The thing that keeps me going in my job, even more than my love for my students, is the power of my community. You can love your students but still burn out on the difficult work that is teaching social/emotional skills and supporting students’ navigation through incredibly complicated lives. Without the community of educators, social workers and others who care about our students, I wouldn’t be able to do the work I do.

Our school has been participating the last two years in a conference of Vermont therapeutic school educators. While my local community at my school is strong, it adds even more to know that others are out there across my state doing the same type of work and facing the same challenges as I do. It strengthens my practice when I learn from other educators taking different approaches toward the same goal – or taking the same approach as I am, confirming what I know to be good work.

Now, I want to connect even more therapeutic school educators. Twitter has been a really powerful way for me to connect to other educators around the world, but I rarely see others in this space who are primarily working with at-risk youth in a therapeutic setting. Is that you? 

If so, I’d like to start by creating a list of those of us doing this work. Get in touch with your Twitter or blog info, or just say hi. I’d love to see an exchange of ideas, best practices, shared challenges and growth among us. At the very least, I think the power of knowing we are not alone doing this work will be beneficial to everyone involved.

So are you a therapeutic school educator or know someone else who is? Please leave a comment or email me at alex DOT shevrin AT gmail DOT com. I’d love to connect!