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\u201cThe prevention monitor program started in Fall of 2020,\u201d began Cannon Brawley, the Program Coordinator for the Weakley County Prevention Coalition (WCPC) based in Martin, Tennessee.<\/strong> \u201cCourtney, WCPC\u2019s Director, was writing for a grant and trying to find a way to spend $10,000. As she was coming up with ideas, I passed by a TV at the University of Tennessee at Martin (UTM) that was displaying a static slide. It got me thinking, wouldn\u2019t it be great to have a slideshow playing with information about prevention? So, I pitched the idea to Courtney and decided to call it the Prevention Monitor Program. She wrote that into the grant we were applying for, and we got it, and that was one of the main pieces they said they wanted to see the results of how it turned out.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI began by talking to all of the school principals, and they really loved the idea. Now, it\u2019s in all the middle and high schools in the area, as well as the Martin Enrichment Academy, which is an after-school program for kids in need sponsored by our fiscal agent, the Martin Housing Authority. Currently we are working on two more: the Stewart Center, which is a community resource center, and I\u2019m also working on putting up a kiosk in Martin\u2019s new public library when it opens.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cFor a while, I ran the Prevention Screen Program on flash drives. I\u2019d stop by the schools biweekly to update the slides, but to complete the loop where I\u2019d visit every middle and high school in the area, it was almost a four-hour process to update them all. I was like, this program is amazing, but it takes up your whole day, which is why we needed to switch to instant streaming. However, all these companies that offer that service were super expensive, and I didn\u2019t want to ask the state to pay the ridiculous subscription fees, where the most inexpensive option for streaming to nine monitors would be $1,000 per month.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cEventually, I found this streaming provider that left their YouTube employee tutorial videos public, so I taught myself how to set the screens up so that they would turn on at a certain time of day, and by using an Amazon fire stick and Amazon photos, I could livestream picture slideshows. These are all run from a cloud. Each monitor has their own dedicated album, so there are albums called, Martin Middle School, Martin High School, Dresden Middle School, Dresden High School. I can instantly take one picture out of a slideshow and put another one in, and the other albums aren\u2019t affected. I can do school-specific messages and control it from any device, anywhere. All you need is an Amazon Prime Account. It\u2019s super easy to work with and super simple. You can\u2019t ask for better compared to how much people will pay for it.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cCurrently, we have nine prevention monitors. They are 54\u201d flatscreens, which run for about $250 to $300. The firesticks were purchased refurbished off of Amazon, and they work perfectly and cost only $20 each. If you buy them in bulk, that price can go down as well. We typically place these screens in the school lobby or the cafeteria.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cDresden Middle School\u2019s principal loves this program. He says every time there\u2019s a basketball game, everyone has to go through the lobby to get to the gym, and he\u2019ll see people stop to read the screens because of the eye-catching graphics. We use graphics from the CDC, SAMHSA, CADCA, the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and the Tennessee Department of Health. We especially have infographics that focus on alcohol, tobacco and social norms campaigns. We also have mental health awareness slides, which we partnered with the Tennessee Suicide Prevention Network on for, and we\u2019ve partnered with the Tennessee Department of Health for slides on Covid-19 safety and wearing masks, things like that.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cHow I get principals to really love this idea, is I can give them admin access to the slides, so they are able to add in their own content. If the school wants to put up a calendar or pictures of the football game, they have five slides that I\u2019ve given them access to where they can put whatever they want.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThese images are up for six to eight seconds. We set up the slideshow on slow and shuffle, and that way there is no precise order that\u2019s going to get stale. Think about how static school hallways are. They rarely change. If something changed in my school hallway from freshman to senior year, I noticed immediately since you\u2019re there every day. Whenever we update those prevention monitors biweekly, and kids see a new image in the rotation, they stop and read it because you\u2019re just drawn to a change in your environment.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe try to stay away from graphics with too much text or text that\u2019s difficult to read. We typically go for big words, big numbers and cute infographics. We include quit line resources, partner graphics and sometimes we just have short messages like, \u2018Life is a highway, you better drive sober.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cAlso, youth coalition members can send me designs to put into the slideshow. We teach our youth members Canva, and they can send me what they create. It\u2019s a great way to get kids involved. A lot of the times if they create designs, we also print it and laminate it to put up in the bathrooms or outside the nurse\u2019s office in the hallway. Anytime they walk by the monitors and see the slide they sent me they get really excited. We\u2019re going to have a meme contest for Red Ribbon week, and while the voting will all be done via social media, all the memes will go up on school\u2019s prevention monitors so they can proudly show their friends.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cAlso, we have an amazing partnership with our local university, the University of Tennessee at Martin. They have a Healthy Hawks team, which is comprised of students advocating for all aspects of health, but they also work in substance misuse prevention. They have these huge kiosk stands, which are quite expensive \u2013 about $2,000 each – but they are basically like giant smartphones. For those slideshows, we share the slide space with them. They get five slides; we get five slides.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n \u201cFor the kiosks, I create a presentation using google slides. With google slides, I\u2019m still able to instantly update the slideshow, but I can also put in a photo with a hyperlink. People can go up to the slide, and if they see it says to tap to take a survey, they can tap the picture and instantly take it. When they\u2019re done it closes, and the slides resume.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n