The 5 Best Ways to Save Money on School Assembly Programs
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...
Strong School Culture Can Be Developed Anywhere
“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...
TEEN TRUTH Welcomes Stephen Amundson
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...
A Fun Way to Raise Money for Your School
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!...
3 Reasons Activities Directors Quit
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...
How to Build an Inclusive Campus Culture
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...
3 Ways to Teach Your Teen How to Overcome Disappointment
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...
Goonies #NeverSayDie… What do your students say?
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...
3 Simple Ways After-School Can Help You
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...
7 Back to School Tips for Counselors
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 Welcomes Stephanie Lerner
Texas school counselors are outnumbered 500 students to one counselor. Where I grew up in California, the ratio is 900 to one. Your school probably faces the same challenge, which is overwhelming by itself. But when you add the... Social-emotional issues Career...
President Trump & Your School Culture
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...
End of School Year Promo
My dad, a teacher of 30+ years, once told me, “The three best things about being a teacher are winter break, spring break, and summer break.” Congratulations! You made it through another year! In a profession that suffers from so much burnout, it's so cool to know...
Save $1,800 on an SEL Program that Works!
I know cost is a major issue for schools, and that you are working within razor-thin budgets. That’s why I want to save you $1,800 in your school guidance efforts. The RISING UP Trainer Certification Course is ideal for school counselors, after-school...
I’m betting you need some support right now?
Last year, my friend Pete told me, “School culture is the first thing on every admin’s list. The problem is we have so much &@#$ 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 met on...
13 Reasons Why Teens Overcome Suicidal Thoughts
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...
Suicidal Teens: “13 Reasons 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...
Stay Vigilant & Normalize the Pressure
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...
What Kind of School Culture Will You Build?
“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....
Using Your Smartphone to Prevent Cyberbullying
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....