CASSOPOLIS — Prevention services “have come a long way from ‘this is your brain. This is your brain on drugs’ mentality,” Cass County commissioners heard Jan. 20 from E.J. McAndrew.

McAndrew, who was to meet with Cass County school superintendents Friday morning, has since October coordinated substance abuse prevention for Woodlands Behavioral Healthcare Network, though she’s been doing prevention for eight years.

“Woodlands does treatment, but that’s a different department,” McAndrew said. “I’m not a therapist. I’m an educator, a social worker by degree. It’s bad when you come across a teenager who’s addicted, but unfortunately it does happen, and I would refer them to our substance abuse people.

“Almost all of the programming we do is evidence-based, which means it’s been through all of the research and science to make sure it’s effective and not a lot of what we think is going to work,” he said. “It has been evaluated and proven to work.

“There are two different approaches to substance abuse prevention Woodlands will be focusing on,” McAndrew said. “One is individual services. The other is community-based environmental-based. We’ll use both.”

Cass Alcohol Safety Solutions is a community collaborative addressing the consequences of existing and emerging issues associated with the use, abuse and addiction of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs, whether illegal narcotics or prescriptions and over-the-counter medications.

CASS coalition’s goals are to address substance abuse concerns in the county, to develop and strengthen community partnerships and to provide education to Cass County residents.

CASS meets the second Thursday of the month. Meetings are open to the public.

“We’re in the process of increasing our membership and the diversity of our membership,” McAndrew said.

“We have a very strong law enforcement membership, including the prosecutor’s office, and Pastor Pittman from the faith-based community recently joined us,” she said. “We want to address what the county actually feels is necessary by going into the community and talking to the community about what it wants, as well as bringing in data to see if an issue truly is growing or has it just been on the front page of the newspaper lately and is more in our consciousness. That’s going to be one of our biggest efforts this year, the coalition. We already have some things planned.

“Last year we wrote a letter to all of the juniors and seniors in the county, to their parents at prom and grad time. It came from the prosecutor’s office and was signed by all of our law enforcement, the health department and Woodlands,” McAndrew said. “It talked about the law regarding providing alcohol at a party to teens, as well as some of the things we know they’ll do during prom time. We also have Smart Summer, to increase parents’ awareness of ways they can help keep their kids safe. We’re also going to be participating in the National Take Back Drug Day on April 30. That’s what we’re doing in a nutshell.”

She can be contacted at 445-2451.

Woodlands Director Kathy Emans told commissioners about changes in provision of substance abuse prevention services to Cass County, which for the past five years or so had been provided by the Van Buren-Cass Health Department.

Woodlands applied for and was awarded the contract and worked with Kalamazoo Community Mental Health to develop a SAP, or substance abuse prevention plan specifically for Cass County.

The plan was developed using Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMSHA) Strategic Prevention Framework model, which uses assessment, capacity, planning, implementation and evaluation.

The model is designed to use and expand on already existing resources to address specific substance abuse prevention needs unique to Cass County.

Using the community-based approach has proven to be most effective in implementing SAP programs on a broad scale.

The Cassopolis agency collaborates with Family Court, the Department of Human Services (DHS) and local school districts to implement educational programs for high-risk adolescents and chemical education for student athletes and their parents.