 Resilience
and Health Realization: An Administrator's Perspective
Richard Holt, Ph.D., Director of Student Services,
District 742 Community Schools,
St. Cloud, Minnesota
District 742 in St. Cloud, Minnesota, has been receiving
ongoing training and technical assistance from the Safe and Drug
Free Schools Project at CAREI since 1994. The goal originally was
to assess Drug Free Schools programming. Today all buildings are
implementing the official Student Assistance process with staff
teams at every building. The team is the first point of referral
for all students for any need or service. Resilience/health realization
has been adopted as the operational philosophy for all teams. Student
capacity for well-being is emphasized and labeling discouraged.
The District has recently developed its new strategic plan. The
first bold initiative calls for a district paradigm shift from focusing
on youth the innate strengths and capacity of students for health
and well-being. Two pilot training programs are underway with North
Junior High and the Early Childhood Program. Community agencies
and organizations are also involved.
Those of us that have been around for a long time, have seen
initiatives come and go and we often wonder how they relate to the
big picture of educational improvement. Resilience/health realization
definitely does. We are using it to build on past efforts to better
meet student needs.
Approximately eight years ago, District 742 Community Schools
held a two day workshop for over 400 staff members. The purpose
was to begin to lay the groundwork and establish a vision for how
we program for children with severe and profound disabilities. Up
to that time, these children were educated in segregated settings
throughout the school district. It was the vision of my friend and
close associate, Ron Watkins, and his commitment, assistance, and
support that led us to examine our approach to providing services
to these young people. It was a big step. There were some staff
that said it couldn't happen and that it wouldn't happen.
 But
it did happen, and today these young people are served in inclusive
settings in neighborhood schools with age-appropriate peers. There
have been bumps along the way and there will continue to be challenges.
But the point I want to make is that our effort not only changed
the lives of those children with disabilities, but also the lives
of hundreds of other children, kids that we call typical or non-disabled.
I think the change in our approach to working with children with
disabilities reflects something even more basic. What do we want
our world to be like? Do we want our world to be segregated, our
children labeled and taught in separate places? Many of our staff
who played a major part in creating this change said "No."
Today we are exploring resilience and health realization as an
operational philosophy for student services in our school district
and I think in some respects what we are beginning today is similar
journey. We have a group of people who are very interested and want
to learn more. Thanks to the leadership of Jeanne Slingluff, Student
Assistance Coordinator, and the support of Kathy Marshall at the
University of Minnesota, and the initiative of Dr. Pat Welter at
North Junior High and Marj Hawkins in the Early Childhood Program,
we have a group of district people who are taking the first step.
I believe this is a journey where even more is at stake than in
our earlier initiative.
I have worked in Special Education for 25 years. When Superintendent
Bruce Thomas, as part of a district restructuring effort, moved
the responsibility for Student Assistance to my office, I had the
opportunity to look at Special Education from a different vantage
point.
I have to say that my experience in Special Education has been
wonderful. Many tremendous things have been accomplished for students
with disabilities. I would never diminish those accomplishments.
But increasingly over the past few years, I have experienced frustration
with a system that is built upon creating a negative picture of
students.
Special Education, Title I, Assurance of Mastery-this plethora
of systems are all based on making a case that a child is deficient,
needs fixing, and requires our services. I am not sure we are going
to be able to change these systems in the short run. All are pretty
much ingrained in our society and perhaps need to be there to some
degree. But I see increasing numbers of students with special needs
coming through the system with labels. This troubles me. The one
thing we learned about the inclusion of children who are labeled
severely handicapped is that the labels we create don't adequately
predict a child's performance or capacity or even what expectations
are most appropriate. That of all things has emerged in my mind
as the most significant of outcomes. Kids that we thought had limitations
in some areas have far surpassed what we had ever anticipated. It
is a kind of mind set. I think our training in resilience/health
realization, is the first step to meeting an even bigger challenge.
How does resiliency fit the needs of the school district? When
I was assigned the responsibility for the Drug Free Schools Student
Assistance Programs, two things struck me as critical. We needed
to establish a new system to address student needs and plan interventions.
This new system must be less stigmatizing, asset oriented, and less
costly while maintaining and reinforcing the joint ownership of
the total system. Secondly, we needed to change the way we think
about the young people we work with. That is what our new initiative
is all about. We are moving ahead.
We have set up some processes and some systems related to Student
Assistance at all our buildings. Great things are happening at North
Junior High and in our Early Childhood Programs. There are a lot
of very positive efforts at our other schools, too. But the truth
is that the impact of Student Assistance Teams is uneven across
the district. We really have to have effective teams in place so
we can start to address how people think about children who might
enter the Student Assistance system.
Fortunately, the district has also been going through a long
term strategic planning process over the past six to eight months.
It is a process that those of us who have been around for a while
felt was absolutely necessary. We needed to have some kind of direction
about where we wanted to go so as to not be whiplashed back and
forth by what was happening on any given day. Many school and community
representatives were involved in the process of developing critical
success factors. Several major initiatives evolved.
One of the major initiatives has been to implement a resilience-based
operational philosophy throughout our schools. In fact, this is
initiative number one. We also are talking about youth development,
focusing on assets, and most important, shifting the paradigm so
that we start thinking about kids differently. We are using the
concepts of resiliency and health realization to change the way
we view children's capacity. One part of the initiative is very
directly related to Student Assistance. We are working to imbed
the operational philosophy of resilience/health realization into
the Student Assistance Team process. This effort is built on the
belief that all students have the capacity for well being and successful
outcomes.
I fully anticipate that our current systems change training will
lead staff and community to some very different feelings about kids,
programs, and themselves. This change effort is not just about the
children we work with; it is also about our own resilience. I am
very, very excited about this initiative. There is so much at stake
here; we are entering a new era.
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