Alternative School Program Standards
The Background:
Tennessee Code Annotated Section 49-6-4017(f)(2) requires that "The State Board of Education shall provide a curriculum for alternative schools to ensure students receive specialized attention needed to effectively reform students to prevent them from being repeat offenders."
The Alternative School Program Standards provide a framework for local school systems to use in developing curriculum to meet the needs of the students.
The standards define an alternative school environment with curricula, counseling, and resources to enable the student to master life skills that are critical to social, emotional, and academic growth and success.
The standards were developed by a broad-based committee that also developed the service learning curriculum standards. The draft was circulated statewide for comments.
ALTERNATIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM STANDARDS
The Alternative School Program Standards provide a framework for local school systems to use in developing curriculum to meet the needs of the students.
MISSION
The mission of the Alternative School is to intervene positively with students who currently are not succeeding in a traditional school environment.
STUDENTS SERVED
For purposes of these guidelines, the student populations to be served in alternative school programs include:
- Students who have violated school policy in regards to zero tolerance;
- Students with multiple rule violations;
- Students who have been suspended for a period greater than 10 days;
- Other students whose assessments have demonstrated inability to make decisions, low capacity in resiliency, poor self-management skills, lack of self-respect and self esteem, poor interpersonal and social communication skills, inability to work with others, poor negotiation skills, lack of responsibility for self and others, inability to work cooperatively, poor organizational skills and inability to follow instructions.
Students who have been certified as disabled should not be placed in this program based on problems associated with the respective disability. Students that have been suspended for periods of less than ten days should be placed in the appropriate discipline option as developed and defined by the school system discipline policy and procedures action plan.
Jerry Conrath describes the most common characteristics of the defeated and discouraged learner in Our Other Youth, 1986. These characteristics best define the student population to be served in the Alternative School programs and are listed in Appendix A.
Appendix B contains an extensive list of resources that will be helpful to educators who are initiating or improving alternative school programs.
PRINCIPLES
In order to remove barriers to success for students, alternative school programs are based upon the following principles:
1. Educators understand that all students have value and potential.
2. Public investment in resources to address needs is cost effective in that it forestalls greater expenditures later.
3. Alternative education must be one component of a comprehensive discipline policy and procedures action plan, which includes classroom management training, graduated disciplinary alternatives, and other strategies. Alternative education must be integrated with community resources, including federal, state, and/or local service delivery agencies.
4. Alternative programs address the basic psychological needs of at-risk youth. Five central dimensions are crucial to an individual's well-being and ability to be resilient under stress:
- Competence: the student has evidence of abilities, skills and strengths.
- Belonging: people accept the student in some important group.
- Usefulness: the student's work is needed by others and it has meaning.
- Potency: the student has power to make changes.
- Optimism: the student receives positive feedback from others and is confident about solving problems in the future and understands that the future holds promise.
(Abraham Maslow, William Glasser and Richard Sagor, At-Risk Students: Reaching and Teaching Them (1993))
5. Alternative programs must offer an alternative learning environment in which students can learn: possibly at different rates of time, with different but successful strategies and tools, and with caring and dedicated staff of visionary teachers and leaders.
6. Professional development enables staff to approach behavior problems in a way that builds character and offers opportunities for restitution; use active listening skills and problem solving strategies; and use social skills that demonstrate positive character traits.
ALTERNATIVE SCHOOL PROGRAM STANDARDS
The student who
is in need of an alternative school environment will be provided with curricula,
counseling, and resources to enable the student to master life skills that are critical to
social, emotional, and academic growth and success.
1.0 The Alternative School program will establish collaborative partnerships in a system of shared responsibility for program support and for service delivery to enrolled students.
2.0 The Alternative School program will integrate life skills development within the curriculum.
3.0 The Alternative School will have an effective system of positive student management.4.0 The Alternative School will utilize innovative teaching strategies.
5.0 The Alternative School will have curriculum developed in response to needs of the student population.
6.0 The Alternative School program will provide appropriate assessment and support services.
7.0 The Alternative School program will provide an environment that is conducive to learning.
8.0 The Alternative School program will be implemented by effective, qualified staff.
9.0 The Alternative School will have an effective transition process for students entering and exiting the program.
Standard
1.0 The Alternative School program will establish collaborative partnerships in a system of shared responsibility for program support and for service delivery to enrolled students.
Program Expectations
The collaborative partnerships will:
1.01 Provide supportive administration including but not limited to the superintendent, the program director, and juvenile court judges.
1.02 Provide support services to address the student’s environment outside the school, including community agencies such as family resource centers and mental health centers.
1.03 Provide community sponsored mentorship program.
1.04 Provide successful service learning in the community.
1.05 Develop a liaison with the school from which the student has been reassigned.
1.06 Involve and inform parents about techniques and strategies to work effectively with their children, using school resources and home visits.
Standard
2.0 The Alternative School program will integrate life skills development within the curriculum.
Program Expectations
The Students will:
2.01 Learn social skills and work readiness.
2.02 Have access to learning experiences outside the school building including real life experiences.
2.03 Engage in service learning.
2.04 Learn to set realistic short term and long term goals and learn what they must do to achieve their goals.
2.05 Understand how they learn using a learning styles inventory and develop an appreciation of their uniqueness.
2.06 Learn responsibility, conflict resolution, problem solving and decision-making.
2.07 Learn time management skills.
2.08 Learn citizenship.
2.09 Learn that people have to work to live.
2.10 Learn self-assessment and improvement.
2.11 Learn to accept constructive criticism and react positively.
2.12 Develop career awareness.
Standard
3.0 The Alternative School Program will have an effective system of positive student management.
Program Expectations
The Alternative School Program will:
3.01 Provide positive reinforcement.
3.02 Define clear, explicit student expectations and discipline plan.
3.03 Provide consistent, firm, and fair behavior management.
Standard
4.0 The Alternative School Program will utilize innovative teaching strategies.
Program Expectations
The Instructional Format will:
4.01 Provide varied and innovative teaching strategies and provide for experiential learning.
4.02 Allow frequent student and teacher interaction.
4.03 Use structured multiple teaching styles matched with student learning styles.
4.04 Encourage teacher networking to enhance teaching strategies and available resources.
4.05 Include project based, experiential activities.
4.06 Consist primarily of non-lecture techniques.
4.07 Include instruction through innovative, useable technology and appropriate software.
4.08 Use interdisciplinary approaches.
4.09 Use appropriate equipment - video, audio, still camera.
4.10 Use varied, multiple assessment.
Standard
5.0 The Alternative School Program will have curriculum developed in response to needs of the student population.
Program Expectations
The Curriculum will:
5.01 Include a balance between mandated curriculum and special needs of the student.
5.02 Focus on social skills development, such as skills defined in the course Success Skills Through Service Learning.
5.03 Incorporate student ideas in curriculum design.
5.04 Include the GED + 2 program, as appropriate.
5.05 Include career awareness and exploration.
Standard
6.0 The Alternative School Program will provide appropriate assessment and support services.
Program Expectations
The Alternative School Program will:
6.01 Conduct initial student assessment associated with social and emotional needs, such as the F.A.S.T. assessment.
6.02 Assess the student to determine if the student needs drug or alcohol abuse intervention.
6.03 Include mental health evaluation.
6.04 Include individual and group counseling components.
6.05 Integrate conflict resolution into all aspects of the program.
6.06 Include tutoring and mentoring components.
Standard
7.0 The Alternative School Program will provide an environment that is conducive to learning.
Program Expectations
The Alternative School Program will:
7.01 Have a safe, clean and quiet facility.
7.02 Be designed to facilitate teamwork.
7.03 Have adequate space for low teacher-student ratio, 1:12 with teaching assistant.
7.04 Have open architectural design that supports youth empowerment.
Standard
8.0 The Alternative School program will be implemented by effective, qualified staff.
Program Expectations
The Alternative School Staff will:
8.01 Include excited, energetic, competent teachers with multiple teaching styles.
8.02 Understand and practice the concept of facilitating learning.
8.03 Include appropriately trained aides and counselors.
Standard
9.0 The Alternative School Program will have an effective transition process for students entering and exiting the program.
Program Expectations
The Alternative School Program will:
9.01 Provide student orientation that consists of rapport building, assessment, goal setting, and development of individual student profile, designed to orient students to alternative school setting.
9.02 Develop specific, individualized long range plan for each student as the first and the last step of the transition process
9.03 Establish a team, composed of representatives from the origin school, the alternative school, and the parents, to review referrals on transition readiness
Jerry Conrath describes the most common characteristics of the defeated and discouraged learner in Our Other Youth, 1986. These characteristics best define the student population to be served in the Alternative School programs.
1. They are low in self-confidence, have a deeply held sense of personal impotency, helplessness, and lack of self-worth.
2. They are "avoiders". They avoid school because it is demanding and/or threatening, or because it is confusing and unresponsive to their needs. They avoid contact and confrontation with other students and adults, for they are not confident of themselves. They avoid classes because they are behind and because there is often a more satisfying short-run payoff to skipping school than going to class and trying to figure out what is going on. Avoidance of adults and school begins in very early grades.
3. They are distrustful of adults and adult situations. Adults in their life have been unfair, unresponsive, or even mentally, intellectually and physically abusive.
4. They have a limited notion of the future. They are very responsive to short term, measurable goals with demonstrations of success and competence. However, they do not see the future as either bright or positive. Their life is usually grim and they have no cause to see the future any other way. Therefore, long-range class projects are deadening as are complicated career planning systems. Teachers and other involved adults must be willing to compete for their attention or lose them.
5. They usually lack adequate reading, writing, and math skills and have come to see themselves often as "dumb" rather than unskilled. Dumbness, as they reason, cannot be cured so adults give up on them and the kids give up on themselves. Schools stop taking them seriously as learners and only put simple worksheets in front of them that make no intellectual demands and offer no challenge. The students are not convinced that skills not yet learned can be learned. They are poisoned by a sense of intellectual incompetence.
6. Most of these students come from fragile homes. Their parents often suffer similar characteristics: low skilled, low self-confidence, distrustful of institutions, avoidance, suspicious of the future. Some of these fragile parents don't care, treat sons and daughters with hostility, and even engage in serious physical and sexual abuse. Some of these students come from homes with parents eager to help, but more often, parent response is to be grateful that an adult finally is helping their child.
- They are impatient with routine, long-time sitting and listening, and classrooms with little variety; more so than students who feel good about themselves as learners and have a better developed sense of how to get along in adult institutions. Because of their low skills, discouraged learners are often seen as disruptive when they demonstrate their impatience. Once the disruptive label is attached, there is a predictable chain to difficult...dumb…delinquent.... dropout.
8. They often come from the category of learning preference identified as "practical". They are good at working out applications of what is being taught if that is allowed and encouraged. They learn well through their own private experience and can talk about the experience better than write about it. They remember very little of what is delivered in linguistic style to a physically passive, note-taking audience.
9. They do not see a relationship between effort and achievement. They see success as a matter of luck or ease of the task. They are "externalizers", who see the world as happening to them and one over which they have little control of events, especially failures and successes. When they do poorly, it is the result of an impossible task, bad luck, a bad day, or an adult who refuses to help them. And, of course, to the "fact" that they are dumb, a situation of which they have no control and , therefore, can take no responsibility. It is the same when they do well: good luck, easy assignment, wonderful teacher. They will not take personal responsibility because they do not see the relationship; not, as adults often accuse, because they stubbornly refuse to. Because of this, conversations over how much effort they put into a task fall on deaf ears. To an "externalizer", effort has little to do with it. Because of this phenomenon, these students do not learn from their mistakes, and they do not learn from their successes. They think mistakes and success just happen and then cannot explain why or how. To ask them "why" they did something prompts an impotent response, "I don't know. It just happened." They are a challenge for an "internalizer" adult who understands internal responsibility but does not understand the impotent world of the "externalizer" student.
The following is a list of resources that have assisted the development of successful alternative schools throughout Tennessee. The list is organized in the following categories: assessment, support services, positive student management, informing parents, innovative teaching strategies, and life skills.
RESOURCES
Assessment
C.I.T.E. Learning
Styles Instrument
Babich, A. M., Burdine, P., Allbright, L., Randol, P.
Wichita Public Schools
Murdock Teacher Center, the Center for Innovative Teaching Experiences
Multiple
Intelligence Assessment
Bench Mark Group
1601-B Lundhurst Drive
Savoy, Il 61874-9516
Functional
Behavioral Assessment
Metropolitan Nashville Davidson County Schools
2601 Bransford Avenue
Nashville, Tennessee 37204
Functional
Analysis Screening Tool
Dr. Brian Iwata
The Florida Center on Self-Injury
Motivation
Assessment Scale
Durand, V.M., & Carr, E. G. (1991)
Functional communication training to reduce challenging behavior: Maintenance and
application in new settings. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 24, 251-264.
Multiple
Intelligence Approaches to Assessment.
David Lazear
Zepher Press
P. O. Box 66006
Tucson, Arizona 85728-6006
Support Services
"Mentoring:
Elements of Effective Practice"
compiled by the National Mentoring Partnership and United Way of America
www.mentoring.org/bestpractices.html
Positive Student Management
Discipline
Alternatives: First the Rapport, Then the Rules
Assertive Discipline
Lee Canter
Learning Magazine
1607 Battleground Ave
Greensboro, N. C. 27408
Resolving
Conflicts Creatively
Peace Foundation
1900 Biscayne Blvd.
Miami, Florida 33132-1025
1-800-749-8838
Communicating
with Students in Schools: Exercises in Motivation and School Discipline through Rapport
Dr. Richard Burke
Department of Education
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, Ohio 43403
Graffiti Wall: Building Classroom Rapport
Erin S. King, McNeil High School
English in Texas (v27 n1 p 20 Fall 1995)
Austin, Texas
Understanding
Group Behavior – Why we behave as we do
Caroline Oliver
J. Weston Walch Publisher
P. O. Box 658
Portland, Maine 04104-0658
Tough
Decisions (50 Activities in Values and Character Education)
J. Walch Publisher
P. O. Box 658
Portland, Maine 04104-0658
YARDSTICKS
– Children in the Classroom ages 4 –14
A Resource for Parents and Teachers
Chip Wood
Northeast Foundation for Children, Inc.
71 Montague City Rd
Greenfield, Ma 01301
Cooperative
Learning and Motivation Across the Curriculum
Susan Finney
Good Apple
1204 Buchanan St. Box 299
Carthage, IL 62321-0299
Face Forward
– Young African American Men in a Critical Age
Julian C. R. Okwu
Chronicle Books
85 Second Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
Empowering
African-American Males to Succeed
Mychal Wynn
Rising Sun Publishing
1012 Fair Oaks Boulevard
South Pasadena, California 91030
You Can Handle
Them All ( A quick reference guide for handling 117 different misbehaviors at school and
at home)Quick Action Card Deck
Robert L. DeBruyn and Jack Larson
The Master Teacher
Leadership Lane
P. O. Box 1207
Manhattan, Kansas 66505-1207
The
Pre-Referral Intervention Manual (PRIM)- the most common learning and behavior problems
encountered in the educational environment
Stephen B. McCarney, Ed.D., Kathy Cummins Wunderlich, M.Ed.
&Angela M. Bauer, M.Ed.
800 Gray Oak Drive
Columbia, MO 65201
Following
Directions – An Activity Pack
(20 reproducible masters & audio cassette)
Nancy Lobb
J. Weston Walch, Publisher
Portland, Maine 04104-0658
Our Other
Youth
Jerry Conrath (1986)
Gig Harbor, Washington
COMP Classroom
Organization & Management Program
Alene Harris
School of Education
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, Tennessee
Project Alert
BEST Foundation
RAND Corporation
1-800-ALERT-10
Circle of
Courage
Martin Brokerley, Steve Van Bochean and Larry Brendtro
Black Hills Seminars
NES Reclaiming Youth At-Risk
1-800-733-6786
Informing Parents
"There's
More Than One Way to Be Smart"
Quick Tips from the Parent Institute
P.O. Box 7474
Fairfax Station, VA 22039-7474
1-800-756-5525
"Teachers'
Learning Secrets to Use at Home
Quick Tips from the Parent Institute
"The Parent Involvement Facilitator" (home-school ties activities)
The Master Teacher, Inc
Leadership Lane
P. O. Box 1207
Manhattan, Kansas 66505-1207
Parents On
Your Side – A comprehensive parent involvement program for teachers
Lee Canter and Marlene Canter
P. O. Box 2113
Santa Monica, CA 90407-2113
Innovative Teaching Strategies
Using
Integrated Instructional Strategies to Accommodate Differing Learning Styles, Abilities,
and Interests
Imogene Forte and Sandra Schurr
Incentive Publications, Inc.
Nashville, TN
LionsQuest
Skills for Action
Quest International
1984 Coffman Road
Newark, OH 43055
1-800-446-2700
Multiple
Assessment for Multiple Intelligence
James Bellanca, Carolyn Chapman, & Elizabeth Swartz
IRI/skylight Training and Publishing, Inc.
2626 W. Clearbrook Dr.
Arlington Heights, IL 60005
Reading Styles
Training designed by Marie Carbo
National Reading Styles Institute
P. O. Box 39
Roslyn Heights, NY 11577
1-800-331-3117
FAX 1-516-248-8105
Deductive
Thinking Skills (Mind Benders)
Anita Harnadek
Critical Thinking Press and Software
Midwest Publications Co., Inc.
P. O. Box 448
Pacific Grove, CA 93950
Dr. DooRiddles
(Associative Reasoning Activities)
John H. Doolittle
Midwest Publications Co., Inc.
Pacific Grove, CA 93950
At-Risk
Students: Reaching and Teaching Them(1993)
Richard Sagor, Washington State University
Watersun Publishing Company, Inc.
Swampscott, Massachusetts
A School for
Healing: Alternative Strategies for Teaching At-Risk Students
Rosa Kennedy and Jerome Morton
Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York
"Reaching
the Tough to Teach"
The University of Georgia Center for Continuing Education
and Interactive Teaching Network
"True
Colors"
291 Boat Canyon Drive
Laguna Beach, CA 92651
1-800-422-4686
Life Skills
TRIBES - A New
Way of Learning and Being Together
Jeanne Gibbs
Center Source Systems, LLC
85 Liberty Ship Way, Suite 104
Sausalito, CA 04965
Lions Quest Skills
for Action
1984 Coffman Road
P. O. Box 4850
Newark, OH 43058-4850
1-800-446-2700
Creating the
Peaceable School -
A Comprehensive Program for Teaching Conflict Resolution
Richard J. Bodine, Donna K. Crawford and Fred Schrumpf
Research Press
2612 North Mattis Avenue
Champaign, IL 61821
Success is a
Thinking Skill
Cognitive Alternatives
P. O. Box 50462
Denton, Texas 76206
Communities
That Care
J. David Hawkins, Richard Catalano, Jr and Associates
Develomental Research and Programs, Inc.
130 Nickerson Suite 107
Seattle WA 98109
LST Life Skills
Training Program
Gilbert J. Botvin
Institute for Prevention Research
Cornell University Medical Center
411 East 69th Street Room KB 201
New York NY 10021
212-746-1270
Skillstreaming
the Adolescent
Ellen P. McGinnis and Arnold Goldstein
Research Press
217-352-3273
217-352-1221
"Character
COUNTS"
4640 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001, Dept. 50
Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6610
310-306-1868
The Prepare
Curriculum
Arnold P. Goldstein
Research Press
217-352-3273
217-352-1221