Most, if not all administrators recognize the impact of non-academic factors on children’s lives. Many believe schools should address social factors that impact school success. But some of these factors, especially those that touch on human sexuality - from sexual orientation, to sexual abuse, to pregnancy prevention, to HIV and other STD’s, are controversial ones that can stir up a hornets nest in the community. School counselors and nurses may want them included, but some parents may feel these are private issues that have nothing to do with schools.

With print curricula, the solution for program developers that were committed to evidence-based practices to prevent children's social injury was often a "boiled potatoes" approach. Content was boiled down to a sanitized essence that could pass muster in communities as diverse as Biloxi Mississippi and San Francisco.

Now there is a better option. The data base structure of Ripple Effects', fully self-contained multi-media program empowers administrators to customize content and delete lessons to meet local mandates and site-based needs, down to the level of the individual computer. With Ripple Effects the entire web of linked content (more than 100,000 media elements) is contained on the flash drive or disk that is delivered. This is a great advantage over Internet-based applications, for which decision-making about sensitive content is managed at a more global level.

See the entire list of available topics for the adolescent software.