Resources within USD # 253:
Topics of Interest:
Children & Grief CGEA offers great resources to help you support and care for children
who are grieving the loss of a loved one.
Ruby Payne's Information A series of downloadable articles about working with children and adults of poverty.
Main Page for 40 Developmental Assets
Children's Grief Reactions and expressions of grief vary at different levels of maturity. It helps to know how children express grief at various ages. As a child matures, he or she will “revisit” a loss, thinking about it with a new level of understanding. Your child may be moody for what seems to be no reason sometimes. It is possible he or she is thinking about and perhaps missing the loved one who is gone.
Kansas Resources State level family, health and assorted resources or contacts.
http://www.jimwrightonline.com/pdfdocs/prtutor/peerTutorManual.pdf Peers can often be successful in reaching students who might otherwise be resistant to adult efforts. This Peer Tutoring Manual offers some concrete suggestions for implementing a peeer tutoring program in your school or classroom.
Intervention Sites Many topics of interest are found on this page. The topics include behavioral issues and SIT related issues. There are many resources and ideas that can be shared with classroom teachers, school staff, or used on your own.
InterventionCentral.org Web Site
Documents for SIT taken from the Casitas Web Site:
http://www.jimwrightonline.com/pdfdocs/behcontr.pdf The behavior contract is a simple positive-reinforcement intervention that is widely used by teachers to change student behavior. The behavior contract spells out in detail the expectations of student and teacher (and sometimes parents) in carrying out the intervention plan, making it a useful planning document. Also, because the student usually has input into the conditions that are established within the contract for earning rewards, the student is more likely to be motivated to abide by the terms of the behavior contract than if those terms had been imposed by someone else.
Interventions: Creating Safe Playgrounds: A Whole-School Approach The following intervention package (adapted from Lewis et al., 1998 & Heck et al., 2001) teaches children appropriate rules for playground behavior and allows classrooms to earn rewards over time for positive behavior during recess. Playground monitors reinforce students for appropriate behavior, assign students to brief time-out as needed for misbehaving, and provide structure when needed by teaching studentsrules to games and organizing activities.
Interventions: Critters!: Rewarding Positive Behaviors This intervention rewards students for positive behaviors. It can be used with small groups or your entire class. Critters provides children with prize slips that they can redeem with the instructor for classroom privileges. This strategy uses the element of surprise and imaginatively designed reward slips as additional student motivators.
Interventions: Defiant Kids: Communication Tools Teachers cite conflicts with defiant and noncompliant students as being a primary cause of classroom disruption. In many schools, staff believe that student misbehavior is so pervasive that it seriously interferes with effective instruction. This article outlines important communication tools that teachers can use to defuse (or even prevent!) confrontations with students.
Interventions: Dodging the Power-Struggle Trap: Ideas for Teachers Here is a scenario that commonly unfolds in many schools: A student behaves in a way that 
disrupts the class. The teacher publicly reprimands the student for misbehaving. The student makes a disrespectful comment in return. The teacher approaches the student and in a loud voice tells the student that he "had better shape up" or "be kicked out of the class." The student responds by standing up and verbally abusing the teacher. The instructor calls for an administrator, who comes to the room and escorts the angry student to the office to be disciplined.
http://www.jimwrightonline.com/pdfdocs/behtrap.pdf
http://www.jimwrightonline.com/pdfdocs/peerreport.pdf Positive Peer Reporting is a clever classwide intervention strategy that was designed to address the socially rejected child who disrupts the class by seeking negative attention. Classmates earn points toward rewards for praising the problem student. The intervention appears to work because it gives the rejected student an incentive to act appropriately for positive attention and also encourages other students to note the target student's good behaviors rather than simply focusing on negative actions. Another useful side effect of positive peer reporting is that it gives all children in the classroom a chance to praise others-a useful skill for them to master! The Positive Peer Reporting strategy presented here is adapted from Ervin, Miller, & Friman (1996).
http://www.jimwrightonline.com/pdfdocs/vandalism.pdf Preventing Graffiti and Vandalism: Enlisting the Power of Classrooms
Sample Adopt-A-School-Location Poster
http://www.jimwrightonline.com/pdfdocs/bully/bullyprevent.pdf School bullying can be described as a situation in which one or more students (the 'bullies') sing
le out a child (the 'victim') and engage in behaviors intended to harm that child. A bully will frequently target the same victim repeatedly over time. A child who bullies can dominate the victim because the bully possesses more power than the victim. Compared to his or her victim, for example, the bully may be physically stronger or more intelligent, have a larger circle of friends, or possess a higher social standing. Bullying can inflict physical harm, emotional distress, and / or social embarrassment or humiliation.
http://www.jimwrightonline.com/pdfdocs/bully/bully.pdf Bullying in school is usually a hidden problem. The teaching staff typically is unaware of how widespread bullying is in their building and may not even recognize the seriousness of bullying incidents that do come to 
their attention. Teachers who are serious about reducing bullying behaviors must (1) assess the extent of the bullying problem in their classrooms, (2) ensure that the class understands what bullying is and why it is wrong, (3) confront any student engaged in bullying in a firm but fair manner, and (4) provide appropriate and consistent consequences for bullying
http://www.jimwrightonline.com/pdfdocs/bully/victim.pdf Children 
who are chronically bullied are often deeply unhappy in school, suffer from low self-esteem, and often find themselves socially rejected by their classmates as a result of the bullying. Teachers are likely to see another 'hidden' cost of bullying: as students are victimized, their grades frequently suffer.
http://www.jimwrightonline.com/pdfdocs/bully/bystander.pdf Most students in a classroom or school do not bully others regularly and are not victimized by bullies. A common misconception about these student 'bystanders', though, is that they typically remain 
neutral or try to support the victim when they see bullying occurring. Unfortunately, the truth is that students who observe bullying are much more likely to encourage or assist the bully than to attempt to help the victim! With appropriate instruction and guidance, however, bystanders can be empowered to take an active role in preventing bullying from occurring and to report bullying to adults when it does take place.
http://www.jimwrightonline.com/pdfdocs/bully/location.pdf Bullies
are opportunistic, preying upon students whom they perceive as weak. Bullying cannot take place, though, unless the bully has a setting or location in which he or she is able to exploit and hurt the victim. The far corner of a classroom, a deserted hallway, the bathroom: these are all locations in which bullying may happen. Places where bullying is common are frequently deserted or poorly supervised.
The good news, though, is that when adults are present to supervise a particular setting, intervene quickly when they witness bullying behavior, and provide fair and appropriate consequences to the bully for his or her misbehavior, the rate of bullying in that setting will plummet. A teacher can work with other school staff to put locations off-limits to bullies by first identifying where bullying most often occurs in the school and then providing increased levels of trained adult supervision in those settings.
Literacy Center Education NetworkT
Career Information and Resources:
State Profile NC SOICC, the North Carolina CRN, is a state interagency coordinating committee that oversees the SOICC staff’s development of high quality career information resources and provision of services for counselors, educators, and workforce development professionals. NC SOICC is committed to meeting the career development needs of North Carolina’s youth and adults in a cost effective fashion by leveraging resources and avoiding duplication of efforts.
Resources List A List of 87 resources that are available to support career development for all educators, not just school counselors.
Career Decision Making Tool Homepage The Career Decision-Making Tool (CDMT) helps teachers, counselors, and parents teach their students or children about education and careers using a six-step decision cycle. The tool shows students how to find a career that suits them, and get the education they need to pursue it.
WetFeet.com > Trusted career advice for your internship, job interview or job search Since 1994, job seekers have trusted WetFeet to help them research careers, search for jobs, write better resumes and prepare for interviews. We invite you to explore our extensive career library and our unique Insider Guides. This is a wonderful resource for introducing students to career options.
WetFeet.com > Research hiring practices, salaries and job advicefor your career search Learn about requirements, career tracks, the job outlook and compensation in these careers. Thirty nine career headings to choose from, each with a subset of career profiles.
Information for Parents: