Assembly and school board meet together

PALMER — The Mat-Su Borough Assembly met in a joint meeting with the Mat-Su Borough School District School Board on Wednesday to discuss their legislative priorities, update the beginning of design work for the repair of Houston Middle School and hear a presentation on the Youth 360 Program.

Prior to the start of agenda items, one public commenter received a round of applause from the school board and assembly. Palmer High School freshmen Madeline Ortiz serves on a national council to discuss emergency preparedness. Ortiz attends monthly meetings and travels to Washington D.C., in the summer to discuss opportunities to improve emergency preparedness including a card game created by FEMA to help educate elementary school students.

“Our goal is to work hard to make sure that all Americans are prepared in emergencies,” said Ortiz.

The joint meeting then heard a presentation from Dr. Alfgeir Kristjansson, a senior analyst and data coordinator with the Icelandic Center for Research and Analysis. Dr. Kristjansson detailed the program begun in Iceland that started in Iceland and has been utilized in other European and South American countries with success for substance abuse prevention.

“Youth 360 project in Mat-Su is really a way to try to replicate this work and make it possible here in Alaska,” said Dr. Kristjansson. “The problem is that we are not willing to give time time for longer term changes and therefore we look to routine short term what we often call band aid methods to really close culturally rooted problems.”

Kristjansson discussed Iceland’s sordid history with substance abuse and the steps taken to delay substance use and increase prevention. In 1998, 42 percent of Icelandic students in 10th grade had been drunk in the last month, compared to just 6 percent today. In 1998, 23 percent of 10th grade students were daily tobacco users compared to just one percent today. Kristjansson has also worked at West Virginia University and Columbia University and talked about the 10-step process he and his colleagues published on substance abuse prevention that he made even simpler.

“You build capacity at the local level, you collect data to tell you what the situation is, you act on what the data shows, you repeat,” said Kristjansson.

The Youth 360 plan involves bringing parents and members of the community together for meetings as the stakeholders in the health of the community. The gathered members discuss ideas for positive supervised activities to offer youth as a way to prevent or delay substance abuse and employ a survey to collect data on the where problems lie in the local community and how they can be mediated.

“The power of local data is enormous,” said Dr. Kristjansson. “Once we have a group and the power of this information is shown to them, it usually grows very very quickly.”

Kristjansson presented alongside United Way Mat-Su Executive Director Stephanie Allen and Mat-Su Health Foundation CEO Elizabeth Ripley.

“People tell us they’re yearning for social connection and they’re not getting it,” said Ripley.