When Liz Matola sees staff and students in the Transitions Therapeutic School laughing, she knows something deeper is going on.
“I see strong relationships; I see the staff enjoying their craft, and the kids feeling safe and happy and comfortable,” said Liz, who heads the school as its clinical coordinator.
Those things are not always easily achieved in such a school setting. Transitions, which is housed in St. Aemilian-Lakeside and just started its new school year, provides academic and therapeutic services to boys from 6 to 17 years. Most have experienced trauma, and each child must be evaluated according to his individual needs: academic, therapeutic, relational, developmental and emotional.
Ninety percent of the boys in this program are also in St. Aemilian-Lakeside’s residential program, where they reside on-site because of their serious emotional and behavioral challenges, and 10 percent are day students, referred because their emotional and behavioral needs cannot be met in a regular school. Because each is so different, what Liz calls a “recipe card” is provided for each boy.
“We may have 12 kids in a class on different academic levels, with different therapeutic needs, and different trauma histories,” she said. Although the school’s three classrooms do tend to break down by age, the boys are grouped based on therapeutic, developmental and emotional as well as academic needs. “We try to place them where they will be most successful.”
With a teacher and two support staff in each classroom, the focus is on each child’s individual strengths and mastering skills, so that he can go on to achieve more complex goals. Music, movement, rhythmic and repetitive activities that address a child’s past traumatic experiences by calming brain activity are part of the therapy conducted in classrooms to help the boys with self-regulation.
Boys are evaluated and reinforced every hour on their behavior, participation and treatment goals. As an incentive, they can earn rewards from candy or juice to T-shirts, crafts or games.
Because of the boys’ behavior issues, classes can become disruptive. But the staff avoid verbal sparring and instead participate in what Liz calls echoing: singing a song or clapping hands to re-engage the kids. Lesson plans can involve games and field trips, such as a visit to a museum.
All students receive therapy services to support their needs. The therapist who serves day students acts as a liaison with the home school district, the family and the organization purchasing the services. In addition to seeing the child a minimum of once a week individually, the therapist sits in on classrooms and works hands-on with the boys and helps facilitate transitioning them back to their home schools. Residential boys remain in Transitions school as long as they require residential services, and they also earn credits that transfer to outside schools after they leave.
Liz is celebrating one year as the head of the school, the first licensed clinical social worker in this job. She says the school is unlike a lot of other programs, with its combined academic and therapeutic focus and implementing trauma informed care so heavily. For more information on trauma informed care, click here. http://www.st-al.org/trauma-informed-care/ She said Transitions’ work to translate what is done there into an outside school setting to help ensure success after the boy leaves sets it apart.
In the past year she has seen a “more stable, healthy and safe therapeutic and academic environment. Our team is achieving the ability to teach students who weren’t regulated enough (emotionally and behaviorally) to feel safe and comfortable learning.”
And the staff remain future-focused, she said, always talking about ideas and how they can use them to expand their abilities. “Even when they are making progress, they always see that there is room to take things to the next level.”
Academic achievement, measured by testing upon a boy’s discharge, is way up and parents are reporting changes in their sons they never have seen before, Liz said. All of this makes her really proud. One particular success story has really moved her.
A boy in middle school has been in Transitions longer than the typical stay, now into his second school year. Liz said she used to think the sooner a boy moved on the better.
“This boy has made more progress than I ever thought he would make,” she said. Because of the individualized work with him, in therapy and in the classroom, plus relationships staff built with the boy, a kid who used to have extremely aggressive behavior, problems interacting with women, and social difficulties so severe that he hated being touched will now shake a hand, look someone in they eye, and interacts positively with her and other female staff.
“His grandmother says she thanks us every day, because she knows how challenging he can be. And that’s ultimately what this is all about.”
