Sports, arts and music are the focus of a substance use prevention program out of Franklin County, but not lectures about drugs and alcohol.

As our June Lefler reports, the county has adopted an overseas model that is showing some results at home.

At Kentucky Dance Academy, students rehearse for The Nutcracker.

Amanda White's runs the dance studio that eighth grader Emery Culp has attended for years.

I love Katie.

I've known Miss Amanda forever.

Like, I just think it's like a really supportive environment.

Cobb's family pays for classes and pointe shoes with the help of the Yes card.

It's a voucher worth a few hundred dollars that every middle schooler in Franklin County gets.

Students can use it for bands, sports, arts and dance.

It's just something I can do, like every day.

And I love the people I dance with.

I've known them for like a really long time, and a lot of my friends do dance and it's just like athletic and fun and I love my pointe shoes.

Keeping kids excited, busy, and under adult supervision is exactly the point of the Jessie's program.

It's a drug and alcohol prevention program that doesn't have to harp on drugs and alcohol.

Kids need to know that drugs are dangerous.

They need to have information.

What our goal is, make it so that they're never even given that choice, that they're in environments where they're too busy being active and being engaged in things that they love and so are their peers.

Since 2020, that theory has been tested with countywide surveys.

Those surveys show that Franklin County kids that engage in sports and arts at least once a week are less likely to drink or use drugs.

And since this card has been around, more kids are getting involved.

So we know that it makes a difference for them just having somewhere safe, constructive and fun to be when school is out.

Amelia Berry adapted her program from the Icelandic model named after the country through a nationwide effort started in the 1990s.

Frequent teen drinking plummeted over the course of 20 years.

Communities all over the world are trying to replicate those results.

It's a combination of having fresh local data from from kids about what's happening in their lives and then sharing that out really quickly and widely and in accessible ways to the people who are closest to the kids and who can actually do something about it, whether that's parents, teachers or local government.

And what we've found is that when we share this data, people really pay attention because they care about these children.

These are our children.

Iceland's adults rallied to make a difference for their kids.

They even put in place a national curfew for teens that might go too far for Frankfort.

But Berry says any community that goes down this path can decide what changes work for them.

The Yes card made a lot of sense for us here because we have a lot of a lot of activities that are available and a lot of them have fees attached to them.

I can imagine in a rural community you may not be able to have a yes card because there would be nowhere to spend that money.

But that doesn't mean that you can't.

Not only that, you can't implement the Icelandic prevention model, but that you can't work on getting kids involved in after school activities.

It's just going to look.

Different in Frankfurt.

The community that's looking out for its kids will get to enjoy some of their performances this holiday season.

For Kentucky Edition, I'm June Leffler.

Thank you much, June.

A middle schoolers aren't the only ones that get a yes card, thanks to funding from the state's Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission.

K through 12th graders with certain risk factors can also get a card.

And we'll have more on the commission's prevention work and tomorrow's Kentucky edition.