Timberlane schools take new approach to counseling

From the Eagle-Tribune;

Timberlane schools take new approach to counseling
By Meghan Carey
mcarey@eagletribune.com

PLAISTOW — The student assistance programs at Timberlane Regional middle and high schools are getting a slight makeover this month to focus more on at-risk students.

Counselors Kelley Binette and Tim Lena just finished training in Project Success, a model prevention program for teenage drug and alcohol abuse. Lena, who was trained in Project Success 20 years ago, secured a grant from the state Department of Education Safe and Drug-free Schools to get the program's founder, Ellen Morehouse, to come to New Hampshire at the end of September.

Lena and Binette are now working to target programs, from support groups to referrals for outside help, to a narrower population in the schools, Binette said. In the past, she was running mood management and divorce groups, as well as other wide-ranging, decision-making programs.

"That's not your role," Binette said she learned. "It's your role to intervene with kids living at a home where parents are using or are using themselves."

She's working with health teachers to see if she can do a handful of lessons with seventh-graders, and use it as an opportunity to identify some students to bring in for later assessment, Binette said. She also is talking with teachers about identifying and referring at-risk students.

At the high school, Lena said he also will "pare back" some programs to focus more on at-risk students.

"We're still going with a broad brush approach," he said. "We're not the substance abuse counselors."

Project Success includes a number of universal preventions, including social norming and counseling. Lena said he will continue checking in with students to see what worries them and to share where they can get help as part of his intervention process.

To do more social norming, he plans to have a "reality wall" exercise at the end of the month. Students will be encouraged to anonymously share stories they or friends have experienced while doing drugs or drinking that had harmful consequences.

"So often they believe it won't happen to them," Lena said. "But the chances aren't too remote."