“Guard Your Heart” Abstinence Program
The year 2007 has been a great time of growth and success for our abstinence program, which is in it’s fourth year. We are currently serving all four Carter County High Schools: Happy Valley, Unaka, Hampton, and Cloudland. “Guard Your Heart” covers an array of issues that teens face from day to day. Some of the topics we cover are: Rules And Boundaries, Abstinence From Alcohol And Drugs, Abstinence Until Marriage, Relationships, and many more. Both the students and the teachers benefit from our classes, because this not your normal kind of classroom experience. These are life lessons in which teens as well as adults can participate. The students walk away from this program with positive influences and the teachers learn new approaches for educating our youth. We spend 14 days at each school every time the curriculum is taught. This makes it possible to have more of an impact on our community’s teens. We teach this in the Wellness classes for all Freshmen. It is a state approved curriculum and it meets the criteria that the state requires for them to learn in Wellness classes.
This year, we added “Drunk Goggles” to our program. Thanks to a generous donation from Best Portraits of Elizabethton, we were able to purchase the “Drunk Goggles” and an adult size tricycle donated by Wal-Mart. This allowed us to implement a new way of showing the teens about how alcohol truly impairs our bodies’ motors skills. The goggles allow you to see with drunken vision, but with a sober mind. As one can imagine, the student wears the “Drunk Goggles” while trying to steer the tricycle through an obstacle course. Included with this they try to perform a series of sobriety tests. This new addition to our program has opened a new door for us to visit Sullivan East High School and show them a portion of our program.
We have also begun to share with the teens the different personality types among their peers and how each personality affects the others. This enables the teens to make wise choices of whom they make friends with and how to get along with the different personality types. Enlightening the teens about their own personality type may prevent them from falling under the wrong influences. The program points out that pregnancy is not the greatest risk during sex, it is STDs. We cover reproduction, fetal development and STDs with each student. We also added a new field trip to the program. Instead of bringing an inmate into the school to have them speak to the students like we used to do, we now take the students to the jail for the student to tour and see what it is really like to be in jail.
Not only are we doing programs with teens, but we are focusing on younger children as well. The Carter County School System also allows us to teach the “Safe At Last” program to elementary school aged children. We serve 8 elementary schools: Keenburg, Hunter, Central, Range, Unaka, Little Milligan, Cloudland, Valley Forge. In this program, the children are taught how to stay safe by addressing: What is a stranger?, How do you answer the door?, How do you answer the telephone?, Internet Safety, How And When To Say “No”, and much more.
We had two special guest speakers at both the elementary and high schools. Ken Freeman shared his life experiences with the high school students. He stressed to the teens about how drugs, alcohol, and bad decisions affected his home life. Ken also shared about how he overcame those decisions that his mother made and did not allow his nightmarish childhood ruin him. George Smith shared about personality types and great feats of strength with elementary students. With each personality type, he had a different strength activity. This enabled him to help the students to understand how to stay away from bad influences and get along with other personalities. He also shared the strengths and weaknesses of each personality type. Similarly to what we share with the teens, this helps them to figure out their own personality type.
Similar to our high school program, we also provide our abstinence program to those incarcerated at Carter County Jail as a sort of rehab and reform program. This program is entitled L.I.F.E. (Living In Freedom Eternally). So, in saying that this program affects teens as well as adults is a very factual statement. In essence, the abstinence program covers every aspect of the services of our center.
This has been a very successful and exciting year for us. We were even given the opportunity to take “Guard Your Heart” to the country of Ukraine! It has amazed our community that our program has gone international and plan to continue the work happening there. Through the “Guard Your Heart” abstinence program and a lot of hard work, we have had major accomplishments. We have been able to touch hundreds of lives both in our community and outside of the country.
