As the mothers of former and current Lawrence High School students, Linda Keeler, Donna Olson and Karen Frick have dealt with the teenage drinking before.

And they know that challenges remain.

“We’ve been in the trenches and learned a few things — but you have to stay vigilant,” Frick said.

Vigilance against the dangers of underage drinking was why the three mothers joined other parents of Lawrence High School students at a panel discussion on the topic Thursday night.

Dozens of people came to the LHS auditorium to hear law enforcement officials, school administrators and students talk about the realities of teenage drug and alcohol abuse — and what parents can do about them.

The discussion, sponsored by the LHS Parent Teacher Organization, was held to bring attention to the issue as prom season approaches.

The keynote speaker at the presentation was Overland Park Municipal Court Judge Karen Arnold-Burger, who is part of a Johnson County program called “A Wrong of Passage,” whose purpose is to educate parents about underage drinking.

“I see person after person in front of me in the courts,” Arnold-Burger said. “And when I read their prior histories, I see that so many of them started drinking at a very early age, oftentimes at the acquiescence and acceptance of their parents.”

A local problem

Lawrence High School seniors Matt Kirby, foreground left, and Jami Powell, respond to questions during a forum on underage drinking. The forum Thursday was sponsored by the Lion's Pride Parent Teacher Organization and included a panel of the two students, educators, administrators and experts on teen alcohol abuse.

There’s no shortage of underage drinking in Douglas County. In a 2004 survey by the Greenbush Institute, about a third of local students said they’d had at least one alcoholic drink in the past 30 days — and two-thirds of high school seniors had been drinking during the past month. Among sixth-graders, the number was closer to 10 percent.

The survey also suggested that 19.2 percent of Douglas County students had been binge drinking — five or more alcoholic drinks in a row — during the previous two weeks. That’s down from 25 percent in 1995, but higher than the state average of 17 percent, a concern to authorities.

“Some of the drinking habits these days — with the binge drinking — may be different than what (parents) experienced” during their high school years, said Jen Jordan, director of the Regional Prevention Center in Douglas County. “They’re using a lot earlier than their parents did, at an earlier age.”

That doesn’t even count the 18- to 20-year-olds who come to Kansas and Haskell Indian Nations universities too young to drink legally but old enough to want a taste of adult freedoms.

“Because Lawrence is a college town, there’s a large segment of people who are underage and there’s a large problem with underage drinking,” said Tom Groneman, director of Alcohol Beverage Control in Kansas.

The problem for adolescents, Jordan said, is that their bodies can’t handle it.

6News video: Underage drinking forum targets parents (02-24-05) On the Street: How young is too young for someone to start drinking alcohol?

“Especially in these adolescent years, their bodies are changing and their brains are developing,” she said. “Introducing alcohol at this time can affect their education — alcohol affects a child’s brain differently than it does an adult’s brain.”

Solutions difficult to find

But just how to address the problem in Lawrence continues to be an elusive issue.

Several of the parents at the discussion were astonished to hear the student representatives estimate that 50 percent of students at LHS dances arrived under the influence of alcohol. The revelation caused a few of the people in the crowd to call for breathalyzers to be placed at the doors of school dances.

While the dance issue continued to confound some of the attendees, Arnold-Burger did have some practical advice for parents in weekend-to-weekend situations.

One of the best things parents can do to prevent their children from drinking, she said, is to make sure that the teens are where they say they are.

“I’ve called other parents before and said, ‘My son or daughter has been invited to a party, and I just want to make sure that there is a party there, and that there is going to be an adult there, and there isn’t going to be any alcohol served,” she said.

And perhaps most importantly, Arnold-Burger said, parents need to make sure they clearly communicated to their children that they disapprove of underage drinking.

“Even though your teenager will tell you and demonstrate that they hate to be around you and you are the stupidest person on the planet, they really are listening to you,” she said.