SAMPLE LETTER
Dear Representative/Senator __________: I am writing to request that you make funding for the State Grants portion of the Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities (SDFSC) program, zeroed out in the President’s Budget, one of your top FY 2010 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education appropriations priorities. In our tri-county region, we use this funding to implement evidence-based drug and violence prevention programs for more than 57,000 children and youth in our public and non-public schools. The state grants portion of SDFSC is our only funding source for school-based drug and alcohol prevention and intervention services. Without it, the drug and violence prevention infrastructure that is currently in place in each of our schools will be totally dismantled. This will leave the vast majority of our schools and students with no drug and violence prevention programming at all. Each year, as students change developmentally and are greeted with new risks, they must be equipped with the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to resist violence and drug abuse. Research is clear: the younger a person first uses drugs or alcohol, the greater the likelihood that they will become dependent and/or addicted to drugs and alcohol as an adult. This creates huge costs for that person, as well as for society as a whole: academic failure, school dropout, lost job productivity, family dysfunction, and increased medical costs to name a few. Clearly, the focus should be on preventing substance use before it starts. The President’s FY 2010 proposal, however, shifts the focus away from prevention. The proposal to eliminate this program and move $100 million into a competitive program within the Title IV B of No Child Left Behind will decimate the school-based prevention infrastructures that are currently in place in all the schools in our tri-county Safe and Drug-Free Schools Consortium. In addition, it would give large grants to a very small number of recipients that will not be able to sustain them over time. Eliminating the State Grants portion of the SDFSC program is not a sound proposal and does not bear in mind the best interests of our nation’s youth. For these reasons, we hope that you will support funding the State Grants portion of the SDFSC program at a minimum of the FY 2009 appropriated level of $294.8 million in the FY 2010 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations Bill. Thank you for considering my views.