The Start of a New Year in PA....

At the start of a new year we have some new students and some returning students back to work in Public Achievement again.  Our returning students have struggled at the beginning of the year since they have repeated the democratic process of deciding on an issue and have chosen 2 completely new issues. Going through the process of meeting new coaches and working in new teams has led to some growing pains. The students are working to find their roles in these new situations.

The two issues selected this year are: bullying and working with kids who are hospitalized.

These are two difficult and complex issues that the students are spending time exploring along with learning to work as a team and with new adults in their lives.

Welcome!

Hello Fellow PAer’s!

            Welcome to our blog—Radical Change in the Midst of Mediocrity.  Hopefully we are doing what we can to live up to that title…

The idea for this blog came about when a group of us from Augsburg College attended the national ADP in Orlando, Fl back in June of 2011. We had attended the conference as an opportunity to share our work- and the work of my students- with other groups looking for new ways to bring Public Achievement alive in their own parts of the world. 

Public Achievement has been around for awhile so you may be wondering what made us feel we could make the bold claim of radical change.  Our new twist on PA was bringing it to students with special needs.  More specifically, we were “PAing” with students with Emotional Behavioral Disabilities currently being serviced at a federal setting III (if you are not familiar with K-12 education there will be a future post explaining this further).

We were overwhelmed with the response to our work during our pilot year and were met with many requests for further information about our work so…here’s the blog!