New Jersey Peer to Peer will sponsor the eighth annual “Middle School Day of Learning” Dec. 2 at the Hyatt Regency in New Brunswick.
This year’s program, “Powerful Connections,” will bring together more than 500 middle school students and their adult mentors for a day of learning about how they can conduct outreach activities around substance abuse prevention in their schools and communities.
Groups of student leaders will conduct interactive workshops for their peers, including “Smoking: Don’t Get Sucked In,” “Drugs are Ugly and Uncool,” “Designer Drugs and Rave Drugs,” “What’s Wrong with Inhalants?” and “The Media and Substance Abuse.”
There will also be Family Night workshops focusing on improving parent-teen communications, as well as a presentation by Ty Sells, a motivational speaker from Youth to Youth International. Sells’ workshop, “The Power of Acceptance,” is a humorous discussion designed to challenge students to examine the way they treat others who are “different” from them and to explore the consequences of making decisions based on what’s “cool.”
Three schools from Monmouth County plan to participate in the program: Clifton T. Barkalow Middle School, Freehold Township; Choices School, Tinton Falls; and Millstone Township Middle School, Clarksburg section of Millstone.