My name is Deputy Damian Openshaw and I work for the Cache County Sheriff’s Office in Utah. For the past 3 years, I have been teaching drug awareness lessons to students in Elementary and Middle School.

This past summer, Deputy Brandon Douglas and I became Certified N.O.V.A. Principles Instructors. We really like this program and our Agency decided to pilot it in several schools to see how it would be accepted. Our plan was to teach N.O.V.A. at 2 schools, and to continue teaching the previously taught program at the other 8 schools.

As I met the teachers of the non-pilot schools, some of them had already heard about the N.O.V.A. program from teachers from the Logan School District. They said that the Logan teachers that had N.O.V.A. loved it, and that because of this they wanted N.O.V.A. in their schools as well. In fact, they wanted to know why we couldn’t teach N.O.V.A. at their school.

I explained to them our original plan to pilot N.O.V.A. in just 2 schools, but that I would see what could be done. I made a few phone calls, and after speaking with my Lieutenant, the decision was made to teach N.O.V.A. at all 10 schools because that’s what the teachers wanted. I was excited about this chain of events because now I don’t have to teach two different programs, and I know the kids are going to benefit from the N.O.V.A. program a lot more.