How It Works
High school counselors and teachers recommend "role model" students, and PEERS application process screens these students to find out who are committed to living up to the challenge of being a leader: making good grades and avoiding all risky behavior including alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and premarital sexual activity. These exemplary students are trained by adult coordinators to present the Peers Educating Peers about Positive Values© (PEP) curriculum. Small groups of four to six peer mentors teach PEP’s lessons. Most often, each group of volunteers only presents one lesson and misses one day of school per semester. This is credited to them as community service and is an excused absence. The ratio is approximately 12-15 peer mentors for 125 program participants. These teens present PEERS informative, engaging, interactive program to middle school and high school students in their health or physical education classes.
PEERS also collaborates with youth-serving, community-based organizations that have after school and/or summer programs, and its peer mentors present its lessons in either English or Spanish.
Without preaching or moral judgments, PEERS mentors teach its scripted, research-based and fully referenced lessons on the following topics:
Middle School
- Media Influences
- Teen Pregnancy and Parenthood
- Assertiveness Techniques
- Friendship and Peer Pressure
- Sexually Transmitted Diseases
- Linking Drugs to Sex
- What Love Really Is
- Healthy Relationships
- Learning to Love
High School
- Dating and Other Risky Behavior
- STD: The Choice Is Yours
- Love That Lasts a Lifetime
Nineteen percent of PEERS mentors and program participants are minority populations. PEERS’ collaboration with the Indiana Family and Consumer Science Education Association is providing healthy relationships, abstinence and marriage education resources to high school family and consumer science teachers.
