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Regional Tobacco-Free Teen Leadership Summits

The Texas School Safety Center will conduct 14 Texas Tobacco-Free Teen Leadership Summits during the Spring of 2012 to train and equip community and school-based organizations to invest in youth. At these summits young people and adult allies will come together to create positive social change concerning tobacco use and prevention. This more

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About CTS

We are Your Platform for Professional Development.

We offer a variety of Prevention trainings through Coordinated Training Services (CTS), HIV-related trainings through the Texas HIV Connection, and Workplace Wellness Professional Development trainings through Alliance Work Partners (AWP). Learn More About Us >>

DSHS Approved Curricula Descriptions

DSHS Approved Curricula Descriptions

For additional questions about any of these curricula, please contact CTS at 877.287.1533 or cts@workersassistance.com. More comprehensive program details can be found at http://www.modelprograms.samhsa.gov/model.htm.


Al's Pals: Kids Making Healthy Choices
Al’s Pals: Kids Making Healthy Choices is a resiliency-based early childhood curriculum and teacher training program that develops personal, social, and emotional skills in children 3 to 8 years old. Using 46 interactive lessons, Al’s Pals teaches children how to—
  • Express feelings appropriately
  • Use kind words
  • Care about others
  • Use self-control
  • Think independently
  • Accept differences
  • Make friends
  • Solve problems peacefully
  • Cope
  • Make safe and healthy choices
  • Understand that tobacco, alcohol, and illegal drugs are not for children
The lessons use guided creative play, brainstorming, puppetry, original music, and movement to develop children’s social-emotional competence and life skills. A nine-lesson booster curriculum is used in second or third grade with children who have previously received the full program. 


All Stars™
All Stars™ is a school- or community-based program designed to delay the onset of or prevent high-risk behaviors in middle school-age adolescents, 11 to 14 years old. It affects youth substance use, violence, and premature sexual activity by fostering development of positive personal characteristics. A highly interactive program, All Stars involves 9 to 13 lessons during its first year and 7 to 8 booster lessons in its second year.

All Stars is based on strong research that has identified the critical factors that lead young people to begin experimenting with substances and participating in other high-risk behaviors. The program is designed to reinforce positive qualities typical of youth at this age; it works to strengthen five specific qualities vital to achieving preventive effects:
  • Developing positive ideals and future aspirations
  • Establishing positive norms
  • Building strong personal commitments
  • Promoting bonding with school and community organizations
  • Promoting positive parental attentiveness


CCP Part I and II
CCP Part I is designed for communities seeking to form or strengthen coalitions to work on environmental strategies to prevent underage alcohol use and to develop strategic plans for tactics to accomplish objectives.  Organizing for environmental policy change requires very different structure from the usual prevention coalitions.  Participants will learn how to engage and retain effective advocates.  Understanding preemption and governmental procedures, the most current research on environmental strategies, and strategic campaign development are included components.

CCP Part II will be hands-on skill building for successful implementation of strategic plans.  Media advocacy skills training will focus on specific environmental policy campaigns.  Where feasible, a live media event will be conducted as part of the training.  Tactics for enhancing relationships with key policy makers will be developed and role-played.  Incremental steps to build community-wide support for policy objectives will be outlined.

Part I and Part II are each approximately one-day trainings.  They may be scheduled consecutively or at separate times.  TST staff will accommodate the coalition's timeframe to complete the components of each training.  Each training will be framed in the context of the coalitions' specific objectives.


Creating Lasting Family Connections
Creating Lasting Family Connections (CLFC) is a comprehensive family strengthening, substance abuse, and violence prevention curriculum. CLFC has demonstrated that youth and families in high-risk environments can be assisted to become strong, healthy, and supportive people. Program results, documented with children 11 to 15 years old, have shown significant increases in children’s resistance to the onset of substance use and reduction in use of alcohol and drugs.

CLFC provides parents and children with strong defenses against environmental risk factors by teaching appropriate skills for personal growth, family enhancement, and interpersonal communication, including refusal skills for both parents and youth.

Proven Results
  • Delayed onset of substance use for participating youth
  • Decreased use of substances among participating youth
  • Increased parents’ knowledge and appropriate beliefs about substance use
  • Increased parental involvement in setting rules about substance use

Dando Fuerza a la Familia
The Spanish version of the Strengthening Families Program (SFP) involves elementary school-aged children (6 to 12 years old) and their families in family skills training sessions. SFP uses family systems and cognitive-behavioral approaches to increase resilience and reduce risk factors for behavioral, emotional, academic, and social problems. It builds on protective factors by:
  • Improving family relationships
  • Improving parenting skills
  • Increasing the youth’s social and life skills
SFP offers incentives for attendance, good behavior in children, and homework completion to increase program recruitment and participation.

Proven Results
  • Improves resilience, assets, and protective factors in children and parents
  • Decreases risk factors in parents and children
  • Decreases children’s behavioral problems and conduct disorders
  • Improves family cohesion, communication, and organization 
  • Decreases family conflict and stress
 
(FAST) Families and Schools Together: Building Relationships (Elementary and Middle School)
Families and Schools Together (FAST) is a multifamily group intervention designed to build protective factors and reduce the risk factors associated with substance abuse and related problem behaviors for children 4 to12 years old and their parents.  FAST systematically applies research on family stress theory, family systems theory, social ecological theory, and community development strategies to achieve its four goals:
  • Enhanced family functioning
  • Prevention of school failure by the targeted child
  • Prevention of substance abuse by the child and other family members
  • Reduced stress from daily life situations for parents and children
One of the primary strategies of FAST is parent empowerment: parents receive support to be the primary prevention agents for their own children.  Entire families participate in program activities that are designed to build parental respect in children, improve intrafamily bonds, and enhance the family-school relationship. FAST activities were developed to build the social capital of parents and provide a safe place to practice parenting.  As a result of this program, the participating children increase their social skills and attention span, while reducing their anxiety and aggression. Research has shown that these childhood behavioral outcomes are correlated in adolescence to the prevention of substance abuse, delinquency, and school failure. 


Keepin' It REAL (KIR)
The keepin’ it REAL (Refuse, Explain, Avoid, Leave) program is a video-enhanced intervention that uses a culturally-grounded resiliency model which incorporates traditional ethnic values and practices that protect against drug use. A school-based prevention program for elementary, middle, and early high school students 10 through 17 years of age, keepin’ it REAL is based on previous work that demonstrates that teaching communication and life skills can combat negative peer and other influences. keepin’ it REAL extends resistance and life-skills models by using a culturally-based narrative and performance framework to:
  • Enhance anti-drug norms and attitudes
  • Facilitate the development of risk assessment, decision-making, and resistance skills
Keepin’ it REAL utilizes a 10-lesson classroom curriculum accompanied by a collection of five videos that demonstrate resistance strategies and illustrate the skills taught in the lessons.


Kid's Connection/Rainbow Days
Rainbow Days’ Kids’ Connection Support Group Facilitator Training provides participants with the information and skills necessary to be a support group facilitator of Kids’ Connection, one of Rainbow Days’ award winning curriculum-based support group (CBSG) programs for children and youth. 
Kids’ Connection reduces risk factors for substance abuse and enhances protective factors among selective populations of youth.  It was developed specifically to fill a gap in the prevention continuum by providing substance abuse education using an “educational support group” process designed specifically for selective populations of youth ages 4-12. 

Members are grouped developmentally, with group size limited to 6 to 12 members, depending on age and development.  The program is 10 sessions and the session duration is 30 minutes (ages 4-6) to one hour (ages 6-12.)  Groups are held in private settings and are "closed" with regard to membership.  Group rules provide for confidentiality and encourage introspection.  Kids’ Connection can be implemented in school and/or community-based settings. 


Life Skills™ Training (Elementary and Middle School)
LifeSkills Training is a program that seeks to influence major social and psychological factors that promote the initiation and early use of substances. LifeSkills has distinct elementary (8 to 11 years old) and middle school (11 to 14 years old) curricula that are delivered in a series of classroom sessions over 3 years. The sessions use lecture, discussion, coaching, and practice to enhance students’ self-esteem, feelings of self-efficacy, ability to make decisions, and ability to resist peer and media pressure.

LifeSkills consists of three major components that address critical domains found to promote substance use. Research has shown that students who develop skills in these three domains are far less likely to engage in a wide range of high-risk behaviors.  The three components each focus on a different set of skills:
  • Drug Resistance Skills enable young people to recognize and challenge common misconceptions about substance use, as well as deal with peers and media pressure to engage in substance use.
  • Personal Self-Management Skills help students to examine their self-image and its effects on behavior, set goals and keep track of personal progress, identify everyday decisions and how they may be influenced by others, analyze problem situations, and consider the consequences of alternative solutions before making decisions.
  • General Social Skills give students the necessary skills to overcome shyness, communicate effectively and avoid misunderstandings, use both verbal and nonverbal assertiveness skills to make or refuse requests, and recognize that they have choices other than aggression or passivity when faced with tough situations.


PAL® Student Training
PAL® Peer Assistance and Leadership is an award winning, non-profit program providing effective training in "resiliency" strategies. The PAL® peer helping program combats problems such as violence in schools, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, gang participation and school dropouts by providing a critical line of defense both at school and in the home through building peer helping programs all across the United States of America. Skills taught include, but are not limited to: group dynamics, self esteem, social skills, self awareness, communication skills, decision making and problem solving, channels of referral, drug education and cultural awareness.


(PATHS) Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies
PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies) is a comprehensive program for promoting emotional and social competencies and reducing aggression and acting-out behaviors in elementary-school-aged children, while simultaneously enhancing the educational process in the classroom. This innovative curriculum for kindergarten through sixth grade (ages 5 to 12), is used by educators and counselors as a multiyear, prevention model.

The PATHS curriculum provides teachers with systematic and developmentally based lessons, materials, and instructions for teaching their students:
  • Emotional literacy
  • Self-control
  • Social competence
  • Positive peer relations
  • Interpersonal problem-solving skills
The PATHS curriculum has been shown to improve protective factors and reduce behavioral risk factors. Evaluations have demonstrated significant improvements for program youth, including those in general education and special needs settings. Although primarily focused on school and classroom settings, information and activities are also included for use with parents.


Peers Making Peace
Peers Making Peace (PMP) is a peer-mediation program developed to help create and maintain safe and drug free schools by equipping students with attitudes and skills to stay drug-free, stay in school and avoid violence by resolving conflicts in a peaceful, prosocial manner. The goal of the program is to improve the school environment by reducing violence, assaults, discipline referrals, and increasing academic performance. In the PMP intervention, teams of student volunteers are trained to serve as drug free role models and "neutral third parties" to provide mediation services for their peers who lack the skills to successfully resolve their conflicts. The program is based on two parallel philosophical foundations: a strong "no use" message, and the "resiliency and protective factor" approach to prevention.


Positive Action
The Positive Action (PA) program is an integrated, comprehensive, and coherent program that has been shown to improve academic achievement and multiple behaviors of children and adolescents (5 to 18 years old) and their parents and teachers. It is intensive, with lessons at each grade level (from kindergarten to 12th) that are reinforced all day by including school, family, and community components, which work together or can stand alone. It includes school, family, and community components, which work together or can stand alone.

For students, Positive Action improves:
  • Individual self-concept
  • Academic achievement and learning skills
  • Decisionmaking, problem-solving, and social/interpersonal skills
  • Physical and mental health
  • Behavior, character, and responsibility
PA improves school climate, attendance, achievement scores, disciplinary referrals/suspensions, parent and community involvement, services for special-need and high-risk students, efficiency, and effectiveness. PA positively affects instruction and classroom/school management skills of school personnel through improved self-concept, professionalism, and interpersonal/social skills and, in turn, has a positive impact on their personal lives.

Finally, PA helps families by improving parent-child relations and overall family attitudes toward and involvement in school and the community.


Project ACHIEVE
Project ACHIEVE is an innovative school reform and school effectiveness program developed for use in preschool, elementary, and middle schools (students 3 to 14 years old). It is designed to help schools, communities, and families develop, strengthen, and solidify their youths’ resilience, protective factors, and self-management skills. Project ACHIEVE works to improve school and staff effectiveness and places particular emphasis on increasing student performance in the areas of:
  • Social skills and social-emotional development
  • Conflict resolution and self-management
  • Achievement and academic progress
  • Positive school climate and safe school practices
Project ACHIEVE implements schoolwide positive behavioral and academic prevention programs that focus on the needs of all students. It also develops and implements strategic intervention programs for at-risk and underachieving students, and it coordinates comprehensive and multifaceted “wrap-around” programs for students with intensive needs.


Project ALERT
Project ALERT is a drug prevention curriculum for middle school students 11 to14 years old, which dramatically reduces both the onset of substance abuse and their regular use. The 2-year, 14-lesson program focuses on the substances that adolescents are most likely to use: alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and inhalants. Project ALERT use participatory activities and videos to help:
  • Motivate adolescents against drug use
  • Teach adolescents the skills and strategies needed to resist prodrug pressures
  • Establish nondrug-using norms
Guided classroom discussions and small group activities stimulate peer interaction and challenge student beliefs and perceptions, while intensive role-playing activities help students learn and master resistance skills. Homework assignments that also involve parents extend the learning process by facilitating parent-child discussions of drugs and how to resist using them. These lessons are reinforced through videos that model appropriate behavior.


Project Northland
Project Northland is a multilevel, multiyear program proven to delay the age at which young people begin drinking, to reduce alcohol use among those who have already tried drinking, and to limit the number of alcohol-related problems of young drinkers. Designed for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students (10 to14 years old), Project Northland addresses both individual behavioral change and environmental change. Project Northland also strives to change how parents communicate with their children, how peers influence each other, and how communities respond to young adolescent alcohol use. Components include:
  • Parent involvement
  • Behavioral curricula
  • Peer-led small group activities
  • Strategies to reduce access to alcohol
Each intervention year has an overall theme and is tailored to the developmental level of the young adolescent. Alcohol is the focus of the Project Northland program because it is American teenagers’ drug of choice and inflicts the greatest harm among youth.


Project SUCCESS
Project SUCCESS (Schools Using Coordinated Community Efforts to Strengthen Students) prevents and reduces substance use among high-risk, multiproblem high school adolescents. Developed and tested with alternative school youth 14 to18 years old, the program places highly trained professionals in schools to provide a full range of substance use prevention and early intervention services. Counselors use a variety of intervention strategies, including:
  • Information dissemination
  • Normative and preventive education
  • Counseling and skills training
  • Problem identification and referral
  • Community-based processes
  • Environmental approaches
In addition, Project SUCCESS links the school to the community’s continuum of care when necessary, referring both students and families to human services organizations, including substance abuse treatment agencies.


Project Toward No Drug Abuse
Project Toward No Drug Abuse (TND) is a highly interactive program designed to help high school youth (14 to 19 years old) resist substance use. A school-based program, TND consists of twelve 40- to 50-minute lessons that include motivational activities, social skills training, and decisionmaking components that are delivered through group discussions, games, role-playing exercise, videos, and student worksheets.  Project TND teaches participants increased coping and self-control skills that allow them to:
  • Grasp the cognitive misperceptions that may lead to substance use and express a desire not to abuse substances
  • Understand the sequence of substance abuse and the consequences of using substances
  • Correct myths concerning substance use
  • Demonstrate effective communication, coping, and self-control skills
  • State a commitment to discuss substance abuse with others


Protecting You/Protecting Me (PY/PM) ®
Protecting You/Protecting Me (PY/PM) ® is a 5-year, classroom-based alcohol-use prevention curriculum for elementary students in grades one through five (6 to 11 years old). Designed to reduce alcohol-related injury and death in our nation’s youth, PY/PM—
  • Is proven to change children's knowledge about their brains and personal development
  • Increase children’s intentions not to ride with an impaired driver
  • Improves children’s vehicle safety skills—their ability to protect themselves when they have no option but to ride with an adult who is not alcohol-free.
  • Because the program is delivered in elementary school, it reaches children before they have fully formed their attitudes toward alcohol.  The curriculum—
  • Incorporates the latest research on human brain development
  • Focuses on the immediate risks of using alcohol before age 21
  • Includes parental involvement activities
The program can be taught by trained high school students, as well as by teachers, with student teachers deriving short-term outcomes including reduced alcohol use and increased perceptions of the risks of underage alcohol use.  All program materials are available in English and Spanish.


Reconnecting Youth
Reconnecting Youth (RY) is a school-based prevention program for youth in grades 9 through 12 (14 to 18 years old) at risk for school dropout. These youth also may exhibit multiple behavior problems, such as substance abuse, aggression, depression, or suicide risk behaviors. Reconnecting Youth uses a partnership model involving peers, school personnel, and parents to deliver interventions that address the three central program goals:
  • Decreased drug involvement
  • Increased school performance
  • Decreased emotional distress
Students work toward these goals by participating in a semester-long high school class that involves skills training in the context of a positive peer culture.  RY students learn, practice, and apply self-esteem enhancement strategies, decisionmaking skills, personal control strategies, and interpersonal communication techniques.


Second Step: A Violence Prevention Curriculum
Second Step is a classroom-based social skills program for preschool through junior high students (4 to 14 years old). It is designed to reduce impulsive, high-risk, and aggressive behaviors and increase children’s social-emotional competence and other protective factors. Group discussion, modeling, coaching, and practice are used to increase students’ social competence, risk assessment, decisionmaking ability, self-regulation, and positive goal setting. The program’s lesson content varies by grade level and is organized into three skill-building units covering:

Empathy—teaches young people to identify and understand their own emotions and those of others;
Impulse control and problem solving—helps young people choose positive goals; reduce impulsivity; and evaluate consequences of their behavior in terms of safety, fairness, and impact on others, and;
Anger management—enables young people to manage emotional reactions and engage in decisionmaking when they are highly aroused.


Strengthening Families Program (Parents & Youth 6-11 & 12-16)
The Strengthening Families Program (SFP) involves school-aged children (6 to 16 years old) and their families in family skills training sessions. SFP uses family systems and cognitive-behavioral approaches to increase resilience and reduce risk factors for behavioral, emotional, academic, and social problems. It builds on protective factors by:
  • Improving family relationships
  • Improving parenting skills
  • Increasing the youth’s social and life skills
SFP offers incentives for attendance, good behavior in children, and homework completion to increase program recruitment and participation.

Proven Results
  • Improves resilience, assets, and protective factors in children and parents
  • Decreases risk factors in parents and children
  • Decreases children’s behavioral problems and conduct disorders
  • Improves family cohesion, communication, and organization 
  • Decreases family conflict and stress


Too Good For Drugs
Too Good For Drugs (TGFD) is a school-based prevention program proven to reduce the intention to use alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs in middle and high school students. Developed by the Mendez Foundation for use with students in kindergarten  through 12th grade (5 to 18 years old), TGFD has a separate, developmentally appropriate curriculum for each grade level, and is designed to develop:
  • Personal and interpersonal skills relating to alcohol, tobacco and illegal drug use
  • Appropriate attitudes toward alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drug use
  • Knowledge of the negative consequences of alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drug use and benefits of a drug-free lifestyle
  • Positive peer norms

The program’s highly interactive teaching methods encourage students to bond with prosocial peers, and engages students through role-play, cooperative learning, games, small group activities and class discussions. Students have many opportunities to participate and receive recognition for involvement. TGFD also impacts students through a family component used in each grade level: “Home Workouts” in kindergarten through 8th grade, and “Home Pages” in high school.


Youth Connection/Rainbow Days
Rainbow Days’ Youth Connection Support Group Facilitator Training provides participants with the information and skills necessary to be a support group facilitator of Youth Connection, one of Rainbow Days’ award winning curriculum-based support group (CBSG) programs for children and youth. 
Youth Connection reduces risk factors for substance abuse and enhances protective factors among selective populations of youth.  It was developed specifically to fill a gap in the prevention continuum by providing substance abuse education using an “educational support group” process designed specifically for selective populations of youth ages 10-15. 

Members are grouped developmentally, with group size limited to 6 to 12 members, depending on age and development.  The program is 10 sessions and the session duration is 45 minutes to one hour.  Groups are held in private settings and are "closed" with regard to membership.  Group rules provide for confidentiality and encourage introspection.  Youth Connection can be implemented in school and/or community-based settings.