Self-Care Tips for School-Based Counselors, Admins & Staff The holiday season is upon us and self care is more important than ever. Many agree that this is the most stressful time of year to work in a school! Student behavior zooms all over the spectrum as...
Quick and Easy Daily Themes to Student Leadership How can I encourage excellent student leadership as an Activities Director? I ask myself that question every few months, and one of the most effective tools I’ve discovered is Daily Themes! Highly successful and...
Cyberbully Prevention With the rise of social media over the last decade, cyberbullying has become a huge problem for students and for schools. To follow up with my October post about bullying prevention, I thought it would be timely to explore the cyberbullying...
A Guide to Stopping Bullying at School As much as we don’t like to admit it, bullying is as prevalent in schools as gym class and homework. According to the Cyberbullying Research Center, school bullying rates have increased by 35% from 2016 to 2019. Sadly, some...
We all want maximum exposure for our big school activities, but sometimes people just don’t show! How can we draw interest in our next event from parents and students who already have a full schedule? That answer is in stacking several small events to lead up to your...
The 5 Best Ways to Save Money on School Assembly Programs $600 to bring a TEEN TRUTH assembly to your school would be a crazy deal, right? Well, that is exactly where we started. I was making most of the sales calls back then in 2006, and let me tell you, not everyone...
“Your school is too diverse for this to work.” “Your teachers are too dumb to pull it off.” “Your time, funding, and testing practices will stop you from making it happen.” As you might have guessed, I call total B.S. on those notions! Click here for this CNN article...
5 minutes! That’s all it takes for me to know if a school has strong culture or not. After visiting over 1,000 schools I can feel it. Great culture requires a strong admin team and a tightly connected community, but more often than not it is created by the Director of...
One of the biggest problems our school programs face is money. We have amazing teachers who want to do amazing things, but everything costs so much money! Cash shouldn’t get in the way of education, so here’s a great way to raise thousands of dollars in ONE NIGHT!...
The average Director of Activities (also know as Student Council Advisors) lasts for 3.5-years. Let’s take a moment to think about the significant implications this statistic offers in terms of building school culture. Honestly, if every 3.5-years a school is...
When building school culture it’s very important to understand WHO your activities are reaching and HOW often you are reaching different groups of people. Often times our activity programs are only reaching certain groups over and over, while neglecting...
Today’s teens are feeling increasingly overwhelmed, stressed and anxious, warns the American Psychological Association. In fact, many adolescents actually experience more stress than adults. Studies report that common reasons for this include high parental...
While searching for One-Eyed Willie’s Treasure, the Goonies hit all kinds of crazy obstacles: lethal traps, nasty gangsters, and bizarre riddles. But they carried a powerful motto: “Goonies never say die!” The Goonies emboldened millions of Generation X’ers with an...
You want to build school culture. You want to extend guidance. You want to improve grades and attendance. But you’re already working through lunch, balancing a razor-thin budget, and hacking through miles of red tape! What if I told you there was a solution to all...
Are you ready to start your year off right? If you are like me, the sight of a disorganized office or classroom is overwhelming and disorienting! And the knowledge of an unorganized counseling or teaching program is worse! For that reason, I have compiled a list of my...
TEEN TRUTH is heading into our 12th school year, and over that time we haven’t spoken much on politics. However, with recent education related changes coming down the pipe, and some of the frenzy that I see on Facebook amongst my educator friends, I feel the...
Last year, my friend Pete told me, “School culture is the first thing on every admin’s list. The problem is we have so much &@#$ to deal with, we never get the time to focus on it!” Those words struck me. They made me recall all the exhausted principals I’d...
I enjoyed my time in school and it troubles me deeply to see students in pain. In my work with TEEN TRUTH & RISING UP I have met suicidal students, and I have seen so many overcome negative thinking and adversity. So all this talk about Netflix’s 13 Reason’s Why...
In the new Netflix show “13 Reasons Why,” teenager Hannah Baker dies by suicide. Before she takes her own life, she makes a series of tapes expressing the reasons she did it. In her tapes, Hannah highlights bullying, rumors that were spread about her, and ways other...
She had the plans. She had the weapons. And judging by her journal, she had the motivation to commit the biggest school shooting since Columbine. Luckily someone stepped in and notified the authorities, neutralizing the threat and avoiding our next massacre. I can’t...
“Don’t do for students what they can do for themselves.” This philosophy was taught to me by one of my mentors, the great Kathleen Bethke, a wonderful educator and veteran after-school professional. Each time I’ve applied it, I’ve seen students grow in profound ways....
Nearly one-quarter of junior high school students and more than 15 percent of high school students reported being cyberbullied in 2015. And, since 2007, the number of people who have at some point in their lives experienced cyberbullying has almost doubled as of 2016....
I have often mentioned how visiting over 1,000 schools has helped me to develop our Student Ownership M.A.P., which is a time-tested theory that school culture can be easily built through your message, your activities, and your people. So I want to take a few moments...
Every school has a slogan. I assume your school has one as well, but is it working? In my book, Building School Culture From the Inside Out, I highlight the importance of a school slogan and discuss how just a few simple words can drive school culture and create...
