Standard Grade 9’s “P.A.R.T.Y.” in Calgary

Times Contributor

 

The visit to Calgary was anything but a Party as the Grade 9 students from Standard school participated in the P.A.R.T.Y. program, which stands for Prevent Alcohol and Risk Related Trauma in Youth, as part of their health curriculum.

P.A.R.T.Y. focuses on making smart choices. Students going to the program would encounter some people who unfortunately made some pretty bad choices, or who had someone make a bad choice for them, and are now living with the consequences. 

The students and parent volunteers and teachers spent the day learning about traumas incurred by impaired driving, the realism of drugs and their unfortunate availability to today’s youth and the consequences that can happen if they participated in recreational drug and alcohol use. 

The morning started with a definition of each of the terms used in the P.A.R.T.Y. acronym. The students were told that 95 per cent of the accidents that occurred are preventable.

The students learned about the ‘stupid line,’ which is an imaginary line in your brain that divides your thoughts into good decisions and bad decisions (much like the devil and angel on your shoulders). The students learned about safety in driving, including the recent addition of the distractive driving law while operating a vehicle. The laws are enforced for the safety of everyone.

Lunchtime proved to be a challenge as students were assigned a disability such as a brain injury, blindness, tunnel vision, no use of hands, or a spinal injury where they had no use of thumbs and a neck brace and needed assistance to eat. Lunch was a powerful and very real example of the consequences that can happen with bad choices.

The group was introduced to the Emergency and Intensive Care units at the Foothills Hospital, and was led through a series of events that would happen when someone was admitted to these units.

Students heard true life stories from trauma survivors that made an impact and solidified the morning’s events in that they were faced with the reality of trauma, putting a face to the situation.

The P.A.R.T.Y. program doesn’t prevent trauma from happening but gives the students the opportunity, when faced with making choices, to make the right choices based on what they had seen and heard.