Like a lot of parents, Andrea Wulff worries about drug and alcohol use among the young. Unlike a lot of parents, she decided to do something more than worry.
”The thought of my daughter entering her teen years was pretty scary,”
she says. ”I don`t think our community is any better or any worse than any other. The fact is, drug use is a nationwide problem, and I think parents`
awareness is vital to prevention.”
So when Andrea`s daughter, Dana, entered the 8th grade five years ago, Wulff joined an Oak Lawn group called Citizens for Alcohol and Drug Awareness. As a first step in raising the community`s awareness, the group invited David Toma to visit the high school.
Toma is a former undercover New Jersey police officer who became addicted to prescription drugs after his young son died. His story provided the basis for Tony Baretta, a character on a former police television show. Now recovered, Toma travels the country talking to teenagers about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse.
Before Toma agrees to visit a community, he insists that a follow-up program be established to continue drug awareness work after he leaves. The Oak Lawn citizens group decided on Operation Snowball.
The Snowball concept originated in 1978 at a weeklong retreat near Champaign organized by the Illinois Teenage Institute, a statewide group dealing with teen issues. A handful of Rockford students decided that the retreat, which encouraged teenagers to talk about their problems in a small group setting, was too good to be limited to one session.
The program got its name because ”they wanted the idea to snowball,”
says Nancy DeLap, director of the Oak Lawn Human Services Department, which helps coordinate the program. That`s exactly what has happened. Today there are 70 Operation Snowball chapters in Illinois.
The Oak Lawn chapter holds its three-day retreats each fall at Camp Manitoqua in Frankfort, Ill., and DeLap says attendance has increased every year: There were 60 participants in 1986, 80 in 1987, and 120 in 1988. The group also holds weekly discussion meetings.
”A lot of people think if you`re a druggie, you go to Snowball for rehab, but it`s not like that at all,” says Dana Wulff, now a 17-year-old senior at Oak Lawn Community High School. ”A portion of it-maybe 30 percent- is about drugs and alcohol, but the rest is learning to take your `mask`
off and just be yourself. It`s kind of hard to explain-you just have to experience it.”
Although Dana is a fan of the program-she has been a teen leader the last two years-she originally wasn`t thrilled about going to the retreat.
”The first time, I remember, I wasn`t too happy about it because my mom was making me do it, and I couldn`t get any of my friends to go either. But it was fun. It`s kind of like camping: no TV, no distractions.” Wulff chimes in with a smile, ”Her fingers start to get itchy because there are no telephones.”
Dana`s friend Lisa Macek, 17, also had initial reservations. ”I thought it was going to be boring,” she says, ”But it was actually so much fun. They had some people come in and talk to us. Usually at a lecture, you`re, like, bored, but they had one priest, Pastor Mike, he really had everybody going.” By the time the weekend was over, Macek says, ”I was hugging and kissing people I hadn`t even known two days earlier.”
Much of the trust develops in the group discussions, she says. ”We broke down into small groups, and there was this one girl, her dad was an alcoholic. I`m always the type of person who doesn`t believe in crying. Well, I admit I cried-you just totally open up. My tough outlook changed while I was there.” ”The problems that most kids have, they think they`re the only one who have them,” says Wulff, who has sat in on several small group discussions.
”Almost everyone in the small groups finds out that there`s at least one other person who has either a similar or a worse problem than they do. They can then share those problems and not be judged, and learn how to get help when they need it.”
Nezar Ziad, 17, a senior at the high school, was eager to find out what a Snowball weekend was all about, but concedes he suffered a bit of disorientation at first. ”I was so lonely the first hour of the first day,” he recalls. ”I felt totally out of place. But after five or six hours, it just hit me-this is like family-and I just opened up.”
An issue commonly dealt with in Snowball discussion groups is stereotyping, Ziad says. ”Everyone wears a mask-`jock,` `head banger` (a heavy metal rock fan), `stuck up.` I went in there-well, I wasn`t exactly stuck up, but by the time I left, it really made me realize that appearances aren`t everything-you can`t judge a book by its cover.”
Asked if drugs are common among his fellow students, Ziad replies, ”Oh yeah, there`s a lot of that going on. I`d hope something like this would knock some sense into their heads. It taught me how to deal with my peers better.” The Oak Lawn Youth Commission, which is part of the human services department, also coordinates Operation Snowflake, a one-day version of the Snowball retreat for junior high students. Funds for both programs are generated by candy sales, donations from community groups and local businesses, and from the fees charged participants. There are no geographical restrictions on who can attend; teens come from as far away as Hoffman Estates.
The Oak Lawn Police Department also is working to educate young people about drugs and alcohol. James Spallina, public information officer, includes drug awareness information in the talks he gives to Oak Lawn grammar schools. For the upper grades, Spallina is setting up a state program called Drug Abuse Resistance Education, known as DARE He hopes that the program, which involves working closely with high school students for 17 weeks, will be in place at Oak Lawn Community High School by the fall.
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For more information on Operation Snowball, call Mary Egan, 636-2929.
