By Bill Mallon

Special to the Harvard Features Service

Today was an ordinary school day. Six children and youths killed themselves. Over 340 teenagers were arrested for violent crimes. Almost 3,400 students dropped out of high school. Another 13,000 public school students were suspended.

These alarming statistics illustrate the damaging effects of three decades of decline in traditional institutions designed to support our most at-risk children -- the family, the neighborhood community, the house of worship. Existing institutions, such as schools, are left with the overwhelming problem of assisting youngsters who need support and intervention.

For Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Robert L. Selman, the answer to this problem is to stop asking schools to address every social ill. "Typically, resources are put into problem-based amelioration like drug rehab or GED classes," Selman says. "Our whole idea is to shift the emphasis from treatment and cure to prevention. We have so many more opportunities before the crises hit, before we have a drop-out problem, a drug problem, a kid who can't read."

To shift this paradigm, Selman established the Risk and Prevention program in 1992. The program represents a change in focus from a traditional "rehabilitation" model -- which diagnoses and treats children already in trouble -- to an "early intervention prevention" model, in which professionals help children and youth at-risk to develop resilience to the problems they face.

"We are training new professionals to provide a child with the social supports and competencies he or she needs to make healthy life choices and to succeed academically," says Selman. "Academic improvement is a primary goal of our work, because we view this as central to youths' ability to succeed in adult life." Selman heads the R&P program, which includes Human Development faculty members Gil Noam, Catherine Ayoub, and Michael Nakkula.

The Risk and Prevention program, the only one of its kind in the nation, currently enrolls 65 master's and certificate of advanced study students and boasts over 200 alumni. Students enroll in classes drawn from education, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and public health. The heart of the program is a yearlong practicum, in which students gain community experience -- largely in school settings -- and leadership experience that they will carry with them into their careers.

The following recent alumni are making the R&P faculty's dream of a new cadre of professionals a reality. Their varied work sites reflect their unique experiences, perspectives, and expertise, as well as their focus on different ages and populations. At the same time, they share common elements. By adapting the early intervention model in different settings, they are realizing the goal of the R&P program: to foster psychological resilience within children and to reduce risk by building social supports around them.

Kristin Carvill

Violence Prevention

Kristin M. Carvill, who earned her Ed.M. from Harvard in 1996, hopes to reduce physical fights in school by focusing on prevention, not punishment. She works with 270 fourth- and fifth-graders at Moton Elementary School in Brooksville, Florida, spending 45 minutes in each of 11 classes every week. She teaches a classroom-based violence-prevention curriculum, focusing on three broad competencies: empathy training, impulse control, and anger management.

"Many of the students lack skills in these areas," Carvill explains. "They need to learn how to identify with the feelings of others and how to solve problems without fists. I work with them to develop a personalized anger management plan that identifies their anger signs and triggers and helps them come up with methods of calming down when they feel angry."

Carvill has her work cut out for her. Moton Elementary School has the highest number of disciplinary referrals, the lowest records of self-esteem, and the highest absentee rate in Hernando County. Students at Moton are among the poorest in the county. Some 85 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches and 100 percent qualify for free breakfasts.

To help reverse these trends, Hernando County started in 1996 a violence-prevention program, Hi-Five Hernando, in collaboration with Eckerd Family Youth Alternatives Inc., a private, youth-oriented, nonprofit organization. Carvill joined Eckerd and began the program at Moton last August. The program is the first of its kind in the county.

For a lesson on empathy training in one of her fourth-grade classes, Carvill uses a figure of a boy made out of paper that is divided into several pieces. The biggest piece, his body, is in the shape of a red heart. "This is Jimmy," Carvill tells the class. "He got into a fight on the way to school and he didn't pass a test. He's so down-and-out that he's in pieces."

Carvill then asks the class to focus on the positive aspects of Jimmy's life and, by extension, of their own. "The way we treat others is a direct result of how others treat us," Carvill says. "These students' behaviors stem from how they have been treated. Together, we focus on making positive rather than negative choices, as well as building self-confidence so that they are more likely to treat others more kindly, more empathically."

Carvill also works once a week with Moton's physical education classes. As a trained facilitator in low-and-high ropes courses, she combines team building and recreational activities to teach trust, problem-solving, communication skills, and personal responsibility.

Although the success of the program will be evaluated in quantitative measures, such as the reduction of suspensions and fights, Carvill also focuses on the changes in individual children, like the boy who has gone from complete disengagement to active participation in class. Other informal assessments show brightly colored promise: her office walls are covered with drawings by her students. "You're the coolest teacher," says one. Her colleagues must agree: after only three months on the job, Carvill was nominated as Moton's Teacher of the Year. She was recently recognized for her outstanding work with youth by the Hernando County Juvenile Justice Council.

"This work is about soul," Carvill says. "It's about forming personal relationships. The textbooks say it's a high burnout profession, but I say it's a sheer joy."

Tania Altamirano

Helping Families Help Themselves

While Kristin Carvill works with individual students, Tania L. Altamirano, who earned her Ed.M. from Harvard in 1996, focuses on the whole family. Altamirano is the executive director of Families in Transition (FIT), a nonprofit social-service organization that assists low-income families in East Palo Alto, California.

East Palo Alto is a diverse community made up of about 40 percent African Americans, 40 percent Latinos, and 12 percent Pacific Islanders. It's also the poorest city in San Mateo County. But the city is trying to make strides in economic and social development. In 1992, East Palo Alto had one of the highest per capita murder rates in the country. Last year, the city suffered only one homicide.

Families in Transition has contributed to this positive change by helping families develop economic and social self-sufficiency. As executive director, Altamirano supervises the case management of the agency's social workers. She points to a typical case: "We've been working with a single-parent family in which the mother was moving from welfare to work. The family had been living in a garage, but we helped them find an apartment."

FIT also paid for part of the security deposit for the apartment, located furniture, found someone to donate a car so the mother could drive to work, helped her get a driver's license, paid the car insurance for the first six months, and is helping the kids find summer jobs.

"Now this family is in a very different economic position than six months ago," Altamirano says. "Hopefully, these changes will lead to a healthier family life, too."

Altamirano is also responsible for the management of an organization that was "at risk" itself. Founded in 1983, FIT was in need of reorganization when Altamirano arrived last June. Since then she has started to rebuild FIT by developing a plan of action, strengthening its existing programs, and beginning new ones. In addition to case management, Families in Transition coordinates a weekly forum for Latina women, runs ESL and literacy classes, and operates a food co-op. FIT, in collaboration with other agencies -- La Raza Centro Legal and the IRS -- offers free legal advice and tax assistance.

Altamirano also spends time with other community leaders in East Palo Alto. Convinced that collaboration among social-service organizations is key to successful intervention, Altamirano is committed to working with other nonprofit groups in the city. "This is a small community and it's easy to get to know people," says Altamirano. "But there is little meaningful collaboration among the social-service groups."

Altamirano believes that a community center would help solve this problem. "The nonprofits are located all over this city." Altamirano explains. "A community center would house many organizations in one building; for example, children's and adult education services, job training and referral, counseling, family violence, and substance abuse, among others." Families, in effect, could benefit from "one-stop" shopping for the services they need.

"Collaboration isn't easy. I'm finding that things move very slowly," Altamirano says. "But as social-service providers, we don't do much good if people don't take advantage of what we offer. Our big challenge is combining projects and coordinating activities to create a web of support so that families can be self-sufficient."

Fred Birkett

Creating a Sense of Security

Fred Birkett, who earned his Ed.M. from Harvard in 1995, focuses on developing resiliency in students by creating a safe environment for them. But he was in for a surprise when the Boston Renaissance Charter School Junior Academy's doors opened in September 1996. "We had a beautiful new building," he recalls. "I knew we had a great staff. I thought I could have a laissez-faire attitude about rules. 'We don't need to regulate when the kids use the bathroom,' I said. Well, the students practically destroyed the facilities. They came from schools where they hadn't learned to respect their school or themselves. They didn't have any ownership of the school."

Birkett, who is the former assistant headmaster of Boston Renaissance and director of its Junior Academy, quickly worked to change that attitude among the sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders by instituting a sense of discipline and structure. "We developed a culture at the school where there is an explicit link in rules, policies, and incentives," he says. For instance, students who behaved badly in or outside the classroom weren't allowed to play on the newly formed basketball team. To reward students for good behavior, Birkett and his staff created an activity session during the last period of the day when students could pursue interests like chess, dance, reading, computers, or even singing in a gospel choir.

Many of the students in the Junior Academy come from difficult family situations. "These kids are coming to school feeling hurt and sad because of the instability in their lives," explains Birkett. "They need to reach out to others, but they don't know how, so they tend to act out. It's the only way they know how to deal with their feelings."

Birkett strove to prevent further behavioral problems by creating a sense of security. "Kids want to be in a safe environment," he says. "They want to know that the teachers are covering their backs so they don't have to cover their own. The staff has to let the students know we're here for them, and we need them to care for themselves as well."

It is important to Birkett that the teachers demonstrate empathy and concern for the students. "When I began to hire teachers for the Junior Academy, I could have found competent teachers anywhere," he says. "My number-one goal was finding teachers who cared for kids. If the students think their teachers don't care, they turn them off. I didn't want that to happen."

A shift in student attitude hasn't occurred overnight. "It has taken three or four months," he says, "but slowly, we've begun to notice fewer problems. Students sense that their teachers respect them, that it's OK to follow the rules, that there are rewards for doing so and punishments for not."

Birkett sounds a recurrent theme of other alumni from the Risk and Prevention program. "My work is about effecting change," he says. "I see a need and I try to fill it." In this new profession of prevention specialists, effecting change is sometimes easier to say, harder to do. But the challenge of the work doesn't stop these R&P alums. With passion and excitement in his voice, Birkett repeats a phrase echoed by Carvill and Altamirano: "In my job, there are no Mondays. I look forward to every day."

Bill Mallon is a doctoral candidate in Administration Planning and Social Policy. This article originally appeared in the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Education Bulletin.