Just a few weeks ago, Northridge Academy High School had some trouble. Good trouble, but trouble nonetheless.
The school, which encompasses about 1,080 students across grades 9-12, needed to administer a critical SAT practice exam to grades 10-12, but doing so required all faculty hands on deck. The choice was either to be shorthanded for the testing or leave the freshmen—some 250 of them in 5 separate classrooms—in the lurch. Clearly, the latter couldn’t happen, so administrators reached out to PESA for help. Having a solid working relationship with the CBO, they asked if PESA could develop a day of educational programming for the 9th-graders—and provide staff to administer it. Despite having only one week to pull it off, PESA stepped up, creating an interactive, discussion-based program, drawing from several existing educational presentations.
"It was a little hectic given the short deadline,” says Dr. Michael Johnson, Director of Counseling/Intern Coordinator of PESA. “But with the deep well of educational programming we've already developed, we weren't starting from scratch, it was more a matter of tailoring a meaningful day of learning for the students."
That programming Johnson is referring to is a suite of presentations on subjects that PESA deems critical to an informed community but which students aren’t necessarily exposed to through their normal curriculum. Topics range from social issues (tolerance, understanding disabilities, the importance of community service) to health and well being (body image, coping skills, peer pressure) to contemporary matters (climate change, history of 9/11, world hunger), and all are available to educators and their students upon request.