Get ready for the struggle session how to#

Thank you for all your hard work, for the extra steps you took, for the extra effort you made and the hours you gave. Your patience is unparalleled, your energy immense and your compassion remarkable. For all of you who have touched Christopher’s life, words of thanks are not nearly adequate.

Get ready for the struggle session how to#

A place that included the only adults who knew how to help him.

As for Christopher, he speaks of Monarch as the only place he has ever felt accepted. He spoke of a community, a place where students learned how to moderate, regulate and become aware of those around them. I remember some words Neal said when we first spoke with him. There were so many psychiatrists, neurologists, psychologists and medications that I have lost count. He had been shuffled through public school for a while, was asked not to return to private school, had several short-term hospital stays, and two lengthy residential treatment stays. He had no friends, no self-esteem and in many ways was alone in a world he did not understand. And who could blame him? No one understood him. ∺ll I can think of is ‘wow.’ When Christopher started at Monarch five years ago, he was a lost, angry and confused young teenager. - John Elder Robison, Author of 'Look Me in the Eye' and 'Be Different' Much of the Leader’s Guide was actually developed in conjunction with the students themselves doing so was a remarkable experience. Monarch’s greatest gift to me is probably the student perspective. From that beginning they went on to develop an excellent Leader’s Guide for Look Me in the Eye, and another for Be Different. Monarch was one of the first schools to adopt Look Me in the Eye, and one of the first schools to ask me to speak to its students. So I’m not a tenth-grade dropout anymore. For that realization, the Monarch School awarded me an honorary high school diploma in May of 2008.

Maybe I wouldn’t have felt the need to leave in tenth grade. Being there made me wish there had been schools like that when I was a kid. The difference between them and me in high school was striking. And in that safe world, the kids did not have the cornered animal look.

It was evident as soon as I stepped through the doors. I spoke there a few years ago and was immediately struck by the peaceful environment. The first school where I really felt a sense of safety was Monarch School, in Houston, Texas.