Wellesley High School has a SNAPPY new way of reducing alcohol abuse among students.
     The program, which is called SNAPPY for Social Norms Alcohol Problem Prevention for Youth, focuses on distinguishing the difference between perceptions about students' alcohol use and actual alcohol use.
     SNAPPY kicked off this Monday with committee members hanging a poster in the high school that informed students that most of their peers respect non-drinkers.
     "I thought a lot more people drank than actually do, which is the point of this program, to educate people that some things they perceive are happening aren't actually happening," said WHS junior Jill Bloom, who is one of two student representatives on the SNAPPY Advisory Committee.
     SNAPPY was created in response to a pattern that students consistently overestimate actual alcohol use among peers and attitudes supportive of high-risk drinking. This builds to the misperception that "everyone is doing it," which inevitably influences students to drink more heavily.
     After students at Wellesley High School and Needham High School completed a survey on their attitudes about drinking this past October, a committee compiled their information and will report different findings in visible areas around Wellesley High School through various media every two to three weeks. Needham High School's findings will not be reported to students, as they are the controlled variable in the study.
     The survey will take place each fall for three years.
     Dr. Linda Langford, the principal investigator on the project, said what makes it successful is that while other campaigns provide students with negative consequences, SNAPPY focuses attention on the peer factor.
     "For a long time we thought it was peer pressure that led students to drinking, but there's an unspoken notion that we've identified, and are trying to dispel the myths around," she said. "We're all adapting our behavior all the time to fit in, and sometimes conforming to a mistaken norm."
     Langford is an associate center director at Education Development Center in Newton, a group whose federal grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism funds SNAPPY. Supplemental funding has been received from the MetroWest Community Health Care Foundation and the Newton-Wellesley Hospital.
     Lisa Stone, vice-chairman of the Wellesley Board of Health, and member of the SNAPPY Advisory Committee, said she is also confident this program will work where others have failed because of its honesty and positive nature.
     "The top of the poster says, `You told us... now we're telling you,' which shows we're not spinning this or trying to make it be what we want it to be," she said. "Most alcohol programs use what we call `health terrorism,' which are pictures of cancerous lungs from smoking or pictures of drunk-driving fatalities, which is understandable because the consequences can be catastrophic, but nowhere else do we come up with education though terrorism. We don't show pictures of homeless people and tell kids this is what happens if they don't learn to read. This is really just putting out the model that, `Hey, you don't need to feel alone.'"
     Wellesley High School Principal Rena Mirkin agreed.
     "The information we have came from the kids directly and it's real information," she said, "and it really lets kids know that they're not obliged to feel a certain way, that they're in the majority when they have these good thoughts."
     Bloom said she sees a good many unsafe activities occurring among her peers, but realizing that these people are the exception rather than the rule is likely to reduce the occurrences.
     "There are people who drink not because they like it, but because they think it's the social norm," she said. "I think that's definitely a part in their decision making."
     Social norms programs have proved successful in curbing youth drinking on college campuses such as Northern Illinois University, University of Arizona, and Hobart & William Smith College, and although other high schools have tried this approach, Wellesley High School is the first high school in the country to study its effects.
     "A number of colleges have done these campaigns," said Langford, "and while no single study has had the methodology we want to see, what we've seen across the wide variety of colleges are decreases in drinking."
     An informational meeting on SNAPPY and the social norms theory will be held on April 3, from 7:30 p.m to 9 p.m at the Wellesley High School Library. The entire community is invited.

For more information visit the SNAPPY Web site at www.edc.org/snappy