Faribault County sticks out, and not necessarily in a good way, and the Faribault County Board of Commissioners was informed of that at their meeting on Friday, Feb. 5.

According to Bob Toland, school resource officer for the Southern Plains Education Cooperative and a volunteer for the Faricares Coalition (short for Faribault County Cares), Faribault County has a higher alcohol abuse rate in teenagers than other young adults in the entire state of Minnesota.

And, Faricares wants to put an end to that.

The Faricares Coalition is a group of citizens comprised of both Blue Earth Area and United South Central school districts, as well as members from Southern Plains Education Cooperative, United Hospital District and many other community members and civic groups to improve the county as a whole.

Toland says the group is in the process of writing a grant with the intentions of bringing in a coordinator to specifically work with the concerns surrounding teenage alcohol abuse.

He addressed this issue to the commissioners in hopes they would support what the Faricares Coalition is trying to achieve.

“There’s a survey that’s done every three years or so in the schools and the kids themselves fill it out. We use the data from those surveys to see positive or negative trends in our community,” says Toland. “And we have found that Faribault County is considerably higher than the norm in the state of Minnesota in regards to youth alcohol abuse.”

Families were also surveyed around Faribault County to see if parents would be for or against bringing in a professional coordinator to address the issues rising in the county, and parents agreed. They want help.

The grant is through the Minnesota Department of Human Services, Alcohol and Drug Abuse Division and states “the objective is to reduce substance abuse and related problems within Minnesota through utilization of a collective impact model (multiple agencies and sectors of a community working together toward a common goal) to implement community-level interventions to delay and reduce youth alcohol use through community-based Planning and Implementation grants.”

Which is right up Faricare’s alley.

The hope, according to Toland, is to stop the cycle of substance abuse before adulthood, which has the potential to reduce repeat offenders in the judicial system as well as many other benefits.

He says if the grant is received, a full time coordinator will be hired to work within the school districts and communities to reduce teenage alcohol and narcotic abuse.

The grant is a multi-year, renewable grant for the Faribault County communities, which offers enough money for the stipend of a full-time professional coordinator and possibly a part-time secretary, somewhere around $120,000 a year.

“If there’s anything the board of commissioners can do to help the youth of Faribault County, I think we are obligated to do that,” said commissioner Bill Groskreutz.

“It is so scary to hear that our county is so out of whack from our neighboring counties,” said commissioner Tom Loveall.

Toland says there is still a lot to accomplish with writing the grant, but says he is confident Faribault County would be a good fit for the grant’s proposed programming.