GUILDERLAND — The DARE program — the acronym stands for Drug Abuse and Resistance — isn’t just about drugs any more, explained Officer Matt Hanzalik of the Guilderland Police, who teaches the course to fifth-graders at Guilderland’s five public elementary schools.

He visits each classroom for 45 minutes a week for 10 weeks. This fall, he said, he taught nine courses a week among three different elementary schools.

The program is also about managing stress, reading body language and expressing one’s own beliefs and preferences, and dealing with peer pressure, said Megan Gejay, a fifth-grade teacher at Westmere Elementary School.

“It could just be everyday situations,” Hanzalik told The Enterprise, “like a couple of kids are going to do something that could constitute bullying.”

Gejay said of Hanzalik, “He weaves the idea of respect and kindness through the entire 10 weeks.”

The idea behind teaching fifth-grade students is that “their minds are like sponges,” Hanzalik said, and, by giving them skills for evaluating situations and responding in a way that is safe and responsible, they can be better prepared to move on to middle school.

Students in Karen Shaffer’s Altamont Elementary School class met with Hanzalik earlier this month for their 10th and final lesson in the DARE program.

Hanzalik asked the students to think about a time when they had needed help and when someone had helped them, and to write down who had helped them, and what traits or characteristics that person had had. The example, he said, can be something “teeny tiny” like they needed help with homework, or something “huge” like they had broken their leg and couldn’t get up.

Some of the words that kids came up with for the people who helped them were “kind,” “helpful,” “encouraging,” “nice, “dependendable.” Hanzalik added “trustworthy” and “honest.”

He talked about the importance of the kids going to people with those characteristics if they ever need help, “because you want them to help you make good decisions, you want to be safe.”

Hanzalik asked the students to write down, in their DARE workbooks, their own personal “help network” of 10 people they could go to if they ever needed help, encouragement, or advice.

“How do you spell your last name?” one student called out.

It’s good to include “police” on the list, Hanzalik said, “because police are there to protect you and keep you safe.”

Another child said she was writing down the name of her cat.

Hanzalik said that pets are indeed supportive. “Who is always glad to see you at the end of the day, always wags their tail when you come in the door?” he asked. Pets give unconditional love, Hanzalik said, adding, “I’ll take that.”

The students say they are already practicing the skills they have learned. As a course requirement, students write an essay at the end; Hanzalik reads all of them and picks one from each classroom for those students to read aloud at the school’s “DARE graduation” ceremony.

Student Andrew Sommo, who is in Gejay’s class at Westmere, wrote about how the skills he learned helped him decide what to do when his two basketball teams had games scheduled at the same time. He said he applied the DARE decision-making model, with its four steps: “Define” the problem, “assess” it, “respond,” and “evaluate” the response.

Sommo wrote in his essay, “First, I defined my problem and realized I had to make a decision. Then I assessed my problem and saw I had three choices: go to one of the games, go to the other game, or go to half of each game. Then I responded to my problem and decided to go to half of each game. Then I evaluated my response and knew it was a good decision because my decision would benefit my two coaches and me.”

In the Altamont classroom, the students watched a brief video created by the national DARE program, called “Keepin’ It REAL.” The “REAL” is another acronym, for “Refuse,” “Explain,” “Avoid,” “Leave.” The video showed teenagers at parties, saying “no” when offered cigarettes or some type of drug, and offering a variety of explanations as to why they didn’t want to take part; for example, one person said that he just wasn’t into that and another said that he had a game the next day and needed to stay focused. The video also showed people moving to a different area of the party to talk with friends who were not engaging in that behavior, or choosing to leave altogether.

Hanzalik said, “Of course you probably don’t have these situations in elementary school. You may not have them in middle school.”

But it doesn’t have to be about just smoking or drugs, Hanzalik said, adding that it can be about anything that seems unsafe or wrong.

He gave the example, “Should we ride our bikes without our helmets to this place where our parents tell us we’re not supposed to go?”

The kids all cried, “No-o-o-o!”

The kids love the program and are disappointed when it ends, said Gejay of Westmere.

Lilliana Jourdin, another of Gejay’s students, wrote in her essay, that Officer Matt “taught us how to make good choices in the real world, on the playground, and just in general.” She continued, “This is why I also wish we had DARE more than once a week. I also wish that we can do DARE in the middle school but right now that cannot happen.”

Hanzalik will move on to other fifth-grade classrooms in the spring. By year’s end, he and the other DARE teacher, Guilderland Police Officer Patricia Stallmer, will have covered all of the 16 fifth-grade classes in the district.

Gejay said her students at Westmere are all hoping they will see “Officer Matt” at the middle school, which he visits periodically to speak to sixth-grade health classes.

Hazalik said he is happy to see some of the kids at the middle school, and to see some of them wearing the T-shirts they received at the DARE graduation.