Local Teens Drink More Than National Peers, Study Says

By Amber Lester Kennedy Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Students in the Historic Triangle are outdrinking their national peers, based on the results of a new survey of area middle and high school students’ drug use.

The study was completed by Ted Mittler, owner of The Crim Dell Group consulting firm, and completed under the name of the Historic Triangle Substance Abuse Coalition. HTSAC, which lost its funding as a program of the College of William and Mary’s School of Education in October 2010, surveyed local students about their alcohol and drug abuse until 2009.

HTSAC is now a separate corporation, and in hopes of continuing their work, Mittler administered the survey himself during the weeks of April 25 and May 2 to Williamsburg-James City County and York County schools. He had worked previously to administer the 2009 survey and helped prepare the 2010 survey that was not completed.

“I am hoping that there is enough interest in the community to keep [HTSAC’s] work going, even if under another name or sponsorship,” he said. “If that is to happen, activities such as the CTC survey need to continue at least on an interim basis, because if the information is not regularly gathered, it will be lost.”

The Communities That Care (CTC) Youth Survey was completed by 2,527 students in the sixth, eighth, tenth and twelfth grades. It is a questionnaire that measures how and when students engage in risky behaviors, and asks students about their substance usage, gang membership, illegal/antisocial behavior, attitudes toward family, school and community, and risk factors related to drug use.

The survey was administered online on a voluntary basis. Mittler gave each school the web address for the survey, and they chose the classes that would take it. Students were able to skip any questions they wanted, and the anonymous survey had no free-response questions. The results were compared with nationally representative surveys completed by the Institute for Social Research at The University of Michigan; that data does not include the sixth grade.

The results show that alcohol is the drug of choice at all four grade levels, with 51 percent of high school seniors reporting they consumed alcohol in the preceding month. In grades eight, ten and twelve, marijuana is the second most-used drug. Sixth-graders are more likely than older students to use inhalants, possibly because they’re easier to obtain. For all grade levels, medicine cabinet drugs were the other most abused substance, affecting more than five percent of survey-takers.

Nearly 10 percent of the respondents had tried alcohol by sixth grade, with some regularly drinking before they were 11 years old. The majority of students started drinking alcohol at 16. The pattern is similar for using marijuana, but 15 is the peak age for students to first try smoking cigarettes.

Compared to their national peers, more Williamsburg-area teens have tried alcohol and more had at least one drink in the month prior to the survey. For example, 51.1 percent of seniors reported drinking alcohol in the month prior to the survey, compared to 41.2 percent of students across the nation. Seniors and sophomores also had more instances of binge drinking than the national sample.

Cigarette smoking is less popular with local teens than it is nationally. Local students are more likely to smoke daily by the 12th grade than those in the national sample, however.

For other drugs, local students were more likely to have experimented at greater rates in the month preceding the survey. For tenth-graders, the local rate was more than twice the national rate.

Mittler found he could not compare the new study with previous HTSAC-administered CTC studies because they were not conducted at the same time. The results did indicate, however, that alcohol use has slightly decreased, cigarette smoking has declined and marijuana use has remained stable.

The survey also asked students about their risky or illegal behaviors. Fighting and school suspensions peak in eighth grade, and gang membership more than doubles between sixth and eighth grades before steadying at 5 percent throughout high school. Almost 17 percent of seniors, more than 13 percent of sophomores, six percent of eighth-graders and one percent of sixth-graders reported they attended school while drunk or high. Just over two percent of eighth, tenth and twelfth grade students had stolen or tried to steal a vehicle, and 10 respondents said they’d brought a gun to school.

Students reported a high number of suspensions, with 10.9 percent of seniors, 12.7 percent of sophomore, 13.5 percent of eighth-graders and 8.4 percent of sixth-graders reporting they had been suspended from school at some point.

Sixth-graders, without exception, had the most positive attitudes on all 37 scales measured in the survey. Tenth-graders had generally the poorest attitudes toward their community and their school, while twelfth-graders often had the poorest attitudes toward family and exhibited the most risky/antisocial behavior. For alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana, the number of friends who use a substance has more influence over parental disapprove when a student decides whether to use that substance.

Most students expect to drink alcohol when they are over 21, but most do not expect to smoke cigarettes or marijuana when they are over 18.

Participation varied from school to school. In York County, Tabb and Bruton high schools did not participate and at Yorktown Middle School, 35 of its 750 students completed the survey. In WJCC schools, participation was stronger but at Toano Middle School, just six students completed the survey. Mittler weeded out some surveys where it seemed the students weren’t taking it seriously; he also included the name of a fake drug to gauge which students were inflating their usage of substances.

Mittler believes the information should be of use to anyone interested in local youth, and to any organization hoping to apply for grant money to provide services to area teens. “As a former school administrator, I can think of a number of ways I would use the data, but I’m sure that each principal will make use of it in his or her own way,” he said.

To see the full survey with more detailed information, click here.