Penn State recently received funding to participate in the PROmoting School-community-university Partnerships to Enhance Resilience (PROSPER) project, which will help communities prevent and handle substance abuse and behavioral problems among youth.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse gave a $9.9 million federal grant to the College of Health and Human Development.

Over a five-year period, Penn State and Iowa State University will be collaborating on the project that will involve 28 school districts and 10,000 students.

Janet Welsh of the Prevention Research Center said the project is designed to reduce the risk of substance abuse.

"It will work to facilitate parent-child communication and understanding in the community," she said.

During the first year, Welsh said the focus will be on the family.

"Parents can attend a seven-week session where they will be given information about how to monitor behavior and clarify attitudes about substance abuse," she said.

The second year will focus on the students. Those running the project will work to educate students about peer pressure, social skills and information on substance abuse, Welsh said.

Penn State had researched the effective methods of prevention, but the PROSPER project itself will be a research study.

The randomized study will pair seven intervention school districts with seven control schools.

"The control schools will receive nothing for the first three years and they will be matched with an intervention school in the same county to see the effects of the program," said Brian Bumbarger, spokesman for the Prevention Research Center.

The schools were determined according to population size and the percentage of students who receive free lunch.

Bumbarger said they tried to find relatively small schools in rural and suburban areas with a high percentage of students who received free lunch and then tried to match those demographics with another school in the area.

PROSPER will work with 14 school districts in Pennsylvania, Bumbarger said.

The project will use the already-established cooperative extension program to transfer knowledge between the university and communities.

"The cooperative extension has a long history in Pennsylvania because it has been used between the agricultural department and the community," he said.

"It has a very good reputation and this is a new way of utilizing the program.

He said the cooperative extension has previously only been used in the agricultural and scientific departments, but the Prevention Research Center hopes to bring already-researched effective ways of substance abuse prevention into the community.

"The PROSPER project will first develop teams of service agencies and then provide them with effective programs to bring into their community," Bumbarger said.