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Fog/Mist East Rockaway's Coalition for Youth starts up
Village, schools on board with innovative program
Deputy Mayor Richard Meagher has invited the public to attend a meeting on April 29 to help launch a new village organization, Coalition for Youths in East Rockaway. Meagher said he hopes the community-wide effort will help to educate parents and their children about the dangers of substance abuse and offer healthy, village-sponsored activities and programs for young people.
“Perhaps the first job of the coalition should be called ‘awakening a community,’” Meagher said. He added that the group’s initial efforts will include educating young people and their parents about the dangers — and consequences — of substance abuse, strengthening existing laws — and their enforcement — to directly combat the problem, and expanding the availability of activities, programs and facilities for youth in the school district and the village.
“Having the Village of East Rockaway and the East Rockaway Union Free School District work together — even in an informal way — to help create a Coalition for Youth is a dramatic and unprecedented first step,” Meagher said.
An idea takes shape
On Jan. 20, a presentation in the high school auditorium revealed the results of a 2008 New York state student survey that tracked substance abuse trends among young people in Nassau County. Some 500 East Rockaway students had taken part, and the results were disturbing. As reported in the Herald’s Jan. 28-Feb. 3 issue, they had “experimented more with smoking and drinking, on average, than those in other parts of the county and state.”
“It was a wake-up call,” said Meagher, a former Board of Education member. “What the youths of the community had to say in the student survey has triggered the call for action to be taken.”
The subject came up again a week later, at an East Rockaway High School PTA meeting — also covered in the Herald — at which the coordinator of the Long Beach Coalition, Judi Vining, counseled parents that “the way to combat substance abuse is by fighting it as a community — and that the initial battle starts at home.”
