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Opinion & Essays
- April, 1994 Issue #27
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EMOTIONAL GROWTH SCHOOLS
What Are They?
by: Lon Woodbury
(This short essay is taken from the introduction of the 6th Edition of the Directory of Outstanding
Emotional Growth Schools)
This Directory is about kids, problems and solutions! Solutions for kids with emotional/behavioral problems
for which nothing seems to work as it should. Kids who can not (or will not) make good decisions despite community and/or family consequences.
Kids who make the dumbest decisions, but are smart enough to easily manipulate parents, schools and therapists. Kids who are not sick
enough to need long- term hospitalization, residential treatment or therapeutic schools (and respond poorly when it is tried), but
definitely need some kind of intensive intervention. Kids whose primary need is to grow up, more than it is to be cured of something.
Kids who can be described as having the body of a teenager, emotions of a four-year-old, and the wants of an adult. Kids whose prospects
of growing up to be a confident and productive adult are dim.
This Directory is also about peer review! The network of schools and professionals listed here respect
results and quality ahead of all else. Even though they sometimes compete with each other and disagree on methods, there is a mutual
respect and frequent cooperation. This Directory is an attempt to list the network in one publication.
This Directory is dedicated to those charming and frustrating children enrolled in emotional growth schools.
It is designed to be used by both parents and youth-oriented professionals who have concluded that things are so far out of control
that the most effective intervention for a frustrating child is some kind of short-term or long-term residential placement.
Copyright © 1994, Woodbury Reports, Inc. (This article may be reproduced without prior
approval if the copyright notice and proper publication and author attribution accompanies the copy.)
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