By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Confident the best treatment is prevention, the National Masonic Foundation for Children developed the Masonic Model Student Assistance Program (MMSAP) to help teachers identify and help at-risk students.
Masons believe today's youth are in danger of falling through the cracks.
Problems such as chemical dependency, depression, suicide and violence among children hinder American families every day.
That's why Masons from Peninsular Lodge 10 in Dowagiac were at Southwestern Michigan College's Mathews Conference Center Wednesday for the first of three days with national trainers and three dozen educators from Dowagiac, Hartford, Lawrence, Lawton, Decatur and Edwardsburg.
Team-building participants include counselors, teachers, administrators and school nurses.
While it's new to southwest Michigan, one of the trainers is Larry Newman of California, who in 1985 co-founded the program in Pennsylvania, then took it national in 1989.
He's been a Mason for 13 years. "They're just people who want to help in their communities, which is what I do for a living," he said.
Newman's colleague, Mike Codori of Rockville, Md., joined the Masons six years ago.
Newman formerly worked for the Department of Education in Pennsylvania.
"Along with staff, we developed a program for our schools, which in 1985 the Masons began to fund," Newman said. "I've done training in 24 or 25 different states and portions of Canada. We've trained over 35,000 teachers, impacting over half a million kids."
"It's real intense," Newman said. "We bring teams of people together that the local (Masons) gather from various places. We give them a structure and a model that we've been working with for twentysome years. It's not a cookie cutter, so they tweak it to make it work in their community. When they leave here they have a team to go back to their schools."
Codori had just finished a school bullying session leading up to the afternoon break.
Newman finished the first day talking about suicide and depression.
"We started this morning with some questions," Newman said. "What does the term 'at-risk' mean to you? What does at-risk behavior look like in your school? What do you think your school could do better in terms of addressing at-risk behavior?
"Today's a hard day for them because we look at all the bad stuff, if you will, that kids are bringing into school. (Today) we build the skill sets necessary to go back, although we have also given them some stuff today that's pretty positive."
"I think we're getting better at diagnosing it," Newman said about the prevalence of depression.
"I was watching a segment on 'Good Morning America' a month or so again and their medical guy, Tim Johnson, said when they asked him that question that he's concerned it's becoming like ADD or ADHD. I think we're seeing an increase, but primarily because we're recognizing it in younger kids. I don't know that we did that before."
"Kids in schools have all these factors impacting on them," Codori continued. "Family situations, their own behaviors, siblings, poverty, any one of a number of things. Elementary kids and secondary kids are manifesting similar behaviors, maybe for different reasons. High school kids may be using substances. These are not special education students, but regular kids whose performance is diminishing – socially, personally, psychologically, educationally. People can see these specific behaviors, where it wasn't this way six months ago. What's happening?"
Teams gather data (grades, attendance, staff feedback, sleeping in class, failure to turn in work, social isolation from peers) from people who know the child, including parents, to assess the situation and pinpoint particular problems.
Then teams develop "action plans" which address the issues in a confidential school setting.
"These people come together periodically as frequently as they can and talk about these cases and develop these confidential action plans," Codori explained. "It's a collaborative effort. The team is an aggregate of people on the staff, usually volunteers, who are approached individually and trained in this way. At their meetings they receive concerns from staff members who work with these children every day. They send a referral saying they don't know what the problem is, but that they're concerned for this kid based on what they see. The team collects data from the various source people in the school and the parents who have access to that child and know that child well. The team brings it all together in a holistic fashion for a complete picture with which to fashion an action plan.
"It could be a plan within the school to use existing resources, it could be a plan to outsource to a treatment center if the issue is drugs or alcohol, it could be a family services or social services facility. That's why we encourage them to become familiar with what services are available in the community," Codori said.
"The team concept is one of the mainstays of this program," Codori said. "They don't have to be experts in anything – just concerned about the kid. They're educators, but they're not experts in identifying addiction issues or psychological issues.
" 'From womb to tomb,' " he says of the modern teacher as social worker.
"The accountability issue with testing for No Child Left Behind forces schools to excel at a higher standard all the time and keep growing," Codori said. "Many of these kids get left out because they're the kids who may impact upon the schools' test scores. Let's work with these kids and get these kids feeling better about themselves so their achievement increases and their success improves. It's not rocket science.
"School systems have been mandated by No Child Left Behind and the principals are under the gun to meet certain standards. Sometimes, because of mandates, these kids get left out. This team provides a haven for receiving concerns about this child and helping them get better."
Codori retired in 1995 after 29 years.
"I'm a career educator," he said. "Teacher for 14 years, administrator for 15 and intervention specialist three days a week in the Safe and Drug-Free Schools Office (of Montgomery County, which had 65 teams and is a northeastern suburb of Washington, D.C., plagued by sniper shootings six years ago) for 10 part-time after that.
" I'm past president of the Maryland Student Assistance Program. Maryland's program was modeled after (Larry's) program. We sent people to Pennsylvania in 1987 to be trained in his model. I only got into it in 1993 when I was an assistant high school principal and we formed a Student Assistance Team. I was so enthralled with the program I stayed with it. I've written some books on student assistance and, like Larry, I have a passion for the process because I think it's an unobtrusive way to help some kids. The confidentiality of the program is one of its key components. Other members of the staff who are not members of the Student Assistance Team don't know what's going on with that kid. That privacy aspect encourages the kids to continue to get help."
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