About Helping Schools

This resource is designed to help schools and their partners take effective action in addressing the impact of alcohol, tobacco and other drug use on the school environment and on students’ health and learning.

Based on an internationally recognized framework called comprehensive school health, this resource is grounded in a social ecological model of public health and health promotion. This means it encourages schools to recognize, explore and address the social and environmental factors – not just individual factors – that influence students’ health and learning, particularly those factors related to drug use.

How this resource can help

Most school administrators, teachers and parents agree that drug education is necessary to prepare young people for life in a drug-using world. But just what to tell students about drugs, and how to effectively deal with issues such as drug use on school property, are still questions that many administrators, teachers and parents wrestle with.

The Centre for Addictions Research of BC (CARBC) is committed to helping schools and others find answers to their questions. We believe we are all responsible for helping young people learn how to live a healthy life – we are all in this together – and that schools can do their part by

• creating healthy physical and social environments for learning, and
• helping young people develop their health literacy (the knowledge and skills they need to survive and thrive in a world where drug use is common).

While there is no magic formula for achieving this complex goal – each school, classroom and student is unique – we believe this resource and our consultation services can help schools understand and address the multi-level factors that influence the school environment and the health of students and staff alike.

Healthy individuals will, by and large, make healthy choices and, in turn, contribute to a healthy and positive school and community.

Using this resource

A suite of promising practices provides the core structure for this site. Designed to help educators apply the principles of health promotion to their school setting, the selected practices reinforce each other to create a comprehensive approach to influencing health, as opposed to just reacting to problems.

Each promising practice is linked to both discussions of the underlying evidence and tools for implementation.

Helping Schools has been developed in order to provide school professionals with ready access to quality information and tools that are both grounded in sound theory and readily applied in real-world settings.

At the Centre for Addictions Research of BC, we believe schools are an important setting in which to address substance use. But we also recognize that, while school-based programs are popular, they have not been very effective in achieving their goals. Therefore, we are committed to working with school professionals to develop, implement and evaluate innovative and pragmatic programs that build on the evidence base related to education and health promotion. In doing so, we employ a four-part strategy. This site contains information and resources related to the first three. Please contact helpingschools@carbc.ca to discuss your needs related to consultation and support.

Funding for this project is provided by the BC Ministry of Health and from BC Mental Health and Addiction Services as part of their support for BC Partners for Mental Health and Addictions Information.

Some of the content on this site is based on earlier work we did for the Joint Consortium for School Health.

iMinds is a set of learning resources being developed by the Centre for Addictions Research of BC on behalf of the Ministry of Health.