Following a decrease in funding from grants and state appropriations, the Campus Office of Substance Abuse Prevention turned to student fees to keep students from drinking and taking drugs.
COSAP was denied funding from the Student Fee Review Board for fiscal year 2012, when it requested $16.82 per student. This year it requested the lowest amount of fees of any group for fiscal year 2013, and the organization has made significant progress in lowering drug and alcohol abuse rates among students.
COSAP’s SFRB request for FY 2013 said 44.6% of students in 2001 reported having driven while drunk, a number which dropped to 33% by 2010. Reported underage drinking dropped from 64.4% in 2006 to 61.0% in 2010. COSAP collected this data from the Student Lifestyles Survey, an annual survey of 700-900 students’ alcohol and drug habits.
But the program manager for COSAP John Steiner said adequate funding has been a struggle to maintain since the organization’s inception.
COSAP was founded in 1992 as a response to the federal Drug Free Schools and Communities Act of 1989, which requires any university receiving federal aid to have a policy on drugs and alcohol and a program to prevent substance abuse.
COSAP receives $1 per student in funding from UNM every year. It also received a grant from the Fund for Improvement of Post Secondary Education, but COSAP has not received it for several years.
Steiner said COSAP requested $0.82 per student from the SFRB for FY 2013, a more modest request than COSAP had the year before, but the SFRB recommended it be funded at $0.84 per student.
Steiner said any money helps students.
“I think they gave us a vote of confidence because we had a very modest proposal and we had concrete ideas on how to spend the money.”
COSAP has $5,000 to put toward expenses, and still has $5,000 remaining from a NCAA CHOICES grant of $30,000 awarded three years ago. It still has about $32,000 left from a $162,000 state block grant distributed among a coalition of five New Mexico universities this year.
SFRB Chair Katie Richardson said although she can’t speak for the entire board, she believes COSAP was denied funding for FY 2012 to prevent a student fee increase. Richardson is one of two current SFRB members who were on the SFRB last year.
In previous years, COSAP had a program called “Designated Drivers Do It for Their Friends,” a service that offered incentives for students who choose to be designated drivers. Bartenders signed off cards that would verify the student’s sobriety and designated driver status. These cards were redeemed for prizes, but the program was discontinued because of a lack of funding. The SFRB also recommended a $5,000 one-time funding allocation for FY 2013 so COSAP could restart the program.
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“The board thought it would be great as a pilot program to support safe driving habits,” Richardson said.
Steiner said with the help of the small amount of student fees, COSAP will be able to significantly improve its work at UNM.
“The main goal of COSAP is to educate students on making smarter choices when drinking in order to reduce the negative effects that alcohol can cause,” Steiner said. “Abstinence is not our thrust; we want to let students be students.”
