Confronting Intergenerational Substance Abuse Patterns in a Rural School Setting

Paul S. Higbee, M.A.
Ernest O. Bantam, Ed.S.
Black Hills Special Services Cooperative
Sturgis, South Dakota

Black Hills Careers Academy, a South Dakota public secondary school for rural youth whose lives have been disrupted by substance abuse, has faced two challenges since opening in 1981.

The first challenge is that of developing programs and attracting the right staff in an effort to help young people experience success, learn to think through situations rather than to act impulsively, and to explore career options. The Academy has documented progress toward those ends. The second challenge relates to keeping the school funded, a perpetual problem in a State with limited industrial revenue and shrinking tax bases. By the mid-1990s, when the school had evolved so that it could point to encouraging student growth indicators, its student population had changed.

In the early 1990s, students' ages ranged quite evenly from 14 to 18, but now it is rare to see students over the age of 16 referred. In an era of tight budgets, referring schools and juvenile courts have had to let older students drop out.

If there can be a silver rim lining the cloud of needy children going unserved, it is perhaps this: the Academy's smaller population (about 80 students will attend in 1996, compared to about 100 annually in the early 1990s) has meant a good environment for individualized learning and for fine-tuning the staff's sense of purpose and its methods.

Purpose

Black Hills Careers Academy believes young people grow intellectually and emotionally only when they are experiencing success and when they see ways of being successful in the future. For Academy students, individualized success might be defined in terms as diverse as staying sober, passing math, going a week without fighting, or starting a business. But however success is defined personally, students can usually see how it is connected to at least one of these four Academy emphases:

• All students are engaged in activities designed to promote thinking over impulse. The Academy recognizes that these youth have dealt mostly with adults who react impulsively to situations and believes young people can be expected to learn to think only when adults mediate their activities. The writings of Reuven Feuerstein (1979, 1980) have directed the Academy's approach in this area.
• The Academy, in partnership with local businesses, encourages each student to anticipate a career instead of just a string of jobs. Closely related to alcohol and drug abuse in rural South Dakota is an intergenerational legacy of poverty. In some counties here, unemployment rates are 90 percent or more. Students are exposed to career possibilities that are especially relevant to rural life, including entrepreneurial opportunities.
• Youth who experience substance abuse difficulties always fall behind, to some degree, in academic achievement. Since 1992, the Academy has adopted an individualized Mastery Learning system, where both students and teachers monitor content and skills acquisition, and where that acquisition must be mastered, individually, at an 80 percent level.
• Despite some concerns nationwide about public schools teaching values, the Academy believes young people can best grow into strong adults by considering concepts common to all values systems—for example, loyalty, justice, truth. About one-third of students here are Native American, and the staff has been sensitive in working Lakota cultural imagery into the study of values.

Methods

Drugs and alcohol are always a key factor in the lives of Academy students and their families, but the staff has chosen not to create a program that rests on treatment. Observations of students who have attended such single-dimension programs led the Academy administration to seek a more comprehensive approach, addressing interpersonal, behavioral, societal, and ethical issues. The staff views substance abuse as a barrier to maximum human development, and its program as intervention. For students currently in some stage of chemical abuse, and for those who relapse, the Academy recommends an evaluation to determine what level of treatment is necessary. Often this results in the student and family attending an outpatient treatment program with continuing followup. It is not unusual for those students referred to the Academy by the judicial system to be in court-ordered outpatient treatment. Many students attend weekly meetings of various community-based, 12-step programs in an effort to remain sober.

Students know that Black Hills Careers Academy is a school of high expectations. Graduation means documented success in all academic areas, entering the world of work with a careers portfolio, and developing improved thinking abilities and character expectations that can help them avoid substance abuse.

A day at the Academy begins with an in-school breakfast and the chance to visit with classmates and staff. Teachers know that, above all else, they must be positive role models for young people who may have grown up dealing daily with dysfunctional adults. Breakfast is a time when students can affirm the staff's consistent character.

All students start the day with clean slates despite any problems the day before. From breakfast, it is on to classes in rooms physically structured to feel like school, where teams of two teachers work with small groups. That way, one teacher is always free to offer individual help while the other continues to lead the group. There are daily lessons in math, science, language arts, and social sciences.

Offered three times a week, instrumental enrichment activities are paper and pencil exercises viewed by students as challenging puzzles. These exercises relate to the Academy's emphasis on learning to think instead of reacting by impulse. The content behind the exercises is not the focus. Rather, each of the 500 instrumental enrichments helps students develop specific problem solving skills and cognitive abilities that can be generalized to social interactions, family life, school, and work.

The Academy is affiliated with the national REAL program (Rural Entrepreneurship through Action Learning), which advocates studying entrepreneurship. Students—by meeting local business people, planning their own businesses, and teaming with classmates to actually run those businesses—learn lessons that will serve them whether or not they become entrepreneurs as adults. Their understanding of business operations will make them better employees and consumers.

The Academy's counselor works with students individually and in groups to examine how people develop a sense of character. In 1996, students are considering these concepts: respect, hope, justice, honesty, loyalty, caring, truth, and citizenship.

In 1996, staff and students together are taking their first trips through cyberspace via the Internet. The Academy recognizes that rural South Dakota can be a place where some personalities feel entirely alone and disconnected. The Internet will help those students find people with similar outlooks and interests, and to develop a broader view of who they are. For example, Native American students here sometimes see only two narrow images of their people: "reservation Indians," or "city Indians" who mostly live in a particular Rapid City, South Dakota, neighborhood. The Internet should open their eyes to many Native American lifestyles and to ways their culture has enriched American life as a whole. Also, the Internet has far-reaching implications for how Academy students will learn about substance abuse, and how they will explore careers and possibly create businesses.

To the greatest extent possible, the Academy keeps adults with whom these youth live involved in the schooling. Residential options include students' natural homes, a network of specially trained foster homes, and a group home operated by Lutheran Social Services.

Program Description

This is a program that can best be defined by its staff. In 1985, Dr. Phillip S. Hall studied the Academy's concept, as a consultant, and stated the school could succeed only with a staff who had precisely the right human interaction skills. Hall developed an applied humanism model specifically for this school, including a screening survey for job applicants. With this screening, the school looked for staff who—

• Are not punishers. The Academy believes that its students will not be reached by systems of punishment, that many of its students have been punished in abusive fashions in the past, and that these youth live in a society inclined to punish people who demonstrate inappropriate behaviors. Students learn they are responsible for their own actions and words, which differs from imposed punishment.
• Respect the human rights of all students.
• Understand ways of nonviolent conflict resolution, and are able to lead students toward such resolutions when problems arise.
• Are appropriate adult role models. All students, sometime in adulthood, will face situations in which they will need to draw from characteristics they saw exhibited by past role models—in dealing with their own children, in the way they act at work, in decisions they make regarding drugs and alcohol.

These humanistic qualities have resulted in a school environment that has evolved from authoritarian to interpersonal. That, the Academy believes, is the basis needed for helping these youth see beyond the immediacy of their very real problems to develop a broader world view.

Beyond their human traits, Academy teachers have proven themselves to be educators capable of working in a school that is entirely individualized. The Academy stresses the importance of understanding all learning styles. Teachers have been extraordinarily inventive in working Lakota traditions into the curriculum, and in helping youth see a wide range of vocational options in a rural region where most adults see limited opportunities. In 1996, the Academy staff is made up of one director, one staff supervisor, one counselor, five teachers, and one aide.

Problems Encountered/Solutions

The development of coalitions and partnerships enabled Black Hills Careers Academy to take root and survive. Establishment of an Academy like this was beyond the resources of any single school district in western South Dakota. Public monies here are always in short supply, and the population is sparse. In South Dakota west of the Missouri River—35,000 square miles—there are 5.1 people per square mile. Twelve public school districts joined forces in 1980 to form Black Hills Special Services Cooperative, which has a mission to provide services that districts can not offer individually, and which is governed by a body of school board members representing each district.1 Black Hills Special Services Cooperative operates Black Hills Careers Academy. In fact, opening a school in 1981 for at-risk youth (virtually all of whom were affected by substance abuse) was among Black Hills Special Services Cooperative's first efforts. While the Academy traces its roots to that 1981 school, it bears little resemblance to it today. The Academy's emphasis on applied humanism, careers, and helping each individual experience success developed over time as administrators studied the needs of this population, examined the best professional thinking nationally, and adapted that thinking locally.

The same need to pool resources that brought the 12 school districts together has brought other human services providers into partnerships with the Academy. Currently the juvenile courts, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Federal Probation work with the Academy in reaching this student population. Also, the Black Hills area business community is part of an Academy partnership in which students study vocations and experience actual job placements. The Academy's careers education programming led to its being designated a Federal School-to-Work site in 1995.

Findings

Several indicators suggest that Black Hills Careers Academy is helping its students experience success:

• All students are achieving academically at least at an 80 percent level.
• During the 1994-95 school year, Academy students made NCE (normal curve equivalency) advances of 8.4 in total reading, 11.6 in reading comprehension, 2.6 in total math, and 9.3 in problem solving.
• All students are engaged in career exploration and entrepreneurial studies—including operating actual businesses.
• Teachers have noted decreases in aggression and absenteeism.

Recommendations

In a period where public funding everywhere for education and human services is tight, it can be easy for politicians and the public to overlook this particular population's needs. Students deemed "at risk"—whose lives have been shattered by dysfunctional adults and substance abuse—are seldom mentioned in discussions about educational excellence, school-to-work transitions, and technology's potential.

It is, therefore, crucial that the public know about programs like Black Hills Careers Academy, where students are finding success both academically and socially. The public must know that these youth can:

• Respond to adults who guide instead of punish.
• Make remedial progress after falling behind in school.
• Understand social values.
• Hope for a future career.

The danger is that the public will believe that this population has fallen beyond reach, and demand that limited funding be used to keep these young people separate from the mainstream instead of helping them prepare for the future.

References

Bendtro, L.K.; Brokenleg, M.; and Van Brockern, S. Reclaiming Youth at Risk. Bloomington, IN: National Educational Service, 1990.

Feuerstein, R. The Dynamic Assessment of Retarded Performers. Baltimore, MD: University Park Press, 1979.

Feuerstein, R. Teachers' Guides to the Feuerstein Instrumental Enrichment Program. Brooklyn, NY: SBI Enterprises, 1980.

Hobbs, D. Entrepreneurship and the Community. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri, 1988.

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