The Life Skills Training (LST) Middle School Program is a classroom-based substance abuse prevention curriculum designed to help students develop essential life skills and resist peer pressure related to substance use and other risky behaviors.
Botvin LifeSkills Training at Family Services of NW PA focuses on three main areas:
- Personal Self-Management Skills
- Social Skills
- Drug Resistance Skills
LifeSkills Training is designed to promote mental health and positive youth development. It also helps students resist drug, alcohol, and tobacco use, and supports the reduction of violence and other high-risk behaviors.
As part of the former Opioid Misuse Prevention Project, all middle school health teachers in Erie's Public School were trained to deliver the LifeSkills Training curriculum to all middle school students.
Program Structure:
LifeSkills Training is designed to be taught to students in grades 6-9 in sequence over three years. The curriculum is intended to be taught sequentially to build on skills learned in the previous levels. The first year of the program has 15 class sessions (plus 3 optional violence prevention sessions), the second year contains 10 sessions (plus 2 optional violence prevention sessions), and the third year consists of 5 sessions (plus 4 optional violence prevention sessions).
The curriculum is taught in 45-50-minute class sessions on either an intensive schedule (multiple times per week) until the program is complete, or on a more extended schedule (once a week).
