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