Coalition Conducts First Responsible Beverage and Service Sales Trainings, Compliance Checks

The Osage Nation Prevention Program identified their tribal community in Pawhuska, Okla. as a small town with a huge underage drinking problem. So, they spent the summer implementing a strategy to train the nine businesses in their city that hold a liquor license.

The Drug-Free Communities grantees sponsored three, voluntary Responsible Beverage and Service Sales trainings in June. The training is part of a pilot study to evaluate the effectiveness of the RBSS curriculum in their area.

Retired police chief and experienced underage drinking expert Ernie Tye of the PaNOK Area Prevention Resource Center in Stillwater facilitated the sessions.

“We owe our success to Ernie,” Patti Shook, Director of Prevention Programs for the Osage Nation said. Business received a personal invitation to the trainings from law enforcement and prevention specialists.

The Responsible Beverage Service and Sales Training provides clerks, servers, and managers with the knowledge and skills to sell and serve alcoholic beverages safely, responsibly, and legally. The goal of the free training is to ensure that expectations, liabilities and legal responsibilities are communicated to all licensees and their employees.

In an effort to reduce underage drinking as well as ensure that these establishments are abiding by the law and not selling alcohol to anyone younger than 21, the prevention program will be assisting the Pawhuska Police Department in conducting compliance checks during the next six months.

Of the nine establishments in Pawhuska that hold a liquor/beverage license, only four were represented at the RBSS trainings, Shook said. Reaching out to the rest of the businesses is no small feat, as their area is 2,281 square miles, but Shook feels confident that all the retailers will eventually cooperate with the coalition.

“We don’t want the compliance checks to be a ‘hey, we gotcha’ kind of operation. We want to work with our businesses for everyone’s benefit,” Shook said.

The coalition’s project surveys concluded that the majority of those who attended the RBSS trainings reported the most valuable portion of the training was learning how to identify a fake I.D. The PaNOK Area Prevention Resource Center will be providing handheld flashlights that highlight the safeguards placed in Oklahoma driver’s licenses to every person who attended the trainings. In addition, the Osage Nation Prevention Program will be providing a U.S. Drivers License Reference Guide to every establishment in Osage County that holds a liquor/beverage license. These guides can aide anyone who might not be familiar with a drivers license from a state other than Oklahoma.

Although the coalition wants to train every town in Osage County in RBSS as well as continue the compliance checks, this capital of the Osage Nation has the social norm challenge that most non-Native American communities have—the infamous “rite of passage” argument.

The coalition’s project coordinator, Daisy Spicer, said, “It’s a generational change, but we feel that if we give the youth the knowledge to make the right decisions while, at the same time, educate the adults who might provide the alcohol, we will reduce underage drinking.”

The coalition trains youth mentors from schools in their county in their prevention efforts. A project the youth will lead this school year will be conducting “reality parties” where the students stage an underage drinking party drama for adults and community members” in the hopes of eventually passing a social host ordinance for each town in their county.