Riding Team Imparts Dangers of Drugs
Robert Rogers, Staff Writer San Bernardino County Sun
Parents and educators have for decades grappled with how best to keep kids' attention while imparting the dangers of drugs, alcohol and tobacco.
One recipe that works: horsepower and adrenaline.
Muscular Suzuki motorcycles with 250 cc's of engine and screaming exhausts seized the fickle attention of spans of more than 600 Anton Elementary students Feb. 17 with death-defying stunts which propelled a potent message: Say no to substances that can harm your body.
The DeCoster's Kids Drug Awareness program motivates schoolkids on campuses throughout North America to remain drug free by combining educational information with performances by members of the Suzuki Dream Team.
Bob Sparenberg, the national director and founder of the Suzuki championship school, travels the
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Students at Anton Elementary School in San Bernardino sit watching a motocross show and drug awarness presentation by Suzuki Champions on Friday Feb.17. Two motocross bikes were on display as team rider Dave Bonometti jump off a ramp. (Brett K. Snow/Staff Photographer)
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continent delivering his anti-drug message. With Suzuki stunt rider Dave Bonometti, Sparenberg drove a Team Suzuki trailer hauling two motorcycles and a bevy of anti-drug awareness materials onto the school's athletic field just after dawn.
Sparenberg said the $1,400 fee for the presentation was picked up by a local chapter of the 7th Day Adventist church.
The 2 p.m. stunt show was the culmination of a day filled with class presentations and tours of the trailer that touched every student.
"We talk to the kids one classroom at a time, and we let them tour the drug mobile,'' Sparenberg said. "The message is that life is the toughest race of all, and you've got to be fit to excel at it.''
Sparenberg has a particularly novel way of imbuing excitable youth with his central message. He draws an adroit analogy between human bodies and precision racing machines.
"The air filter is the lungs, the intake manifold the throat, the piston is heart, the kidney the fuel filter and the exhaust system ... you know,'' Sparenberg chuckled.
Sparenberg is quick with the quip and a commanding speaker, but the former competitive racer - Sparenberg raced in the 1970s, a prehistoric period in motocross - leaves the high-flying to his partner, 26-year-old Bonometti.
The self-effacing Bonometti dismisses his ariel acrobatics as "a walk in the park,'' and said appealing to the children compensates for the riding monotony.
"The rush I get is when I'm riding, approaching the jump, and I can hear the kids yelling `No', (to drugs) and the louder they yell the faster I go,'' he said.
As the stunt moment approached minutes before 2 p.m., teachers herded their restive classes of K-6 students onto the verdant athletic field. A shiny aluminum ramp, about 17-feet long pitched at a 30 degree angle, shone on the grassy expanse despite the gloomy sky.
Kids could barely contain their excitement.
"Oh man, I just want to see how far he can jump,'' said sixth-grader David Martinez, who also boasted that he planned on playing in the NFL one day, and that "you can't do drugs if you want to get there.''
With the 2-stroke snarls of Bonometti's motorcycle blasting in the background, even staid principle Fields gushed about the new school's - Anton's plush new campus just opened last August - fortune in having corralling the program.
"The presentations were great, the analogies just awesome, and now I'm just going to sit back and watch them do their thing,'' Fields said.
And then the presentation came. As Sparenberg strode through the mass of seated children, intoning his themes of drug abstention and personal power, his rhetoric soared along with Bonometti's motorcycle.
Time and again Bonometti circled around the field, building speed for about 200 yards before hitting the ramp and shooting 100, 125, even more than 150 feet through the gray sky to the googly-eyed delight of elementary crowd.
By the end, "Mr. Motivation'' Sparenberg's relentless presentation and Bonometti's expert riding had left the crowd exhausted.
Debbie Bingham, who'd brought out her second grade class, examined the riding extravaganza through an educator's prism.
"This program is effective because it's a way to relate to positive behavior, providing role models who are cool people that don't do drugs,'' Bingham said.
Click on Foundation Subsidy below to see how you can obtain help in providing this program at your school.
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