AHS students speak to Gov. DeWine about drug prevention efforts

On November 26th, a group of Anderson High School students met with Ohio Governor Mike DeWine to discuss their role in the school’s drug prevention efforts. The event, which was held in Norwood, also included Ohio’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Paola DeMaria, Senator Rob Portman, Senator Cecil Thomas and members of the governor’s cabinet.

The Anderson students are part of the school’s Student Athlete Leadership Team (SALT) and recently presented to students at Nagel Middle School about why drug prevention is extremely important.

“As student athletes, we have a special opportunity to talk to the middle school students and elementary school students who might see us as at our sports camps or in the community” said AHS junior Sammie Engel. “If they see us out making the right choice, it’s really important.”

“It’s cool to stay on your own path and give back to other kids to make sure they go down a similar path that you went down,” said senior Bennett Snyder.

During Tuesday’s event, the students participated in various tabletop exercises and spoke directly to Governor DeWine about what makes Anderson successful in its drug prevention work.  

“We talked about what makes AHS different than other schools here and a lot of it came back to that ‘AHS is family’ mindset. We feel that we’re so trusted and loved in our school. If we ever have a problem, they asked us who we could go to. Most of the time we said teachers because we feel that each and every student has a teacher in our school that they can talk to,” said Snyder.  

Forest Hills School District provides drug prevention programming in each of its nine schools.