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HAPPY NEW YEAR!
By: Lon
Woodbury
It has been a long tradition to treat the end of a calendar
year as a time for reflection. The popular custom is to make
New Years resolutions, and the game then is to guess how
long until old habits overcome good intentions. However,
behind that popular custom is a more serious intent. This
intent is represented by the ancient God Janus, who with
two faces symbolized portals looking both into the past and
the future at the same time. Many people still use this time
to reflect on accomplishments and failures of the past, while
projecting goals and changes that need to be made for the
future.
In the spirit of this season, let’s look at the network
of Emotional Growth/ Therapeutic schools and programs this
newsletter focuses on. I will cover some of the things that
have happened in the last few years, and speculate on what
might happen in the next few years. First, it would be helpful
to define the network, as we at Woodbury Reports Inc. understand
it, and what elements seem to define the schools and programs
we track. The schools and programs we are interested in have
three main elements.
The first element is Parent Choice. We look for schools
or programs set up to allow a parent to make application
for their child, with the parent negotiating payment. Parents
may pay directly, or use their insurance, or even obtain
qualification through a government program. The key thing
is that the application process is largely initiated and
under the control of the parent. This is as opposed to the
generally accepted standard several years ago where most
schools and programs would accept applications only from
some professional or agency, and the parent’s recourse was
to either make suggestions to the professional, or just accept
their decision.
Along this line, we renamed our Directory, The Parent Empowerment
Handbook, to reflect the Woodbury Reports Inc. mission of
providing as much information as we can to help parents make
sense of their options and make placement decisions based
on current and better information. Our focus is to help parents
with a child who has problems. There is a need for programs
that work directly with children and ignore parents, and
there are some good ones. But, our focus is to help parents
find quality programs that best match the needs of their
child.
The expansion of Parent Choice options in this network since
the 1980s also reflects a broader societal tendency in other
areas of our society. For example, more people are taking
personal responsibility for their health. Medical
Doctors are now making suggestions to their patients, rather
than
the older tradition of “The Doctor Knows Best,” where the
Doctor made their decision and the patient was expected to
automatically comply. It is also reflected in the increase
in alternative health therapies, and new spiritual perspectives
that rely on self-awareness rather than spiritual interpretations
by ordained ministers, priests or rabbis.
For better or for worse, it appears that Parent Choice will
be increasingly important in all areas of education and mental
health treatment for children, and parents must be accommodated
because they are demanding more information and more involvement.
Another aspect of this is the growing demand for family oriented
services, rather than just services for children themselves,
which many programs are now doing.
The second important element for this network is Privately
Owned. This is because the dynamics of the public and private
sectors are radically different. In a private school or program,
especially small schools and programs, the ultimate decision
makers regarding the children are those close to the children’s
daily activities. In the public sector, the ultimate decision
makers are legislators, far removed from the daily activities
of the children. This usually calls for a lengthy chain of
command that requires much more paperwork in order keep the
distant ultimate decision makers informed. This also means
that basic policy in the public sector is usually based on
general categories, rather than the specific needs of children
and families. It is also more likely for the parents to be
intimately involved with a private program since they are
usually providing the tuition and thus have a financial stake.
In the public sector, parental involvement is optional; depending
almost exclusively on the attitudes of the school or program
staff, and it is easier for the parents to maintain a distance
from the program since they do not have a financial stake
in the program. Ever since the 1980s, this country has moved
toward more private involvement in most areas of our society,
often through public-private cooperation. It is reasonable
to expect this tendency to continue, providing many opportunities
for new start-up schools as more parents realize they can
make the enrollment decisions. There also is an increasing
tendency for private-public cooperation to obtain the advantages
from both systems to serve families with limited means.
The third element is our definition of Struggling Teens.
It is broad, encompassing any resource for parents with children
who are floundering in mainstream society. Although several
professionals think we deal only with clinical
or therapeutic residential programs, we have found many parents
have successfully intervened with their children with problems
through counseling, home schooling, mentoring, wilderness
adventure programs, character schools, turn-around schools
or day schools. These all provide some extra element of intervention
that, when done early enough, can preclude the need for a
highly structured residential program. It is our view that
a successful intervention using local resources or effective
mainstream schools is better for a child than waiting until
the problem becomes so great that the only solution is a
highly structured residential intervention.
Thus, we are
always interested in hearing about intervention resources
that can help a child before a highly structured residential
placement is necessary, along with hearing about highly structured
residential schools and programs. Our current public school
and mental health institutions are having a very difficult
time changing with the times and meeting the new needs of
the country’s young people. They even seem to be creaking
under the strain of the demand from new needs and demands.
It is likely that concepts of emotional growth, character
education, parent choice and therapeutic support found in
the Emotional Growth/ Therapeutic network of schools and
programs will expand to meet the increasing demand for quality
services. Perhaps, someday, these concepts will become the
new mainstream for raising our children.
Copyright © 2005,
Woodbury Reports, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
(This article may not be reproduced without written approval
of the publisher.)
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