Lockport — Kim Davidson didn’t fully grasp what her daughter had gotten herself into.

Although she had seen “changes” in Kari’s behavior — sudden distance from old girl friends, quitting the cheerleading squad, downsizing her college and career plans to accommodate a boy she’d only dated a few months — Davidson confessed she had no idea those changes were warning signs of a looming tragedy.

It came in July of 2008 when Kari Ann Gorman, an 18-year-old Wilson High School graduate, was shot and killed by her ex-boyfriend Shawn Wolf, 19, after she ended their relationship. Wolf then killed himself.

Kari’s Candle of Hope was founded by Gorman’s parents to help young people recognize the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships. Its method is to purchase copies of Hazelton Publishing’s Safe Dates curriculum, a 10-lesson instruction program aimed at students in grades 7 through 12, and give the program to schools that request it.

“We want to educate everyone so that a tragedy like this does not have to happen again,” Davidson said.

Two-plus years after Kari’s Candle was launched, Davidson reports some success in persuading area schools to adopt the Safe Dates curriculum. Districts on board include Niagara-Wheatfield, Wilson, Williamsville South, North and East, Depew and Academy of the Sacred Heart. Last week, Davidson told “Kari’s story” to students at North Tonawanda High School and worked on getting a meeting with teachers to discuss the curriculum. Next month, she and Amy Wiltse are headed to MacArthur High School in Long Island for two student assemblies and a meeting with teachers.

Kari’s Candle representatives have to appeal directly to middle- and high school health teachers to incorporate Safe Dates into their already crowded instruction plans, according to Wiltse, group secretary and Kari Gorman’s former cheerleading coach. Dating violence education is not mandated by New York state.

Safe Dates offers instruction in healthy relationships and “safe” dating. Published on DVD, materials include a teaching plan, supplements and handouts for students. The lessons incorporate skits and role-playing scenarios, self-quizzes and lists: warning signs of partner abuse, barriers to leaving an unsafe relationship, et cetera.

“It’s easy to use and it gets to the heart of things,” Wiltse said.

Kari’s Candle buys the DVDs from the publisher, at a discounted price of $180 a piece, and gives them to schools free of charge, on the sole condition that schools promise to use them. Representatives also will instruct the instructors how to use the curriculum; Wiltse and Kari’s Candle board member Melissa Junke, director of the Lockport city Youth & Recreation Department, both are BOCES-certified “safe dating implementation” trainers.

During February, which is dubbed Teen Dating Violence Awareness and Prevention month, Junke is incorporating several Safe Dates lessons into “Girl Talk,” a weekly girls-only rap session she heads up at the youth bureau. She’s using elements of two lessons, titled Defining Caring Relationships and Defining Dating Relationships, as a “launching pad” to discussion about relationships and issues of self-esteem.

“I see a huge, huge lack of self-confidence (among girls). They know their (dating partner) is saying or doing things that are totally wrong, but they tolerate it. ... You question why they’re putting up with that and they say, ‘but he loves me,’ ” Junke said. “A lot of girls think it’s normal to be in these weird, awful situations. I try to teach them it’s not. ... What I like about (the Safe Dates curriculum) is it covers not just the physical part but the emotional part too; it gets girls thinking, ‘how do I want to be treated?’”

According to a 2010 study by Liz Claiborne Inc. and the Family Violence Prevention Fund, nationwide, nearly one in three teens report they’ve been sexually or physically abused, or threatened with violence, by their dating partner. Teen dating violence is equal to domestic violence; both involve a pattern of controlling and abusive behaviors by one partner over the other in a romantic relationship.

And when it comes to teens, regardless which partner is the aggressor, both are hurt when they’re caught up in an unhealthy relationship. Wiltse needs only remember July 26, 2008, when Wolf killed Gorman and himself, to know that’s true.

“Two children were lost that day; it was a bad day for everybody. (Wolf’s) family got hurt too. We never forget that,” she said.

A fundraising event, the Kari’s candle basketball game featuring members of the Lockport Police Department versus the Lockport Fire Department, will begin at 6:30 p.m. March 3 in the Lockport High School gym. Tickets are being sold in advance, for $5 a piece, at Lockport Athletic & Fitness Club, police headquarters and the city youth & rec office on Willow Street. There will be a door prize, a basket auction, a ski weekend raffle, concession stand and halftime performances by the Lewiston Players In Progress and the Wilson Youth Football cheerleaders. For more information, visit www.kariscandleofhope.org.

•••

Separate of her work with Kari’s Candle of Hope, Kim Davidson is a Liz Claiborne Inc./Redbook Magazine-appointed “action leader” tasked with promoting legislation to mandate dating violence education in schools statewide.

Claiborne Inc. launched Moms and Dads for Education to Stop Teen Dating Abuse (MADE) in 2010; action leaders agree to help push legislation in all states similar to Rhode Island’s Lindsay Ann Burke Act, enacted in 2007 in memory of the young woman whose ex-boyfriend murdered her. The Burke Act requires all Rhode Island schools to have policies for addressing dating violence incidents in their facilities, provide training to school staff and provide age-appropriate education in health classes every year in grades 7 through 12.

Since the Burke Act went into effect, similar laws were enacted in the states of Ohio and Nebraska.

In New York, two dating violence education bills have been introduced in the legislative houses in the 2011-12 session. In the senate, George Maziarz, R-Newfane, is the sponsor of one and Diane J. Savino, D-Staten Island/Brooklyn, is carrying the other.

Maziarz’s bill virtually mirrors the Rhode Island law. Savino’s goes further by expanding the parameters of partner-threatening behavior to include electronic communications (text, email, cellphone and/or Internet messaging), and requiring “respect and self-esteem education” for elementary-age students.

Both bills have lingered in the state Senate Education Committee since their introductions in January 2011, as have their Assembly companions.

Similar bills introduced in the 2009-10 legislative session, by Maziarz and then-Assemblywoman Francine DelMonte, never got out of committee.