Smail receives lifetime D.A.R.E. award
SUBMITTED PHOTO
Maryville Public Safety Sgt. Rick Smail, center, stands flanked by MPS Director Keith Wood, left, and Deputy Director Ron Christian after accepting the Lifetime Achievement Award Thursday from the Missouri D.A.R.E. Officers Association. In addition to being honored for 25 years of service to the anti-drug abuse education program, Smail was also installed as the association’s vice president for the coming year.
Sgt. Rick Smail, a 27-year law enforcement veteran with the Maryville Department of Public Safety, has been honored with the Missouri D.A.R.E. Officers Association Lifetime Achievement Award.
In the company of friends, family and Maryville police colleagues, Smail accepted the award Thursday in Kansas City during the MDOA’s annual banquet. He was also named the organization’s vice president for the coming year.
“It goes beyond words,” Smail said of his reaction to receiving the award. “I’m astounded. It’s something I never dreamed that I would get.”
Smail became one of the department’s two original D.A.R.E. instructors in 1990, and he remains the only MPS officer who has been with the program, largely targeted at children attending grade school and middle school, from the beginning.
Drug Abuse Resistance Education is a substance abuse education program that seeks to prevent the illegal or irresponsible use of drugs and alcohol by young people. It was founded in Los Angeles in 1983 by ex-Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates and the Los Angeles Unified School District as part of the federally backed “War on Drugs.”
Praising Smail for his commitment to D.A.R.E., Maryville Public Safety Director Keith Wood quoted an excerpt from the sergeant’s 1991 performance evaluation.
“He is to be commended for the effort he is putting forth as a DARE instructor,” the evaluation stated in part. “The positive effects that his efforts and this program will have on the department and the community will be long-lasting.”
“Who could have guessed how prophetic this would be some 25 years later?” Wood said.
Smail was sworn in as a Maryville police officer in 1988 and promoted to Sergeant in 1992. In addition to completing the core (sixth grade) D.A.R.E. instructor program at the outset of his career, he later qualified to teach auxiliary D.A.R.E curriculums tailored for young children, high school students and parents.
These days Smail is best known for his D.A.R.E. work with sixth graders and children attending kindergarten through fourth grade at Eugene Field Elementary School, Maryville Middle School, St. Gregory’s School and the Horace Mann Laboratory School at Northwest Missouri State University.
This year’s 25th annual D.A.R.E, graduation ceremony marked Smail’s involvement with more than 3,100 sixth graders who have completed the program during his quarter-century of service.
Wood said that Smail maintains personal relationships with many of his former D.A.R.E. students, and that virtually every young person in the community knows the tall, broad-shouldered sergeant by name.
In more than a few cases, Smail is now offering D.A.R.E. instruction to the children of children he worked with 25 years ago.
Though the stated purpose of D.A.R.E. is to reduce the amount of drug and alcohol abuse among young people, Smail said the program’s greatest benefit may be in fostering better relationships between police officers and the children who will become tomorrow’s young adults.
“It really helps with the educational process and raising our kids,” he said. “If they are no longer afraid of cops, they’ll come to us. They not only get the drug education message, but they find that we are there to help them, and that it’s not like what they’ve seen on TV.”
While psychologists, scholars and public health officials have long debated the effectiveness of D.A.R.E., Smail said he believes the program is worthwhile. At the very least, he said, D.A.R.E. pushes back the age at which some young people take their first drink or light up their first marijuana cigarette.
“It’s a proven fact that the older a kid is when they start drinking, the less chance there is of them becoming an alcoholic,” he said. “People are more susceptible when they are younger.”
Smail added that the D.A.R.E. program acquaints children with the consequences of substance abuse as well as the notion that law enforcement is in their corner.
“Having a police officer in the classroom breaks down that barrier,” he said. “It helps them realize that we’re there to help them, and shows that we are compassionate enough to care — that we want to keep them from making those mistakes.
“D.A.R.E. is the school, police and parents working together. If the three sides of that triangle stay together we have fewer problems in our society.”
Besides teaching the D.A.R.E. curriculum, Smail is also responsible for coordinating various activities, such as field trips to Worlds of Fun, Peewee Basketball tournaments, and bowling and movie nights. He also organizes the annual D.A.R.E. dinner and auction that brings in $12,000 or more a year in support of the program.
On other fronts, Smail supervises the MPS Mozingo Lake patrol, acts as the department’s special events coordinator, and manages special enforcement activities such as bar patrol and alcohol sales compliance checks.
In civic life, Smail is active, along with his wife, Sheila, in the Maryville Optimist Club and belongs to the local chapter of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s service group.
Adds police chief Wood: “He has performed all of this faithfully while fulfilling his more important full-time jobs of husband, father, grandfather and son.”
