You may not guess it from the look of things today, but ten years ago in St. Louis Park, MN, birthplace of the Healthy Communities • Healthy Youth initiative, 44% of all 9th graders were failing one or more of their classes. This worrisome fact prompted action. By the ’05-’06 school year, this number had gone down to less than 21% of 9th graders failing one or more classes. The question is, what happened in the time between? The answer is that the Building Assets-Reducing Risks program was instituted, and program coordinator Angela Jerabek is hopeful that the program will soon receive NREPP (National Registry of Evidence- based Programs and Practices) approval, which would put it on the list of “proven practices” which are allowed to use federal grant dollars.
Back in 1999, the statistics about failure rates and a number of risk behaviors prompted dedicated staff to figure out what they could do to change the situation. At that time, thanks to the already existing Children First initiative, most of the teachers knew what the Developmental Assets were but were not extensively using the asset framework in their classrooms. “Teachers were familiar with the assets but they had difficulty trying to figure out a concrete way to apply them to their own situations and figure out why the assets were important,” says Jerabek.
What the staff decided to do was to completely restructure the 9th grade system. The idea was to create a more close-knit community that these incoming 9th graders could use as a support system as they learned the ropes at the high school. Class size was reduced for core classes, with no more than 25 students per class, and all 9th grade classes were reorganized into blocks with three classes per block. In these smaller classes and blocks, 9th graders learned about the Developmental Assets and were able to increase attachment and commitment to school through their participation in a more tight-knit group of students. Once a week in their smaller classes staff and students were to engage in “I-Time,” non-curricular time in which everyone could talk about social and emotional issues such as chemical awareness, self-respect and grief and participate in a variety of exercises designed to build social skills.
After just one year, the school was seeing results. The project has since been evaluated by several external evaluators, all of whom have been impressed by what they have seen. “It’s been a highly successful project,” said Anu Sharma, an evaluator from the Minnesota Institute of Public Health. “I think it’s had a significant impact on the school, the students and teachers. I think it’s achieved something that no other project has but many try. It’s cut the failure rates in half.”¹
And this is just one of the many reasons that Jerabek and her fellow school staff decided that they were really onto something- and should let other people know about it. Evaluation also showed declines in several of the risk behaviors which are targeted by the program.
In January of 2007 they submitted their application to the National Registry of Evidence- based Programs and Practices for the Building Assets-Reducing Risks program in the hope that they could get the program listed on the NREPP list of approved programs. With the program on the list, schools and communities across the country would be able to purchase the program with federal grant dollars- an honor that is reserved for pre-approved programs. The program has cleared the initial steps of the review process, and Jerabek is hopeful that the program will be approved sometime in the next year.
Angela Jerabek, Program Developer and 9th grade Program Coordinator for the Building Assets-Reducing Risks program, can be reached by phone at (952) 928-6129 and by email at ajerabek4@msn.com
¹ Taken from the Minnesota Sun newspaper article, “Changing perception meant changing the system,” Teri Kelsh, Minnesota Sun, Nov. 13, 2003
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