Belmopan – September 12, 2013. The National Drug Abuse Control Council (NDACC) and the Ministry of Health in collaboration with the University of the West Indies – Open Campus Belize, Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports and the Inter-American Observatory on Drugs OAS/CICAD will be conducting a Survey of High School and Junior College Students on Alcohol, Tobacco, Other Drugs and Health, in both public and private schools.
This survey is critical to the development of intervention strategies to prevent the use and abuse of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs by our adolescents. Similar surveys were previously conducted in 2003 and 2008.
The district coordinators of the School and Community Program Unit of NDACC along with field workers from the Ministry of Education will be administering this survey during the month of September in twenty nine (29) high schools and five (5) junior colleges countrywide. It is expected that by the end of the data collection period approximately three thousand (3,000) high school and tertiary-level students would have been surveyed.
The survey will allow planners, policy makers and researchers to better understand counter risk behaviors among our youths. The published results from this survey will no way identify any student and data will be aggregated.
For further information on this initiative, please contact Mr. Amelio Matura, Schools and Communities Program Unit Coordinator at the National Drug Abuse Control Council at 227-1143 or e-mail ameliomatura@gmail.com.
