Trust moves in well before students get out of control

Tucked away in a place called The Depot in Lloyd Elsmore Park, Pakuranga, a community initiative may point the way to meeting the needs of "our forgotten children".

The Howpak Wrap-Around Charitable Trust takes youngsters from four colleges in Howick, Pakuranga and Botany Downs as soon as they start skipping classes or getting into trouble - well before the two terms out of school usually required to get them into alternative education.

Trust principal Michele Zackey, with 25 years' experience as a high school teacher, co-ordinated the area's alternative education consortium until she realised that she was picking up young people who had already been so damaged that it was a huge struggle to bring them on to a good path.

"The ethos for us is about early intervention," she says. "We don't want to see them suspended or expelled, so we challenged the schools to identify the students early."

She also works with the students' parents from the start. No student can get on to the Howpak programme without the parents' agreement, and the programme involves "multi-systemic therapy" tackling all the problems in the students' families and/or peer groups that led to their behaviour.

"Once you look into who's kicking chairs and throwing things and swearing, you see there are home and environmental problems," Ms Zackey says.

Her trust combines intensive teaching for the students, normally for 12 weeks funded by the four colleges, with a Ministry of Social Development contract to co-ordinate "Strengthening Families" services for their families.

"If you're a family of six crammed into a three-bedroom house, you're going to have tensions. So we've had great success through Housing NZ - you state your claim and tell them what needs to happen, and they will bend over backwards to try and support you," Ms Zackey says.

"Often there are entitlement problems which families are struggling with. You sit down with the integrated case managers from Work and Income and their problems can be sorted."

Specialist agencies such as Community Alcohol and Drug Services, anti-violence counsellors and Police Youth Aid are brought in if required.

Some students with serious addictions are referred to Odyssey House's residential programme. Surprisingly, she says, most of the 12 students she takes in every term make enough progress in 12 weeks to go back to college.

"If all the government signatories attend, and the family attend, you can normally resolve things," she says.

A common factor in all the other success stories in this series, in schools, alternative education, truancy services and the community, is that reaching alienated young people requires working with their families.

Principal Youth Court Judge Andrew Becroft says education and other social services cannot be compartmentalised.

"It's greater than an educational problem," he says. "Education didn't create it. It's a fallacy if we think that education can solve it."

But so far initiatives such as Howpak are ad-hoc. It gets $32,000 a year from its four colleges and $20,000 from Strengthening Families, but Ms Zackey, her one limited-authority teacher and four or five volunteers survive only with support from the Howick Rotary Club and constant funding applications, plus subsidised rent from the Manukau City Council.

Ms Zackey believes programmes such as hers could be even more effective with younger children.

"You can identify those problems at 6 or 7. We could really be working with primary schools," she says. "We have done a number of trials for the Ministry of Education. They are very keen to refer people to us. They just don't seem to know how to fund us."

SEEKING ANSWERS

Saturday: Alternative education.
Teens in Third World schooling
When the mainstream model doesn't fit
A far better alternative to dropping out
Monday: Truancy and dropouts.
School dropout levels fall over past 10 years
Tuesday: Issues of transience.
Message sinking in: switching schools bad for kids
Absenteeism often cry for help
Transient students struggle to catch up
Wednesday: Who kicks kids out?
Second chance works well for student
Expulsion seen as tool of last resort
Aorere strives to improve record
Today: What can be done?
Help for those who fall through cracks
Trust moves in well before students get out of control
Schools can't do it all on their own