Most middle school coordinators have multiple responsibilities and seemingly endless possibilities for action and reform. Sometimes it is hard to know where to start. A good way to get your bearings, as well as ensure that your prevention planning is on track and truly responsive to student needs, is to learn as much as you can about your students and your community.

As you learned during the five-day core training, this exploration is called a needs assessment. The success of your prevention efforts depends on the ability of your schools and districts to identify and prioritize local needs and select research-based programs to meet those needs.

What Is a Needs Assessment?

As you may recall, a needs assessment is a multistep process of identifying issues, collecting information, and drawing conclusions about the primary drug- and violence-related problems facing young people in your schools and communities so that you can effectively tailor prevention activities to your local circumstances. A formal needs assessment will allow you to uncover important issues and trends in your youth populations that would be difficult to detect as a casual observer.

Why Conduct a Needs Assessment?

Many of you may have worked in your schools and communities for some time and have a good sense of what is going on. Concerned about limited time and resources, and eager to move on to program selection and implementation, you may be tempted to skip over the assessment process and rely on your personal experiences to inform program selection. Resist those impulses! Needs assessment is a critical step in prevention planning, and failing to complete a thorough assessment could ultimately undermine the effectiveness of your prevention initiative. Several important reasons to conduct a needs assessment are described below.

• To document evidence of need. Let's say that parents in your community are very concerned about the use of psychedelics, cocaine, or heroin, but your needs assessment shows that more young people are using tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana. Your argument for selecting a prevention program that addresses smoking will be much more compelling if you can back it up with data.

• To highlight key issues that are particular problems in your community or district, and target prevention efforts to those at risk. You may find out that underage drinking rates are higher in your community than in similar locales or in the state as a whole, or that more students in your community than in other locales begin using alcohol in the sixth grade.

• To identify potential barriers to implementing research-based programs. You may discover, for example, that your superintendent is committed to continued implementation of a particular prevention program that is not based on research, but which has been part of the school system's curriculum for many years

• To determine if your community is ready to address a given problem. For example, you may learn that parents in the community are unwilling to acknowledge that substance abuse or violence is a problem among their children. If this is the case, you will need to spend time educating parents, as well as their children, if your program is to succeed.

• To promote community buy-in to your prevention initiative. The school and community members you meet and connect with throughout the assessment process are your future partners in prevention. Engaging people in the process of collecting information about your community's needs will motivate and better prepare them to make decisions about which prevention strategies or programs should be selected to meet those needs.

• As a baseline for evaluation. Assessment data lets you track behavior change over time and monitor the impact of your prevention efforts.

• To mobilize the community. Carefully presented assessment data can be used to heighten awareness among community members of the extent and types of drug- and violence-related problems facing local youth. Local data, in particular, can be a powerful tool for mobilizing your community to address problems (perhaps even more effective than similar data about state or national populations.) Community members with a clear understanding of your findings are more likely to actively support and participate in prevention activities.

The Value of Existing Data

Several tools are at your disposal for assessing local needs, including surveys, focus groups, and key informant interviews. Yet, the first step in conducting a needs assessment is not to collect new data, but to carefully review existing data that have already been collected by others. All schools, for example, collect data on truancy, drop-out rates, drug suspensions, and incidents of violence. Many local agencies collect data and maintain records to better understand their clientele and to document and evaluate the services they provide. State and federal departments also routinely conduct assessments of the well-being of their residents and the general population.

Once you have collected information from multiple sources at the local, state, and national levels, you may find that you have all the information you need to shape your prevention initiative. If you discover any gaps in your understanding of local needs, then your review of existing information can guide any additional data collection efforts that may be required to identify appropriate research-based prevention programs and strategies. (For a detailed discussion of the relative advantages and disadvantages of data collection methods, visit Section 4 of the MSC Training Manual Assessing Local Needs and Assets in Your School and Community.)