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...
Learn Parenting & Co-Parenting Strategies that Work In a complex world filled with challenges and increasing isolation, what would it look like for you to have tools to connect with and love your teen? Join us for the Austin film premiere of TEEN TRUTH: Parents...
The New Year offers all of us a fresh beginning. We’ve made the pledges to lose weight, call so-and-so more often, finally clean the garage, or any other series of goals, but I’ve found over the years that these resolutions often fade into the busy landscape of our...
We know the speakers you invite to your campus need to connect with your students, and over the past 10 years, we’ve employed many youth speakers who inspire positive change in students lives. However, no speaker has ever done as well as Jared Scott. His TEEN TRUTH:...
Visiting over 5,000 campuses has given TEEN TRUTH a unique insight into what it takes to build school culture. Even after just a minute or two of stepping into a school, we can generally feel the culture. We know within moments how engaged the students will be during...
When it comes to children, the smartphone has gotten a bum rap in the recent years. Adults have placed the blame for everything from bullying to low grades on the same technology that they rely on for daily business and family planning. Since there is no reason to...
Over the last 10 years I have visited more than 1,000 schools, and I can usually tell if a school has a positive school culture within minutes of stepping on campus. Research has proven that a positive school culture creates safer school communities, connects teens,...
This July we worked with Frisco ISD in what has turned into a landmark event for the RISING UP: Coaching Program. RISING UP, designed specifically to help school counselors extend guidance efforts across campus, will be implemented in 18 schools across the district...
This summer I was honored to serve as an adjunct instructor for Texas State University. Working directly through the Texas School Safety Center School-Based Law Enforcement Summits, we were able to bring TEEN TRUTH’s message to over 400 officers across Texas. As I...
When I started RISING UP in 2012, I wanted to create a program that would help students work through adversity. Having worked with TEEN TRUTH in the anti-bully / school culture development field for the last 10 years I felt that this was a need for both students and...
Imagine you’re standing in a school auditorium, and a young student tells you that they’re cutting to relieve the pain in their life, and that they are being abused by their step mom. Imagine that student tells you they’re thinking about suicide. Now…imagine...
