The
College has always had lots and lots of kids come through
our doors who bring problems with them. Originally we had
a Counsellor, a Chaplain and a Nurse and each of those people
worked in isolation. And in a sense, you could say they
were working on the areas they were employed to work on,
so the nurse was doing the medical kinds of things and the
counsellor doing the counsellor kinds of things.
But,
gradually over a long period of time and with lots and lots
of experience we started to collect data about what the
situation actually is… how many kids come to us with
boils, how many kids come to us with scabies and how many
kids come to us with serious social, emotional or psychological
issues. When the Commonwealth Government started to develop
the IESIP outcomes approach and started talking about baseline
data, for me that was a really big step forward at the College.
That was when we realised we needed to actually collect
all this data and so we started to do it.
And
when we actually started to document what it was that we
were dealing with, we could see why we had teacher burnout.
Teachers would go through normal teacher training programs
and then into the classroom and all of a sudden, particularly
because we had residential students, they're not only being
teachers but they're being social workers, counsellors,
nurses, doctors, parents… The whole gamut of service
provision was in one person, who actually wasn't equipped
to work with those kinds of things and to help kids through
and yet they tried to. So while we had enormous good will
and enormous efforts being put in to try and help the huge
numbers of kids who were at risk.
So
we realised that the support services people were much too
isolated and they were some of the ones who were burning
out most quickly because they were actually confronted by
the problems and they were so isolated. We had to build
a team approach and we've now established a Student Services
Centre in the college.
The
statistics tell us that of 240 Indigenous students at our
school, at least two-thirds of them present with some sort
of physical, emotional, social or health issue. And these
issues are complex and require specialist skills to understand
what's going on and to be able to help. We've moved from
thinking that we're just an educational provider to understanding
that if we don't deal with these issues, or at least try
to work with other organisations to do specific things,
then the issues might never be addressed. And outside agencies
are under-resourced as well.
So
we've started to say, well we're a community and the issues
are being presented here, so we have to do something about
the situation.
The
Student Services Centre has a manager, who's the Head of
Student Services, two Chaplains, a Welfare Officer and a
Nurse and they're able to draw on other assistance when
they need it. But we're finding it's still not enough.
The
way it works is that in the normal school structure there
are home group teachers and 'house parents'. Students are
allocated to classes and to residences and so there are
people who are working with them on a daily basis. Of course,
there are behavioural and other consequences for inappropriate
behaviours. But if students start to present with particular
issues, the individual teacher will try and work with those,
but if things unravel and they find out more and more about
a situation, there are Level 1, 2, 3 and 4 structures for
both intervention and support services. That's where Student
Services comes in.
Depending
on the particular student, case management might include
talking with the parents (even if they are in a remote location)
and then there might be a diagnosis component and following
that we are able to work out individual management plans.
But
what it all comes to is that we actually have to get the
kinds of people in our school community who can access the
specialist skills that can help us deal with poverty, with
such low self esteem that kids are self harming, with suicide,
with drug and alcohol abuse. For many families, schools
are realistically going to be the place where these things
are actually identified. So schools have to position themselves
around not just the educational agenda, but the community
agenda and realise that we are centres of community.
In
my wildest dreams, I would like to have on campus a doctor
and a psychologist and perhaps a psychiatrist and probably
others as well. And I want all this available to every kid
who needs help.
I
resent it when I go to a meeting and someone implies that
the kids are not coming to school because schools are alien
places. In many cases now, schools are safe havens and it's
the world around them that is diabolical.
