Student Support Services

Social and emotional well-being is a prerequisite for academic success. Juniper Ridge Community School is committed to providing a foundation for healthy learning by supporting those students who are experiencing challenges. This commitment is the foundation of the curriculum and the heart of our work at JRCS. We have adopted our Three Care Streams of Student Support process in order to provide as much support as possible for students who are experiencing social, disciplinary, or learning challenges. It is based on the work of Kim John Payne, who is respected worldwide for helping children, parents, and teachers navigate challenge as well as conflict.

Under the guidance of the Student Support Coordinator our school has three branches of
students support:

• Social Inclusion

• Discipline and Guidance

• Learning & Remedial Support

Underlying Premises of the Three Streams Work

• Accountability rather than blame. When things are going wrong we must set them right. Each person involved can take some responsibility. Empathy is key to success in life. Our interventions seek to build empathy in the children so that they can learn to stand in one another’s shoes.

•  A child who misbehaves is a disoriented child. If we realize that a child who is pushing the behavioral boundaries is disoriented, we approach the child differently – less punitively – than we do when we see their behaviors as intentionally naughty or disruptive.

• Conflict is a necessary part of being human. If we expect that we can remove all conflict from our children’s lives, we set ourselves up for frustration. Conflict is a given, and most of us have learned our greatest lessons from the conflicts we’ve experienced. Our task is to let children know that we are there, guiding them through their conflicts so that they may learn constructive lessons from them.

• Our task is to remove hindrances to learning. Children who experience learning challenges present us with a riddle: What is the key that unlocks their capacities? As educators and parents, our work is to seek these keys and support the child to find areas of success.

• We begin with implicit approaches before moving to explicit approaches. Implicit means “not directly expressed.” In other words, it’s a process that is there, but the children are not necessarily aware of it. The Waldorf curriculum is rich in implicit approaches to social and emotional challenges. In fact, much of the Three Care Streams work is not apparent to the parent body or the students because it is implicit – embedded in the stories, pictures, artwork, speech, music, theatre, and rhythms of the lessons. When the teacher tells the class a story about a character who could never forgive, and describes the hardships this caused him in his working life, this is an example of using a story to address the difficulties that one or more of her students is experiencing.

On the other hand, an explicit approach directly addresses a situation in the class or with an individual child. Explicit approaches range from “light touch” (“Children, is this a raising our hands and taking turns time, or is it a speaking out time?”) to “heavy touch” (possible a behavior change plan for an individual child). When we support a child, we begin with the lightest touch possible. If that doesn’t work, we move on to more explicit, heavier-touch approaches.