The Students Against Destructive Decisions organization has thousands of chapters across the country with 350,000 active student participants, but the club is no longer active at The Wheatley School.
At Monday night’s East Williston Board of Education meeting, Wheatley School Principal Sean Feeney said the decision to sack SADD was made after a lengthy review process.
“We now do these club reviews on a regular basis, really on a three-year cycle,” Feeney said. “So every club is getting reviewed and a little more vigorously than the annual reviews.”
The original mission of the SADD chapter was to help young people say “No” to drinking and driving, according to the organization’s Web site. The mission has since expanded to become a peer-to-peer education, prevention, and activism organization dedicated to preventing destructive decisions, particularly underage drinking, other drug use, risky and impaired driving, teen violence, and teen suicide.
Feeney said the high school administration looks at each club and reviews its events and activities to determine the club’s benefit to the students.
After reviewing the SADD club, it was evident there was no reason to go forward with the club, Feeney said. There was low student involvement in the club and he said other clubs with larger memberships were raising awareness on similar issues of drugs and alcohol.
Feeney said although student involvement was low, those who were involved “were deeply committed to it.”
“They were really trying to get more students engaged and involved and unfortunately they didn’t have sufficient students to follow that lead and that’s really based on the attendance and the activity sheets that are submitted,” Feeney said.
According to school policy, students in the SADD club should have been notified of its termination during the end of the spring semester. Feeney acknowledged the error.
“The suspension of that club was recommended, but it wasn’t recommended until after the school year during the summer,” he said. “That did not give students sufficient time to prepare and be aware that there wouldn’t be that club and in that case I think we needed to do a better job communicating that in the spring as we did with all of our other club decisions.”
The board had received complaints from students about the lack of notification and board members expressed concern about repeating the error in communicating similar decisions to the students.
“That was an error on our parts and that communication should have occurred in a better fashion and for that I apologize,” Feeney said.
