Troubled Teen Director to Oversee Venture Academy’s Ontario Campus

Venture Academy for Troubled Teens has announced the hiring of Sean Elliott as Agency Director responsible for the school’s Ontario Campus.

Elliott will lead staff at the Ontario campus, the second Venture Academy campus designed to provide parents of troubled teens with an alternative to boot camp.

“I will be working with our team to bring about positive change in our youth and to help their families in family reintegration,” Elliot said. “We are primarily helping families who are simply not getting answers to the questions they seek; parents who are saying enough! Things are falling off the rails and we need help.’”

Elliott is an experienced career development practitioner with a bachelor’s degree from Tyndale University College in Toronto and a graduate certificate from George Brown College.

He has extensive experience working with youth with behavioural, emotional and substance abuse issues including experience leading a team that provided counselling and employment programs for at-risk youth. He has worked with municipal, provincial and federal levels of government, with private and public school boards, and with employment, career and counselling centres.

Venture Academy Founder and Executive Director Gordon Hay is pleased to have Elliott on board.

“Sean is a dedicated professional, passionate about leading our qualified team of professionals committed to strengthening families and restoring hope and support to youth making positive changes in their life,” Hay said.

Venture Academy for Troubled Teens is a residential treatment program with campuses in B.C. and Ontario. Both campuses serve families from throughout the US and Canada, including those in Alberta, Newfoundland, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and BC. For more information visit www.ventureacademy.ca.

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Troubled Teens Need Help Parents Can’t Provide

By Anne-Rachelle McHugh
Guest Blogger

In the late 90s, parents shocked by the Columbine High School shootings held their kids tight and asked themselves what they could do to protect their children from “monsters” with guns.

The question they should have been asking was “How do I keep my kid from becoming the troubled teen holding the gun?”

The sad reality is there have always been troubled teens that push their parents to the point where they are simply unable to cope with behaviour they can no longer tolerate.

So much so that in 2008, overwhelmed Nebraska parents took advantage of a vaguely written safe haven law that allowed them to abandon children as old as 19 without fear of prosecution.

In total, 36 children as old as 17 (most between the ages of 11 and 17) were abandoned before legislators plugged the legal loophole that allowed parents to give up on their struggling teens. The law was rewritten to reflect its original intent, which was to provide teen mothers with a safe place to leave newborns they couldn’t care for.

Children and Family Services Director Todd Landry said most parents who abandoned their teens were frustrated by their child's behaviour or inability to follow rules.

“I'm a parent of a teenager myself and so I can empathize with what many parents around our country go through with sometimes rebellious teenagers,” Landry told a local radio station.

The incident raised questions about the way social service agencies throughout North America deal with troubled teens, estimated at more than four million.

A report released in the wake of the Nebraska mix-up described mental healthcare services for adolescents as fragmented, inadequately coordinated, and insufficiently accessible.

The report, “Adolescent Services: Missing Opportunities,” said teens have unique problems that require care tailored services to their needs.

Venture Academy for Troubled Teens is one of a growing number of facilities dedicated to helping struggling teens in Canada.

Founder Gordon Hay has spent 23 years working with troubled youth and says lasting change requires long-term help involving a team of professionals.

“It’s not simply that the young person won’t try. It’s often that they can’t,” he says. “They aren’t making a conscious effort to rebel, or to be disobedient, in fact they may not even understand what it is they are supposed to do and how to achieve those goals.”

Hay says many teens with serious behavioural issues struggle with learning disabilities that affect every aspect of their life, not just their grades.

“Adults have expectations as to what a teen should be able to do at a given age and in many instances that cognitive ability just isn’t there. Perhaps there’s too many steps in the reasoning process or maybe the words are simply too big.”

Hay says understanding a teen’s thought processes is the first step in determining how their brain works and if they need learning modifications that will help them survive — and even thrive — in the challenging world teens must maneuver as they transition from child to adult.

“It’s not easy being a teen nowadays, nor easy being a parent, but there is help out there for those willing to reach out and ask for it,” Hay says.

Venture Academy for Troubled Teens is a residential treatment program that provides an alternative to boot camps for teens. Venture Academy has schools in Ontario and BC and serves families from through the US and Canada including those from Alberta, Newfoundland, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. For information, visit www.ventureacademy.ca.

Schools’ Overzealous In Use of Discipline to “Treat” Troubled Teens

Schools using discipline to deal with troubled teens are missing the opportunity to understand problem behaviour that must be identified before it can be fixed.

Psychologist Ross Greene says schools focus on disciplining teens when what they should do is identify lagging skills that keep troubled teens from behaving in the first place.

“We’re losing a lot of kids and a lot of teachers because we still view challenging kids the wrong way and handle them in ways that don’t address their true difficulties. It’s an exercise in frustration for everyone involved and it’s time to get off the treadmill.”

Green, author of `Lost at School: Why Our Kids With Behavioral Challenges Are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them,’ says school discipline isn’t working for the kids who are doing well and isn’t needed for the kids who are.

“The reality is that well-behaved students aren’t behaving themselves because of the school discipline program. They’ve behaving themselves because they have the skills to handle life’s challenges in an adaptive way.”

Greene believes kids do well if they can and says those that don’t do well lack important thinking skills that come naturally to other teens. He says challenging kids know how you want them to behave; they just don’t know how to.

“In other words, these kids have a development delay, a learning disability of sorts...in the same way that kids who are delayed in reading are having difficulty mastering the skills required for becoming proficient in reading, challenging kids are having difficulty mastering the skills required for becoming proficient in handling life’s social, emotional, and behavioural challenges.”

Greene recommends educators and parents use the Analysis of Lagging Skills and Unsolved problems (ALSUP) assessment, available online at www.lostatschool.org to identify what thinking skills a student lacks.

Skills often lagging – but ones that can be taught and practiced – include difficulty:

• Shifting from one task or mindset to another
• Persisting during challenging or tedious tasks
• Doing things in a logical order
• Maintaining focus
• Considering the likely outcome of an action
• Considering a range of solutions to a problem (rather than just one)
• Managing emotional responses to frustration
• Deviating from rules and routine
• Dealing with unpredictability or uncertainty
• Appreciating how he/she is being perceived by others
• Empathizing with others
• Seeking attention in appropriate ways

“Once you have a decent handle on a kid’s lagging skills and unsolved problems you’ve taken a major step in the right direction because the kid’s challenging episodes are now highly predictable, which is good news if you’re a teacher and have a class full of 25 other students,” Green says.”It’s also good news if you’re a parent who wants to play an active role in making sure things go better for your child at school.”

Additional information on Greene’s approach is available online at www.lostatschool.org and at www.livesinthebalance.org.