Shelly Schick

Senior Andrea Gattone in action, taking the survey.

“77% of students at LHS are alcohol free.” Yes, those results were from the survey all students took on substance abuse two years ago. Today, on February 26, students at LHS took basically the same alcohol/drug survey–but a few differences with different issues that have become more significant over the past year or two, such as electronic cigarettes.

The surveys are made by the Lake County Health Department. Many schools in Lake County give this survey out to their school — Zion, Vernon Hills, Lake Forest, Lake Zurich, Evanston, New Trier, and Niles West all participate in this survey.

According to Mr. Damian Kulikowski, Student Assistance Program Coordinator, the purpose of the survey is to gather information on substance use, self harm, and bullying. It is geared to see what LHS can to do to help students with substance abuse and bullying. For example, they make programs to help these students recover from these issues.

Some students are worried that if they answer honestly to the questions on this test that they will get caught and get in trouble. However according to Mr. Kulikowski, this survey is completely anonymous. Right after the student takes the test, it goes straight into an envelope and is sent to Northern Illinois University. No teacher or administrator looks at it at all. There, they run the scantrons and check for the validity. For example, if it shows that the student picked all “A’s” for the questions or if the student tried to make some sort of picture out of it, the scantron becomes void — that scantron will not be used in the results.

Even though no one can tell for sure if people are being honest with these tests, Mr. Kulikowski thinks that the survey’s results are pretty accurate.

“No one is going to get caught. Why lie about it? No one’s name is on anything,” he said.

Senior Andrea Gattone and a lot of other students agreed that they liked that the survey was a lot shorter this year. Instead of being well over 100 questions, this year it was only about 95 questions. It took about 15 minutes to complete.

Many students including Gattone were confused on one thing in the survey — they did not know what was meant by the “typical student.”

“Is that [the ‘typical student’] the average student? I don’t know if I estimated the ‘typical student’ numbers right,” Gattone said.

The results for this survey come back in March. Will LHS still be “77% alcohol free?” Everyone will have to wait and see.