Choices

The Council on Recovery's Choices program is a comprehensive, multiple high-risk behavior prevention and intervention program tailored to meet each school's unique needs. The program utilizes evidence-based methods for reducing high-risk behavior by working directly with school culture and creating student, parent, faculty action groups to achieve positive outcomes. By addressing the entire school-specific system, Choices delivers specialized programming to universal, selective, and indicated target audiences within each school through close interaction between faculty, parents, and students.

The Choices program model can be adapted to meet the prevention needs of any school. Choices utilizes a novel prevention approach that builds students’ executive functioning skills while simultaneously targeting a variety of high-risk behaviors that students often struggle with.

Schools also have the option to integrate a part-time or full-time Choices Counselor on campus who can provide groups for high-risk students and conduct individual and family therapy. These Counselors can also provide case management and other services as needed.

As a long-term approach, Choices emphasizes skills training and relationship building over a 4-year cohort design, creating a program tailored to the individual school's culture. Programming can be created to be developmentally appropriate for elementary, middle, and high school levels.

Schools that have implemented Choices have shown consistent and sustained decreases in reported high-risk behaviors. To learn more, read this comprehensive review of the Choices program and its effectiveness published in the Journal of Addiction.