"We meet the second Wednesday of the month, and in the summer too," explained Stanczyc. "It's run by students and mentored by adults; it's a unique way of doing it. Youth to youth makes a lot more sense. They've got the sense of what's happening in our community and how to get the information out to people."
The kids organize dodgeball tournaments, volleyball tournaments, dances, a lot of pre-prom activities, she said. "This year they want to have an Inflatable Night for the younger population."
The meeting will start in the Youth Services office with pizza, drinks, and a chance to socialize and talk. That's when the parents learn the most about what's going on with their kids, she said.
Then everybody moves upstairs to the police station training room for the business portion, she continued. "It's free and it's open and we'd love to have people come and check it out."
There's a core group of 15 to 20 kids, who are generally very involved in a lot of activities, she said. "They're high school and middle school students. We try to get them to join in middle school. One of our co-chairs got started in fifth grade and he's a senior this year."
"Underage drinking starts around fifth, sixth, and seventh grade," she noted. "Alcohol is the number one killer of kids, and now it's drinking, driving and texting too."
The coalition has a big youth summit planned for Wednesday, Sept. 30, in the Rocky Hill High School cafeteria, with a speaker on brain development and drugs and alcohol, and another speaker on going green, she said. It's about caring for yourself and caring for your environment, she added.
On Thursday, Oct. 22, Stanczyc said, the group will have assemblies at the high school and at Griswold Middle School with Jeff Yalden, an internationally known speaker on positive youth development.
The Youth & Family Services Bureau has a new initiative this year, called Community of Concern, to get parents involved, she said. The bureau is mailing all parents of school-age children in Rocky Hill a copy of "The Community of Concern Program," a booklet "designed to encourage open and honest communication between parents and children to help prevent underage drinking and drug use," according to the accompanying letter.
The booklet was produced by the national Community of Concern group, which originated in 1988 at Georgetown Preparatory School in Bethesda, MD. The group's web site is www.thecommunityofconcern.org.
The national group allows local groups, such as Rocky Hill, to customize the booklet with two pages of local information helpful to parents, Stanczyc said.