Successful School Transitions
It can be stressful when your child is struggling and you don’t have the answers. “Helpful advice” and typical parenting strategies don’t seem to work.
To make sense of your child’s confusing behaviors and move them toward school, we offer an array of services tailored to your family. This begins with Assessment & Plan Creation and may be followed by Intensive Treatment Options. For individuals and professionals who need one time support, we provide Consultation to share our expertise and offer targeted strategies.
The First Step with Us
To best address what’s going on with your child, it’s critical to understand their resistance to school and begin to identify the important factors maintaining and amplifying this. We also want to understand where and how your family is already receiving support and what gaps need to be filled. In order to determine which services are the best fit for you, we meet with families for a 60 minute intake and follow up with a 45 minute feedback and Q & A session.
Assessment & Plan Creation
It is critical to have clear understanding of the psychological, social, and learning challenges driving school refusal and avoidance.
Our Assessment Service does just that.
Our assessment process is based on the most up to date research and recommendations from experts in the field. After the assessment, a plan for your child is tailored to help remove immediate and future obstacles and to identify critical academic work that may be outstanding or missing.
Our assessment process:
We offer three different tiers to our Assessment Service based on your level of need. For more information, CLICK HERE.
Review of past IQ, psychological or neuropsychological testing
Questionnaires and rating scales
Collaborating with outside professionals
Review of IEPs and other school documents
Observations of your child during key times of difficulty
Interacting and questioning you and your child
Brief medical history
Specific information we will ask you to keep track of for a brief period of time
Your child’s plan to success:
Recommended changes to meet your family’s urgent needs, structured routines, and strategies for long-term changes to support your child’s growth and success.
Therapeutic Treatment Plan to address underlying conditions and disorders
Concrete changes within the home
Incorporation of other professionals such as coaches, specialists, education advocates
School coordination to guide working with school staff
Recommended educational materials so you can best understand your child’s challenges
Identifying parent support networks, Identifying your child’s support network and how they can access it effectively.
Treatment Options
Given the many causes of school refusal, treatment will look somewhat different depending on what is driving your child’s avoidance behaviors. Families also come to us with different established treatment histories. Regardless of your providers, we can collaborate on the creation and execution of a therapeutic treatment plan.
Often, families require ongoing coordination and a leader to guide that coordination with what is going on in school, therapy, and at home. We can provide that coordination and leadership for you in a way specifically tailored to your family’s needs.
Short Term Intensive Therapy.
Designed to create momentum and immediate results, our Intensive Therapeutic Service will include multiple therapy sessions per week of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). When applicable, intensive therapy will include these science backed strategies and skills: learning about why school refusal and avoidance happened, Motivational Interviewing, Exposure Therapy, Problem-Solving, Self-Advocacy, Emotion Regulation, Distress Tolerance, and Mindfulness skills. The frequency and intensity of treatment sessions are based on the needs and schedule of your child and family. Short term Intensive therapy can serve as an adjunct to already occurring therapy.
Recommended Therapy & Supports
Versed in the most effective treatments for different conditions, we may recommend outside providers who are experts in specific conditions and disorders. We will work with you to identify the right provider for your child (either in your insurance network or part of our recommended providers). Family therapy/Parenting work may be recommended to help you support adaptive coping in your child. If you are already working with a therapist, tutor, or coach, we will review our Assessment and Plan with them. By working as a team in learning and putting into practice a new plan and skills, your child will be able to move forward.
Parenting Bootcamp
Parenting is always a balancing act, even more so when your child is struggling to attend or to stay in school. With school refusal behaviors, natural parenting instincts may backfire and in most cases, exacerbate the situation. In this vicious cycle, your child quickly learns to stay away from school and you are left feeling increasingly frustrated, confused and angry. Our Parenting Bootcamp will provide you with three sets of core skills to ignite the process of getting your child back into school: Set 1: Understanding “the school refusal trap” and how to respond differently; Set 2: remaining calm, in control and thus able to use consistent strategies and access resources: and, Set 3: Guiding your child's behaviors through routines and meaningful reward systems, all tailored to your child's specific underlying struggles.
Ongoing Parenting Support
With COVID, parents are no longer “just” caregivers, but in many situations have been placed in the roles of educator, tutor, and executive functioning coach. This creates additional pressures on parents and stress within the parent-child relationship. Since parenting is in and of itself a full time job, our mission is to support you in the role of caregiver, focusing on the relationship and interactions between you and your child. We help you in your pursuit of being a compassionate parent who simultaneously supports your child engage in approach behaviors. It can be overwhelming to implement, maintain, and modify the necessary routines and reward systems, as well as make school related decisions. We can provide you with emotional support, individually or in a small group, to help put you back in the driver’s seat.
Consultation Services
Short Term Consultation
For people in established treatment with a long term provider, Consultation with Successful School Transitions may make the most sense for your family. While your therapist is an expert in treating your child, SST can bring targeted expertise in school refusal and avoidance behaviors to optimize your child’s treatment plan and coordination with the school. The Consultation process will be individualized to meet your exact needs. We know time is of the essence; we will leverage our expertise to bring about the quickest and most successful change for your child.
Ongoing Coordination & Consultation
If after our assessment and initiation of a clear plan your family require us to lead ongoing coordination with school staff, therapy professionals, and what is happening at home we can do so. This can include weekly meetings with relevant stakeholders as well as with your family.