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Arts & Entertainment

Saturday night 101

Students from Hall and Conard High are presenting a series of skits focusing on the issues of binge drinking among West Hartford teens. The skits will portray scenarios the students and their peers encounter.

The students are a part of  The Community Action Research Team, CART, is a group of West Hartford youth who came together through a project of the Institute for Community Research (ICR) of Hartford, CT.  ICR is a not-for-profit institute that conducts community-based research to reduce inequities, promote positive changes in public health and education, and foster cultural conservation and development.  The Institute has been collaborating with the West Hartford Substance Abuse Commission on issues related to underage drinking for the past two years.

            During the 2009-2010 school year students from Hall and Conard High engaged in a Participatory Action Research program that involved constructing a research model, designing data collection instruments, collecting and analyzing data on attitudes and behaviors around teen drinking among West Hartford youth gathered through surveys and in-depth interviews.   During the current school year, the youth transformed their findings into two interactive theater scenes that will be performed for the public. The scenes were developed in collaboration with Hartbeat Ensemble of Hartford, CT, who trained our youth in scene writing, performance, and in the techniques of Forum Theater.  These scenes form part of a larger intervention being implemented in town to address one of the key findings, which is the pervasiveness and perceived normalcy of binge drinking among West Hartford teens.

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