We are in our sixth year of offering secondary school parents the DavisParentsDo pledge as a vehicle to raise awareness about the realities of drug and alcohol use by our teens. We realize the pledge is only the beginning of parent involvement in the battle against teen substance use.

Our webpage at www.davisparentsdo.org is an additional resource. Furthermore, we have repeatedly approached the school district administration on behalf of all Davis parents regarding substance use and our Athletic Policy. Our request to clarify the policy and address how the procedures are to be implemented uniformly across all our secondary schools and all sports has not been uniformly implemented. However, we feel the issue is important enough that we will continue to raise awareness.

The pledge, the website and our major efforts to raise awareness as well as advocate for parents at the district level have been our focus during the last six years. Now is the time for a simple shift – at least on how we get parent pledges.

In the past our pledge was in paper form. As we have been gradually moving toward an electronic pledge, in the last year we had several schools add our webpage link directly onto their school website. In order to reduce costs and eliminate the amount of data entry hours necessary to get pledger’s names published, we have decided this coming school year (2013-14), the pledges will be strictly electronic.

Parents can simply go to our website at www.davisparentsdo.org, click on the pledge and type their first and last name. That’s it! Once they click ‘save’, we have their name on our pledge list which will be published once our webmaster reviews the entries.

We will continue to ask for your help in getting our link onto your school’s webpage, but we will also send our communications early in September to get the word out to parents about where our pledge form is located. Again, here is our strategy for disseminating this coming school year’s pledge form:

• We are going to make this pledge available to our secondary school parents via the internet at www.davisparentsdo.org
• We will send out a listserv periodically with an embedded link to our website pledge. (Still unsure if the listserv allows this.)
• Send out notices via the Enterprise/Patch about our efforts to raise awareness among Davis parents
• Send periodic notices in the DHS newsletter and other communication tools at the other secondary schools.
• Offer our link and pledge letter in *.pdf file format to be posted on school websites (counseling and registration locations might be best).
• Offer to have the superintendent of Davis feature our pledge efforts in his communication email to the district.

Thanks for your continued support and have a wonderful summer!