The student population in our nation’s schools includes individuals failing to meet the expectations of their respective school communities. These students are in just about every school and in all grade levels. The presentation of their struggles might look like aggression toward teachers and/or peers, destruction of property, refusal to cooperate with teacher requests, or an unwillingness to attend school at all. These students move throughout their day with realities of hunger, fatigue, fear, anger, physical pain, sadness, anxiety, or the feeling that something is “just not right.” (And the ability to appropriately express these feelings and emotions to others maybe limited.)

These students may have histories fraught with complex and difficult home experiences or genetic predispositions to a wide-range of afflictions. Whatever the case may be, these students have certainly experienced little-to-no success in their lives--academically, behaviorally, emotionally, socially. Internal monologues likely persist, such as, “I’m a loser,” “No one likes me,” “I can’t trust anyone,” “Life has to be fair for me to be happy,” “Something is wrong with me.” Perhaps they have learned that the communities they come from are unable to support them.

Atlantic Academy and Atlantic Behavior Services is acutely aware of this problem: that there are kids who have profound and chronic struggles despite the best efforts of well-intentioned communities to solve these challenges. To solve these problems, to actually have a positive and meaningful impact on these kids lives, we need more than simply having a “place” to send kids to and adults to staff them with. Properly credentialed staff, or simply giving them a 1:1 staff, does not alone solve the problem. It is the practices, the methodologies, and perspectives employed by those working with the students that turns the tide.

Over the years and throughout our professional travels, we have found purposeful perspectives and practices that can increase the probability that we are successful with our most needy students (i.e., helping them achieve their IEP goals; teaching them critical social-emotional-behavioral skills necessary for their success; successfully returning them to mainstream settings) . These practices and perspectives include models for understanding the problem (i.e., the challenges our students struggle with), the principles that guide our interventions, and organizational systems and supports necessary to promote these practices. Conversely, there are clear practices and perspectives that limit the possibility of success with our at-risk students that should be rooted out (and replaced with more effective and efficient practices) if education and treatment is the goal for these children. Although not exhaustive, the following is a snapshot of the perspectives and practices we have found to be most useful:

In the posts to come, some of these perspectives and practices will be expounded upon with the aim to facilitate community discussion around what it takes to effectively support our most challenging kids, as well as to clarify and affirm what we are trying to accomplish with our services at Atlantic in general.

Please leave any impressions, questions, or thoughts about today’s blog below!

-Jed

Towards a Better Way with our At-Risk Kids