SMART Leaders

SMART Leaders is a 2-year booster program that follows from Stay SMART (for Skills, Mastery, And Resistance Training). Both are components of SMART Moves, a comprehensive drug and sexual activity prevention program offered through the Boys and Girls Clubs of America (BGCA). SMART Leaders reinforces the skills and knowledge learned during Stay SMART and encourages participants to stay involved in prevention activities and to be positive, drugfree role models for their peers. SMART Leaders I involves five small group sessions consisting of role-playing and videotapes about identifying different peer pressures to use drugs and engage in sexual activity and learning to resist those pressures. SMART Leaders II is taught in a three-session video format, with one session dedicated to resisting alcohol, one session to resisting drugs, and one to resisting early sexual activity. Participants are encouraged to become involved in other programs and activities at the BGCA and encourage their peers to be drugfree.

The goal of this program is to help youths identify and resist peer and other social pressures to smoke, drink, and engage in sexual activity.

Over the course of the evaluation, the Stay SMART + Boosters group came to perceive fewer social benefits from drinking alcohol, while the Stay SMART Only and control groups came to perceive more social benefits from drinking. The youths in the Boosters group also perceived significantly fewer social benefits from smoking marijuana than those in the other two groups. However, both the Stay SMART Only and the Stay SMART + Boosters groups reported less marijuana-related behavior. Both the Stay SMART Only and the Stay SMART + Boosters groups reported less alcohol-related behavior than the control group, though this finding was only marginally significant. Both program groups showed significantly less drug- and cigarette-related behavior and significantly more knowledge concerning drug use than the control group.