TIPS FOR REACHING OUT TO SCHOOLS
Thank you for bringing greater awareness of fentapills to your community by reaching out to your school district to ask them to roll out some new drug education.
Schools are busy places with many competing priorities. They have limited resources to do everything that is asked of them. They may not be set up to take quick action on a real-time problem that they did not factor into their routine planning and multi-year curriculum design processes. Further, officials can often be wary of political or hidden agendas. That’s why it’s important to consider this a partnership: first educating yourself and then educating the school district so that they can in turn educate the community of parents and students. In this effort we all have the same goal: to serve and protect our precious children through education. Keeping in mind this idea of partnership, we’ve devised the PAIR approach. Every school district and community are different, so use this approach as a general guide… and do what works for you. You do not need to follow all of these steps, but we hope you get some good ideas from this!
To view a recorded webinar about Convincing Schools to Raise Awareness about Fake Pills, click here.
If you have questions about this process, or suggestions on how to improve it, contact jennifer@songforcharlie.org. Please also email us if you have success in getting this material into your local schools—we want to know how you are doing!
Help us keep track of what schools and districts you're reaching out to by adding to our School District Contact Tracker.
Good luck & thank you for helping to spread awareness!
The PAIR Approach
Plan, find Allies, Identify what you want, & Request action.
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Typically the decisions about curriculum are done at a district level, not at a school level. When requesting action, make sure you are contacting the decision makers- perhaps the superintendent or head of curriculum. While a principal or health teacher can be an ally, they in most cases will not be able to make a decision for you.
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Letters should be a balance of emotion and facts. Be concise when sharing your story, and spend most of your letter providing data supporting how fentanyl is affecting your community and describing what you are asking for.
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Be careful of your wording. Discussing drugs can be a trigger for many people, in a good way or bad. We suggest using some of the following wording in order to most effectively gain empathy from the reader.
