DATF now SAY: Task force rebrands as Scarsdale Action for Youth

The SAY coalition is a communitywide effort of SFCS employees, parents, teachers, school administrators, law enforcement, mental health professionals, village officials, community clergy and others that focuses on more than drugs and alcohol with a wide variety of programming for adults and youth. The coalition is funded through a combination of the Scarsdale Edgemont Family Counseling Service, the village of Scarsdale, the Scarsdale Union Free School District in addition to the Office of National Drug Contol Policy Drug Free Communities Grant. While SAY's roots originate in Scarsdale, the work of prevention has no boundaries. It works actively to collaborate with neighboring school districts to strengthen the resources and skills available to youth and families in all communities. As an example, SAY and SFCS are currently working to provide Youth Mental Health First Aid Training to parents and faculty/staff of the Edgemont School District.

“The board really felt we wanted the coalition name to really better reflect the goals of the group and what we’re hoping to accomplish in the community,” SAY coordinator Lisa Tomeny said. “There was a feeling that Scarsdale Drug and Alcohol Task Force almost sounded like an enforcement type of initiative, as opposed to a community support-based coalition. That’s where it started and we went through a couple of rounds of thinking thoughtfully about what we wanted our name to reflect. Certainly drugs and alcohol are going to remain a major focus of the group, but it’s so much more than that within the community.”

SAY is starting a new program that helps train parents, school administrators and law enforcement personnel to lead that charge, acting as an early intervention for students who are “not quite in trouble and not quite down the path too far where they need treatment,” Tomeny said.

Youth Mental Health First Aid Training is another program delivered to adults who work with children. Tomeny said two dozen staff and community members have been trained so far in “recognizing signs of mental health challenges, what they can do, who they can connect those kids to, and what their role is in that type of situation.”

SAY supports students attending leadership forums that help train them on what the issues are and how they can make a positive change within their own communities. One of Tomeny’s goals is to get more local students involved.

“That’s a huge part of what we’re going after … tackling the big picture and not just focusing on one thing per se, like drugs and alcohol,” Tomeny said. “When you really look at the issue at hand it’s about building resilience and decision-making skills and the education that’s necessary for them to be able to do that.

“We are going to be piloting an advocacy program. We don’t have a name for it yet, but it is going to be focused on giving kids the skills and the tools to advocate for positive change, whether it’s in their own community or microcommunity like the school.”

Tomeny understands how difficult it can be for students to advocate to their peers about living a clean life, but she also understands the power of such efforts.

“Peers need to hear from their peers,” she said. “They don’t need to hear from us adults. I don’t want to say it falls on deaf ears, but it doesn’t have nearly the same impact. That’s kind of our endgame, to have peers who are willing to stand up and not even necessarily persuade their peers to not do drugs, but to lead by example, to be a role model and to demonstrate what it looks like.”

Getting facts out from student to student is key to the mission, especially with what is learned every few years from the Pride survey results (bit.ly/3GVWJfP) that give insight into the alcohol, tobacco and marijuana usage of high school students, a survey that now includes data about vaping.

“We know in particular the majority of students in Scarsdale are making the decision not to use alcohol and drugs and this is through our student [Pride] survey,” Tomeny said. “I think that message is often lost and kids feel like everybody is doing it. For students that feel like taking up that mantle, that’s what we’re interested in developing.”

She’s proud to report that some high school students are trying to develop a club with SAY’s support “built around demonstrating firsthand that you can have fun without the use of substances.”

Tomeny wants to help students build the skills and confidence to “deal with different situations as they go through life.”

“That’s going to be present year-round no matter what, in terms of [students’] health both mentally and physically,” she said. “That’s always a continued focus.”

One of the main partnerships in reaching Scarsdale youth is with the school district, a partnership Tomeny called “extremely important and extremely strong.”

“They are very supportive of everything we do,” Tomeny said. “There is a steering committee, a board that meets to talk about what initiatives we want to take on, what we’re seeing, and the schools are certainly one of, if not the most important partners in determining where we want to put our resources and how we want to go about addressing what is happening on the ground. Schools are one of the locations where our target audience is on a daily basis. They have a lot of the most relevant information.”

SAY brought in Ty Sells of Youth to Youth International to do a Clean the Air workshop for Scarsdale’s 10th grade health classes in the first semester of the current school year. “I like the idea of not putting a thousand kids in one room and telling them not to do drugs, but to really have it interactive, more a one-on-one discussion-led, informative session with them,” Tomeny said.

Marijuana remains an area of focus for SAY — a “hot issue” — especially since New York State changed its laws on sales and growing cannabis last year.

“To date the licenses have been mostly issued or all issued in the city, but it’s only a matter of time [until] the towns that have opted in are going to be operating at full tilt,” Tomeny said. “We want to continue to not just educate students about use, but also to help them think through how this is going to affect our community and what they can be doing — what kind of voice can they be having — in determining what this is going to look like.”

Tomeny joined the SFCS staff in 2019 as the DATF coordinator after having worked in other Westchester County communities like Blind Brook, Irvington, Peekskill and Yorktown over the last decade.

“Each community has a uniqueness to it, but we’re all kind of bound to the same thing,” she said. “We tend to track a lot of similar data throughout the county. So what I’ve seen work in other communities, we’ve tried to find a way to make it Scarsdale-specific with its own special twist and we’re hoping that we can come up with more and more things as we head down the road.”

While SAY's roots originate in Scarsdale, the work of prevention has no boundaries, said Tomeny. “We work actively to collaborate with neighboring school districts to strengthen the resources and skills available to youth and families in all communities,” she said. As an example of that, SFCS and SAY are currently working to provide Youth Mental Health First Aid Training to parents and faculty/staff of the Edgemont School District. 

Tomeny came on board just before the COVID-19 pandemic, so while that led to a “slow start,” she said she is “now hitting the road full force.” Much of that revolves around receiving five years of $125,000 annually from the Drug Free Communities Grant from White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy to supplement the much smaller annual budget for SAY, which is funded by SFCS, the village and the school district.

“It’s absolutely impactful and it allows us a little more freedom to focus on delivering what we’re seeing is the need in the community as opposed to only being able to accomplish what we can raise funds for,” Tomeny said. “The board is very hopeful that the rebranding or name change will really be able to convey what we’re trying to accomplish and really let folks know that it’s everyone, it’s all of us. We’re not a national organization. We’re really just a group of concerned stakeholders in Scarsdale trying to make things better for our youth. We want to make sure everyone has what they need to make healthy and informed choices.”