There are nine elements that are absolutely necessary. In our particular program, we have a governance and management team, for example, as one of the nine.

That is because if you don’t have a well-organized school or system, if you’re doing it at a system level, if it’s not well-organized and managed and managed with a focus on support for child and adolescent development, then you have lots of problems. So governance and management is important.

If you don’t bring the parents in, in a systematic way, but just invite them in to do anything, or just to be present, you’re not going to get the most out of that. So we have a systematic parent participation program which includes being involved in decision-making, being involved in supporting all the activities in the school, and the like.

That decreases a lot of problems that occur from parents: discontent, worry, misunderstanding, and the like. Also, in schools you have all kinds of people who are supposed to be helpful: social workers, psychologists, special ed. You can just load the school with all kinds of people, but if they don’t have a way of systematically working with the school people and getting referrals and so on, if they’re not talking to each other, if they’re not talking to teachers, you’re going to have troubles.

And so we’ve worked out a school staff support team that works with the governance and management team, that works with parents, and so on, so that it works well. And each one of the elements of our program were then designed in that same way with recognizing that there’s an area of potential problem, and we created elements of the program to address that.

A no-fault policy, so that you don’t blame anybody, you focus on the problem. Consensus decision-making so that you don’t have to use power to make things happen, you try to think, “What works for kids?” Keep focus on kids, and everybody tries to come to consensus with a willingness to try somebody else’s notion if that doesn’t work. And then collaboration, having those things. And then the traditional things like a comprehensive school plan with the focus on both the social and the academic. Staff development based on what you identify as needs in the school. An assessment that allows you to identify.

So those nine elements all together touch all of the areas where you have potential problems, or create potential problems in schools, and if you can pull all that together, then you can decrease the problems, increase the focus on support for development so that the children can learn. You create a culture that allows them to learn.

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