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The University of Maine played host Friday to a meeting of schools throughout Maine concerned with underage and binge drinking on and around their campuses.
UMaine is one of the 17 partner schools working with the state Office of Substance Abuse on a statewide initiative to implement five strategies to reduce alcohol abuse: limiting alcohol availability, restricting marketing and promotion of alcohol, increasing enforcement of laws and policies, offering alcohol-free social and recreational options, and creating healthful environments.
A recent survey geared mostly toward first-year students showed that “UMaine is right in line with other schools when it comes to alcohol use,” according to Lauri Sidelko, UMaine’s director of Substance Abuse Services.
“Last year the meeting was mostly about organizing, and now we are bringing everything together,” Sidelko said.
The Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention, part of the U.S. Department of Education, worked with the state to put the meeting together. Each school was allowed to bring any campus group its representatives felt could bring an interesting perspective. UMaine invited ADAPT, Sidelko said, which is a student organization that works for the prevention of alcohol and drug abuse.
Andrea Gifford, assistant to the dean of students, said the meeting was “eye-opening.” Gifford and Sidelko are co-coordinators of a grant from the Department of Education to prevent high-risk drinking.
Meeting participants reviewed grant applications and broke into individual groups, focusing on topics, such as enforcement of drinking laws and off-campus drinking among college students, Gifford said.
“It’s amazing to hear that even though institutions can be so different in size, that they still face the same issues as larger institutions,” Gifford said. “Being one of the bigger schools, [smaller schools] usually look to us for guidance.”
Gifford said she also learned about the current and future measures being implemented to prevent high-risk drinking.
“Judicial Affairs has been working with local bars, like Ushuaia, and working with other merchants and landlords to help prevent high-risk drinking,” she said.
A plan is being considered to make it possible for Orono police to bill landlords when they respond to noise violations associated with large gatherings, Gifford said. Other ideas for preventing high-risk drinking involve raising money or applying for grant funds to pay off-campus police to take turns patrolling on campus.
“A lot of schools can’t afford to have an actual on-campus public safety like we do,” Gifford said.
Some smaller towns also do not have the funding to hire more police officers to control the influx of students in college towns. Some grant money could go toward hiring extra police officers to take the time to go into bars and check IDs.
A new development that affects local merchants is an online training course that requires a passing grade for merchants who lose their liquor license and want to get the license back.
“It normally costs $15, so if any merchants want to test their skills now and avoid losing their license, I suggest they do it now during the free trial period,” Gifford said.
Although no merchants were invited to attend the meeting, it’s not “UMaine versus the merchants,” Gifford said. The meeting’s participants are simply trying to figure out ways to work with everyone to thwart high-risk drinking, she said.
“I am most impressed by the level of commitment,” Gifford said.
Overall, Gifford said the meeting “was very beneficial, goals were established and everyone came away with a specific thing to do before the next meeting.”
The meeting’s participants have no glorified conceptions about ending all college drinking, Gifford said.
“What we want to do is still very realistic, we would just like to eliminate underage, high-risk drinking,” she said.
