The following is a featured story in our 2023 Community Impact Report.
A drug and alcohol informational class isn’t something you expect teenagers to be raving about, but talk to students leaving VOA Alaska’s Prime for Life class, and that’s precisely what you’ll hear.
“We are all teenagers, and it is very hard to get through to us,” a student wrote in a letter to Brian Pickett, Program Coordinator and PFL teacher. “Because we are so shut off and defensive, and we don’t like to be vulnerable. In the matter of 2 days, you have taught me and hopefully us all so much.”
Prime for Life (PFL) is an evidence-based prevention and intervention program that helps youth learn to reduce their risks of alcohol and drug-related problems throughout life.
That’s the by-the-book definition, but Brian explains it a little differently. He says it’s a chance for youth to “freeze time and look at themselves. Like stop everything, every external factor…and determine if their trajectory is aimed at what they want it to be aimed at.”
Most of the youth coming to PFL are on suspension for substance-related offenses, which the Anchorage School District will reduce for students who complete the course. Experiences can range from a wrong-place-wrong-time situation with very little exposure to drugs or alcohol to youth who are heavily using substances to cope with trauma.
With so many varied experiences in the classroom, Brian’s approach to teaching the class is, well, by not teaching.
“I don’t teach, I connect,” Brian says. As he works through the two-day curriculum, Brian finds moments to dig into the questions and responses to help students consider their choices and why they made them, helping them to look “at things that they were probably never asked to look at, about themselves and the world around them.”
As the lowest level of care in VOA’s continuum, Brian hopes that the class “opens up a door of curiosity” for those who may need to find healthier ways of coping through more intensive services and support in VOA’s school-based, outpatient, or residential levels of care.
Ultimately, no matter what comes next in the lives of the youth he connects with, Brian says his goal “is that if they’re going to continue down the path that they’re on, that at some point, they remember the things that they heard about how they can live a better life.”
VOA’s two-day Prime for Life course is available for middle and high school students and offered every week during the school year, Monday and Tuesday or Thursday and Friday. Visit voaak.org/pfl to learn more.
