<p>Today’s CDT …
Freshman class netting more drinking arrests
By Sara Ganim
<a href="mailto:sganim@centredaily.com">sganim@centredaily.com</a>
Another apartment robbery reported
At least 8 hurt in crash
Police report
County considers drug court for DUI offenders
Freshman class netting more drinking arrests
A week after Penn State announced that fall 2007 likely will see the second-largest freshman class in its history, State College police say underage drinking among 18- and 19-year-olds is also soaring.</p>
<p>The size of the 2007 freshman class will be second only to the 2006-07 class of 8,000 students. As the number of freshmen rose in the fall, State College police said they saw a 40 percent increase in underage drinking citations for 18-year-olds and a 33 percent boost in citations for 19-year-olds.</p>
<p>Next year’s freshman class is projected to have about 7,000 students.</p>
<p>The rising numbers have borough council members concerned that the increased number of students is putting a strain on borough services.</p>
<p>“I just don’t know if the town can handle the impact,” Councilman Jeff Kern said. “We weren’t expecting it, and I don’t know that we can continue to have the appropriate level of service.”</p>
<p>Penn State spokesman Bill Mahon said the increase in class size in 2006 was not intentional. And underage drinking had been rising long before 2006, he noted.</p>
<p>Tyrone Parham, spokesman for Penn State police, said the majority of the 862 underage drinking citations university police issued last year were to students ages 18 or 19. Parham said that is the norm. He said police schedules were altered in February 2006 to increase nighttime and weekend patrols.</p>
<p>State College Police Chief Tom King said the tally of all incidents – not just underage drinking – showed a 3.5 percent increase in fall 2006 compared with fall 2005.</p>
<p>And borough Councilwoman Elizabeth Goreham said the Highlands neighborhood, where she lives, has experienced a noticeable increase in the amount of noise, trash and vandalism since the freshman class size was increased.</p>
<p>“We think that is directly related to this, to underage kids,” Goreham said.</p>
<p>Kern and fellow Councilman Don Hahn noted that alcohol-related crime seems to be rising.</p>
<p>“We hear accounts of our hospital being inundated with people who have drunk dangerously high levels of alcohol,” Hahn said.</p>
<p>Hahn said the rising numbers are disappointing, but King said that it’s too soon to tell if the drastic increase in underage citations for people younger than 20 is directly related to the larger freshman class. However, he did say the numbers have risen together.</p>
<p>Kern said the issue isn’t just the drinking. He said freshmen are more likely to binge drink in the downtown area and behave in disruptive ways, and there now are more freshmen in town.</p>
<p>“The freshmen tend to come and want to experiment with booze, and then we tend to have more neighborhood complaints and more police calls and more public drunks and related behaviors,” Kern said.</p>
<p>“It’s the younger ones who are experimenting,” he added. “We need to find a way to grapple with this issue.”</p>
<p>Goreham said council has informally discussed the concerns about the larger freshman class sizes. She said she would like to see better alcohol education coming from the university to curb binge drinking behavior. The larger the class size, the less chance of getting that message to students, she said.</p>