User:Wheele212/sandbox

Peers is a program that allows teens to teach students younger about abstaining from sex, drugs, and alcohol.

Who they are?
According to the Peers Project adolescents need to have positive peer support systems to avoid risk behaviors. Youth are highly influenced by a desire to please their friends, to be part of the “in crowd.” The group believes that if you add a group of positive students to each school then it would help impact students to be positive as well.One of the challenges in getting groups together is finding so many positive individuals to be role models for other students. Peers project believes that alcohol, drugs, sex and violence are linked together. Peers project was started in 1994 with a group of teens at St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana. To be a peer mentor for this program, high school counselors and teachers recommend "role model" high school students. These students are trained by adult coordinators to present the curriculum.

What they do?
Peers Project during the school year has student volunteers who are in high school and they go and speak to students at the middle schools.Small groups of four to six peer mentors teach PEP’s lessons to younger students. Most often, each group of student peer mentors only presents one lesson and misses one day of school per semester. In these middle schools they go over different topics They believe that if you start young you can help early. During the summer a group of teens visit summer camps and talk to the students about media, sex, drugs, alcohol, and any other problems going on in the community at the time.The students are all trained by adults employed by Peers Project. The Peers Project state that one of their challeges as educators is preventing one risky behavior by recommending productive opportunities for students to connect with both positive adult and peer role models and school. Since 1994, The PEERS Project has actively engaged about 25,000 “peer mentors” who have led by example and taught an engaging, medically accurate, program to half a million adolescents in Indiana and other states.

Program Topics
(50-60-minutes) Level 1 (Sixth Grade/11-12 year old) •Media •Healthy Friendships and Peer Pressure •How to be Assertiveness Level 2 (Seventh Grade/12-13 year old) •Teen Pregnancy and •Sexually Transmitted Diseases •Drugs and sex Level 3

(Eighth Grade/13-14 year old) •Relationships/ behaviors •Learning to Lead Level 4 (High School/ 15-18 year old) •Love •STDs