School Partners Explore Progress

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School Partners Explore Progress
Members in our newly formed initiative, School Partners: Sharing the Bread, met on Thursday evening August 22 at the East Shore Branch of the Dauphin County Library to explore the progress made and insights gained since our June meeting.

The School Partners program was formed to involve interested volunteers among our parents and friends to partner with a core team made up of Larry Evans, Myles Miller and John Borland. The goal of this partnership is to gain access to and so introduce the value and benefits of affective skills education to faculty and administrators in the six area school districts served by DCTS.

While hopes are high for the success of our efforts there was also evident within the group an atmosphere of reality regarding the challenge of bringing a new idea to understanding and acceptance.

A review of on-going efforts with the Susquehanna Township School District revealed a continuing, stable level of interest among administrators since our initial April meeting, but also still a need for regular contact and support to advance efforts for an affective skills program within the district. A meeting scheduled for October to engage affective skills discussions with the district’s Safe and Drug Free Drugs Taskforce may produce further results.

Our newest effort within School Partners is with the Central Dauphin School District. Partners are attempting to gain an entry meeting by the core team to discuss affective skills education. A variety of telephone calls to various staff and administration has yielded recognition of the “Personal and Social Responsibility” and Anger Management curriculums from an earlier trial of the products within the high school’s special education program, but as yet no formal invitation to discuss.

School Partners explored various ideas for generating fruitful contacts to an entry meeting. The consensus was with getting an affective skills discussion into the agenda at a regular meeting of the school board. The idea is to use such an opportunity to briefly explain the potentials of affective skills programming and so seek committed interest with board members. The hope is that such an impetus from the top down will serve to generate a desired entry-level discussion of affective skills with district administrators.

It was acknowledged, however, that such an approach will be most effective if a member of the district faculty or administration can be enlisted to champion the affective skills initiative with the board. Such internal support is still deemed important to producing identity and trust with board and district staffs. As such multiple nodes of contract are still recommended to ensure success.

Note was made once again that, despite the inclinations of potentially interested districts, the affective skills curriculums are intended as mainstream programs for all middle and high school-aged students. They are not primarily programs for special education or behavior challenge situations and will not operate most effectively if isolated to these settings.

It was further related that these curriculums would demonstrate their best results with schools and teachers who are dedicated and well trained to teach them. Those schools that have not registered the promised results from affective skills education have often approached the lessons as tangential activity with other coursework or have delivered them in a piecemeal fashion. These lessons are designed as a holistic and focused package for students and must be taught in this fashion to gain the expected outcomes.

Myles Miller again stressed that, in their activities, School Partners assure districts we are not selling a product. Rather, we are, as involved parents, attempting to aid our schools with effective programs that have had very positive impacts on our kids and on we ourselves. “The program sells itself,” Myles reiterated. “All you have to do is sell you.”

A suggestion was made that our information regarding affective skills will be more openly received by districts if we have with it data demonstrating the success of the programs. Questions were asked if such statistics are available. Larry Evans assured that they are.

This brought about the suggestion that a brochure be developed that in a succinct manner explains and points to the benefits of affective skills education. Such a product would provide a valuable handout to informing and reinforcing with educators the nature and value of these programs. An obligation was generated for Larry to locate and share available information with Myles towards producing a first draft of the handout. All of our partners will then work to review and revise the draft into a final product.

The meeting adjourned with our partners having gained a certain renewed sense of vigor and new ideas for creating or renewing affective skills contacts with our school districts.

–- John Borland –-

Affective Skills Web Site

Last Modified: March 21, 2003