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Professional Development
Professional Development:
The Key To Safe Schools' Success
 Stating that the success of a school's anti-violence program depends
largely on the quality of its mentors and other responsible adults is
neither profound nor new, but it is undeniable. This reality drives the
movement for a structured, comprehensive program of professional
development for those working with youngsters from backgrounds which, in
some ways, are widely different, and in others, surprisingly similar.
Staff development has been essential to the development of the Safe
Schools/Healthy Students programs. A comprehensive training program for
mentors assures that adults learn how to work with youngsters in critical
areas of empathy, impulse control, anger management, problem solving and
conflict resolution and mediation. Child psychiatrists and psychologists
from North Shore University Hospital serve as mentor-educators in
providing mental health perspectives on the behavior of children in the
program. This guides mentors in developing effective strategies to use
with mentees, and this provides the basis for all other training.
Because of the central role of the Nassau BOCES Outdoor Education
program in the Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative in Westbury and
Freeport, naturalists work with mentors to introduce the strategies for
using Outdoor Education to produce maximum benefits to the students.
Outdoor educators also provide after-school development sessions with
mentors which focus on stress management and team-building activities. In
addition, a psychologist specializing in stress reduction conducts
periodic sessions with mentors to address current concerns and help them
develop appropriate strategies for mentoring "difficult" children.
"The mentor/mentee relationship is different from the teacher/student
relationship," says Laura Lustbader, Program Supervisor, Parent/Child Home
Programs and Youth-at-Risk Community Partnership Program. "Mentors are
taught that unlike a student's teacher, mentors do not focus on the
student's academic performance. The mentor is trained to provide at-risk
students with consistent, reliable and non-threatening support. This
support differs from the kind of help that students receive from their own
classroom teachers or parents because it is unburdened of the expectations
of family or academic performance."
Mentor training for Safe Schools/Healthy Students consists of a
two-to-three day session before the program begins and ongoing group
meetings during the year. Additionally, notes Lustbader, an important part
of the Safe Schools Initiative is the effort to empower parents to be
their children's partners in education and teach the adults to be role
models for healthy lifestyles.
"We make a focused effort to include parents in our initiative and have
been investigating the possible use of a parenting model like the ‘Every
Person Influence Children (EPIC)' program, the Families and Schools
Together program, or a research-based program of that quality.
"Whether the mentor is a teacher or community member," notes Lustbader,
"for this program to succeed, the participant must be as strongly
committed to the training as to the student."
Contact:
Dr. Laura Lustbader, Program Supervisor
llustbad@mail.nasboces.org
(516) 608-6456
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