PALŪ Peer Assistance Leadership Program Youth Connect Project year 1 evaluation report

The Peer Assistance Leadership (PALŪ) Program is a comprehensive prevention program targeting students ages 8-18 designed to improve student attendance and success, reduce drug and alcohol use, develop a positive school climate, and promote responsible behavior. In the fall of 2005, PALŪ was awarded a three-year grant by the Orange County Health Care Agency. The grant, Youth Connect, focuses on increasing protective factors and utilizing the social norms approach to decrease drug and alcohol use among students. PALŪ partnered with two school districts within which the program was implemented at four schools. From these four schools, having a cumulative total of 9,270 students, 3,708 Protective Factor (PF) surveys and 3,935 Social Norms (SN) surveys were collected. The PF surveys dealt with factors such as school connectedness, meaningful participation, and peer-led interventions while the SN surveys focused on student's actual attitudes and their perceived attitudes of others about alcohol. Following implementation of PALŪ, the students reported a significant positive change in students feeling close to people at their school. The SN survey results show while most of the students reported not drinking in the past month, they perceived nearly all students had. The results in this evaluation show PALŪ provides a positive influence in increasing knowledge and positive behaviors and attitudes about alcohol use. This confirms PALŪ is an effective peer-to-peer school program that serves as a model to follow. The implications of the results are such that they should encourage more widespread implementation of this effective and easily replicable program.