the students shouted a variety of things, from creating awareness to stopping people from making destructive decisions to showing them how bad it is to make destructive decisions.
Teri Smerychynski, SADD advisor and probation officer, first got involved with the group because she knew a former advisor who invited her to come to a meeting to speak to the students.
“As things went, I got really connected to the youth,” she said. “This is a neat way to bring part of probation into the preventative piece.”
The prevention side of things is something she said has a huge effect on her job as a probation officer.
“Ninety-nine per cent of the people that come to my office, either youth or adult, it’s a series of bad decisions and it just snowballs,” she said. “If we can give people some tools for how to make better decisions, how to not make those bad decisions, then you’re going to see that long-term, (there’s) less crime, less damage to the community.”
She said the most important part is prevention and if individuals have the tools early on, it can have lasting effects on their lives.
“I see how these kids are passionate about not drinking and driving, about wearing your seatbelt, about not texting while driving, not doing drugs, things like that, and that gets passed on,” she said. “My children are quite a bit younger and they talk about this. People talk about this in the community.”
At the retreat, the group planned for the coming year, deciding what activities they would do in the school and the community. These include many in-school initiatives, as well some community events taking place to spread awareness.
The group hopes to hold a checkstop with RCMP this year and will be hosting a week of activities in conjunction with National Drug Awareness Week from Nov. 15 to 18.
There is also potential that SADD members will be sent to the National Canadian Youth Against Impaired Driving conference held in Edmonton in April. This will be done in conjunction with the Westlock & District Drug Task Force, an organization that works closely with SADD.
