Free online alcohol safety education for high school students in Florida, Texas, and New York

The Youth Alcohol Awareness and Education Foundation, established by Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, announced the continuation of its AlcoholEdu for High School programme for the 2024-2025 academic year in the USA. 

The online alcohol safety education resource will be available at no cost for high schools in select counties across Florida, Texas, and New York.

AlcoholEdu for High School, developed by EVERFI from Blackbaud, is a 90-minute interactive course designed to educate high school students about alcohol through science-based content and engaging exercises. 

The programme covers five key areas: Knowing the Basics, Knowing Your Influences, Brain and Body, Smart Decisions, and Future Ready. It aims to shift perceptions, motivate behavioural change, and support healthier decisions regarding alcohol.

In the 2023-2024 school year, the programme showed significant results, with students displaying a 25% increase in knowledge, as assessment scores improved from 64% to 89%. Since its launch in 2017, the programme has reached over 41,000 students from more than 289 high schools, totalling nearly 34,000 hours of learning.

Students have reported positive experiences with the programme. A student from Florida shared, “As an individual, I do not plan on drinking, but now if I am in the vicinity of a person who has been I will be prepared with the right course of action to take. I liked the example of the positive peer pressure of, ‘not drinking till we’re both of legal age’. It was a refreshing example of what is usually a stiff topic for some.”

Educators also provided positive feedback, with 88% stating it was interesting for their students, 83% agreeing it enhanced their teaching material, and 100% giving it a quality rating of “Good” or better. One educator noted, “This is a great source and a different way of getting the information other than the teacher telling them.”

The EVERFI programme was initially launched in South Florida in 2017, expanded to Dallas in 2019, and further into New York in 2020. 

For the 2024-2025 school year, it will continue to be available in Broward and Miami-Dade counties in Florida; Collin, Dallas, Denton, and Tarrant counties in Texas; and Bronx, Kings, Nassau, New York, Queens, and Richmond counties in New York.