National drug education program in Calintaan secondary schools and its implementation and challenges

Education can play an essential role in molding students into productive individuals and preventing illegal drugs from reaching them.Using a sequential exploratory design, this study aimed to identify the implementation and challenges encountered by the National Drug Education Program in the Calintaan District.Descriptive statistics were used to answer the descriptive questions, while for the inferential questions and to test the provided hypotheses, partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used, and results were generated by WarpPLS version 7.0.There were 343 randomly selected students and 109 teachers from seven (7) secondary schools in the Calintaan District.Based on the respondents' perception, there were three themes of challenges encountered in the implementation of NDEP: teachers' training, schools' schedules, and support towards NDEP.The study revealed that two sets of respondents had dissimilar perceptions of implementing NDEP.The teacher respondents perceived its implementation as high.In contrast, the students perceived it as moderate.Based on these findings, the study concluded that teachers were performing their tasks in implementing NDEP, but the students were not fully aware of its implementation or were not participating.To improve the implementation of NDEP, training, student participation, and consideration of the action plan of the study have been recommended.