Saturday, September 21, 2019

25 Years Of Working With Youth

It's been a long time.  I was looking today and my last writing on this blog was back in April of 2018 and the subject was the Parkland, Florida shooting and my thoughts on school safety.  Earlier this summer, I made a quick post on Facebook with a hint that this blog was coming.  I have thought and thought about how I am going to take 25 years of experiences and put it into one blog post.  I can't promise that this is going to turn out like I want it to, but the simple fact is that 25 years is a little more broad than the specific topic that I usually write about.  So here we go...

When someone says that they are 25 years into a mission, or a career, or an objective, they tend to be nearing the end of their professional journey.  That is not my case as I started this direction of my career when I was just 17 years old, I was still in high school.  It started with my choice to join a group of other students who were working on getting a youth center built in the small community that I grew up in.  The group was working in collaboration with another organization that had the same mission, or at the beginning, that was the belief.  The other students and I wanted a safe place for other students to go to and that is what the other organization was saying at our meetings.  As the next few months went on, the other students and I became a youth service organization called "Youth Action Force" and we were the board of directors.  Over this time, we as an organization, felt that jumping right into getting a youth center built in the community was getting the cart before the horse.  We scaled back and rethought our position and came to the determination that getting youth involved in the community was a necessary first step before getting the youth center built.  The other organization we collaborated with was not a fan at all about our change in thinking and it became quite clear that their goal with having a youth center was to push a religion practice, in addition to the money it could make for their organization.  It was at this point, that we decided to move on to our own path and get youth involved in the community.  As we went on, Youth Action Force had over 60 other students become members of our youth service organization, in a community that had a school that had a total of about 500-600 students in grades 7-12.  Many of them participated in different youth service projects that were opportunities for our organization to get youth involved in.  The really cool thing about our organization was that we had a real balanced mix of students which included students who were looking for their "place" socially as a teenager and high school student, student athletes, fine arts students, students who were just making the transition from middle school to high school, students who were struggling to find an identity, and some that just wanted to be involved in everything to boost a college resume.  When Youth Action Force hit their stride, we organized a Youth Speaks Out day at the high school and worked with the Rockford School District to change the schedule of the afternoon of a school day and have our over 60 members pair up and go into every classroom and have a conversation with the class or students about how the youth view the community and how they want to be involved. It was so cool to see different mixes of students pair up and lead these discussions.  We also were the featured program shortly after that at a community town hall meeting.  It all happened so fast.  I don't think at the time, that I realized how big this was becoming and what was being accomplished.  Other than a few peers, I didn't have really a lot of support with all of this.  I could chalk it up to being young and stupid and not knowing what I really was doing, which was probably partially true, but it was probably the most courage that I ever had in my life and it did continue to lead to more opportunities.

I became the official "youth" representative at many community organizations.  There was a community collaborative group called Riverside Community Forum where collaborative projects were discussed and executed.  This was a group that consisted of school officials, local business owners, religious leaders in the community, city officials, and county participants.  It lead to me being a creator of a youth mentoring program called Rocket Buddies, where high school students were paired with elementary students and they met weekly after school once a week to build leadership, relationships, and to give the younger students a potential role model to look up to.  Then, the Community Education Director with the Rockford School District approached me to come work with their School Age Child Care program called Creative Corners.  It was nice, because I could finally make some money doing this work instead of just volunteering.  Creative Corners was a great job.  I got along with everyone, as everyone that worked with the program was on the same page and that made an enjoyable climate for the youth that were in the program.  It was a team of people that clicked so well, that we offered the parents and students camping opportunities, Minnesota Twins baseball game outings, and even an overnight sleepover in the school.  Those were above and beyond the normal service offerings with the program.  Again, it was something that took a lot of courage, and was something bigger than I realized at the time when I was doing it.

Over my 25 years of working with youth, I have worked for five different school districts.  They are all in Minnesota.  They are the Rockford School District, Brainerd School District, Bemidji School District, Crosby-Ironton School District and my current employer, the Onamia School District.  My positions in these school districts have included School Age Child Care, Youth Development Coordinator twice, Facility Use Coordinator, Summer Child Care Transportation, Energy Efficiency Coordinator, Paraprofessional, Residential Treatment Counselor, and Behavior Interventionist.  In addition to working with the five school districts, I have also worked with two different private child care companies, one called KidNation and the other one called Step and Go.  I was also involved with the Wright County Collaborative, which had a focus on asset building and developing asset building in youth.  The belief at that time, was the higher number of assets that students had, the higher the chance of success.

I think the most eye opening part of the last 25 years of working with youth is how youth have changed.  Society has changed.  I think as these changes have occurred, the needs of youth have skyrocketed.  It can be kind of scary when you look at it as a big picture model.  It is more realistic to look at the task in front of you and take it one day at a time, and that is hard for me.  I am one to always look ahead and look at the possible outcomes.  My time as a youth had many different challenges.  In some ways I was lucky to have what I had, but I had a lot of challenges and that is what made me decide at 17 years old to want to help other youth.  Some of my challenges were what would be classified as typical challenges for a child or youth, and some were not.  With those challenges, I didn't necessarily have a place where I truly felt I belonged and that was hard.  I never resorted to drugs or alcohol and never smoked cigarettes.  I was someone with a good heart that wanted to help others.  I am still helping youth today, and I work tirelessly at it.  There are days and weeks that completely kick my ass, but seeing a student succeed has made it worth it.

Moving forward, as my professional life continues on, I am not sure where it goes.  My current role includes working with a high number of special education and mental health students.  I have always loved to be innovative and creative and I feel it makes me a valuable part of the team.  Over the last 12 years with my current employer, I have been a part of developing a behavior level system, helping push the idea of developing an academic resource room in our school, and coming up with reward systems in classrooms, which my wife will never admit to with her classroom.  They say that the average life of a special education teacher is five years.  That is crazy with all the commitment it takes to become a special education teacher.  I am not a special education teacher, but I work with mental health special education students and when you combine my time as a paraprofessional and behavior interventionist with the Onamia School district, 12 years is pretty good.  I have always, and to this day, been an employee that comes to work and works hard.  I will tell people that I don't want to be replaceable.  We know that every position is replaceable, but I work with the belief that I don't want to be a body, I want to be a person that is valuable.  Maybe some of that is because that is what I need, but it was I practice.  Moving forward, I want to continue to grow.  I want continue to increase my leadership opportunities and I want to continue to grow in the area of coaching people who work with youth.  I don't say challenging youth, because all youth have different challenges.  When I started this work, I was drinking the Kool-Aid in believing that all students had a healthy home, healthy families, everyone attended school, and everyone's needs were the same.   After 25 years, it is nothing like that. There have been experiences in this work that I never could have imagined happening and it continues to this day.  When I was 17 and doing a public presentation at a town hall meeting about youth involvement in the community, I didn't realize that I was an effective public speaker.  I am not going to say a good public speaker, because that is up to everyone's own opinion.  I got away from public speaking for quite a while, but over the past few years I have had some opportunities to do presentations in front of my co-workers at my school site.  In 2016, I became a certified instructor for the ALICE Training Institute and that has created the opportunity to do some more larger scale public speaking again and that has been good for me.  When I started speaking again in front of people and to larger groups, I learned that my skills in public speaking had become very rusty and that I was very nervous, which never existed before.  Now that I am getting rid of the rust, the nerves are tending to go away as well and I am looking forward to more potential opportunities to speak publicly.  I want to continue to push myself and grow.

Finally, I have worked with some amazing people over my 25 years in this work.  We all have had negative experiences of working with people, but it is the special and talented ones that I chose to remember and will always remember. These people have made a positive impact.  Lynn Englund, Anna Varner, Eric Lloyd, Lori Bromley, Ann Mavis, Dale Sova, Curt Hiltbrunner, Midge Robinson, Larry Ronglien, Jason Donahue, Mary Stephens, Lisa Stawarski, and Holly Booth.  These individuals are the ones who pushed me and helped me grow professionally.  These individuals gave me guidance in the work I do.  It has been an interesting path, but it has made me who I am now.  I look forward to where the path goes from here.

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