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Alternatives Video Transcript

Developed by CSAP's Northeast Center for the Application of Prevention Technologies © 2002 Education Development Center, Inc. All rights reserved.

Narrator:
As communities around the country are learning, the key to effective prevention is to use multiple strategies in multiple settings for achieving one common goal. One important strategy is Alternatives. Across Ages, is an intergenerational program that has found different ways to bring young students together with older adults, their parents, and other family members.

Alternatives: Across Ages

Andrea S. Taylor, Director of Prevention Programs Temple University – Center for Intergenerational Learning:
Across Ages is an intergenerational approach to drug prevention, which targets sixth grade middle school students. The program was originated in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and coordinated by the Center for Intergenerational Learning at Temple University. It consists of four components.

1. Recruit older adults as mentors

The first and core feature of the program is, recruiting and training older adults who are 60 years of age and older, and matching them as mentors with sixth grade students.We provide fairly intensive in-service training for them and then match them with the students and monitor the relationships very carefully during the course of the school year.

1. Recruit older adults as mentors 2. Train teachers in Social Problem Solving curriculum

We also train the classroom teachers to implement the Social Problem Solving Curriculum, which was developed by Roger Weissberg and his colleagues at Yale University, and the teachers once trained then teach the lessons to the children on a weekly basis with support from the Across Ages staff.

1. Recruit older adults as mentors 2. Train teachers in Social Problem Solving curriculum 3. Community service

We also involve the children in community service, and they visit with residents in nursing homes, which is really in keeping with our philosophy about understanding people across the life span. And in this way, they become the providers of service to their elder partners in the nursing home, as well as the recipients of service from their mentors.

1. Recruit older adults as mentors 2. Train teachers in Social Problem Solving curriculum 3. Community service 4. Involve parents and other family members

The fourth component is involving parents, siblings, family members of the students in regular weekend activities, which is a way of helping them to really support the mentor youth relationships and also getting them involved in positive activities with their kids.

Deanda E. Logan, Project Manager, Experience Corps Program, Temple University, RSVP East:
My experience with the Across Ages Program has been probably one of the most rewarding aspects of my teaching experience. I saw first-hand how older adults can have such an impact on younger children. There’s a sense of love and a sense of respect and a sense of warmth that older adults are somehow able to impart so easily to younger children, and it has such a tremendous impact on the students, in terms of their emotional growth, their physical growth, and their academic growth.

Andrea S. Taylor:
And this kind of program really brings older people back into a central role in their communities, and gives them an opportunity to share what they’ve learned over the course of their lives. A program like this really gives them the chance to feel that their lives have had meaning. And I think it’s one of the reasons that the mentors become so involved and they stay with the program. We ask them to give four hours a week, in face to face time with the kids, they give far more than that. And I think it’s because they get as much out of the experience as the children do. And it gives the kid such an incredible perspective. Kids who often don’t think that they are going to survive, that they’re going to live to adulthood, and they see these older people, who’ve really overcome a lot of adversity, and it kind of gives them this sense that, you know, maybe I can do this too. But there’s also somebody there to help them to the next step.

Man and Boy sound bite:
Man:I am really happy that were having this opportunity to talk one on one and there have been a couple of things that I have been wanting to talk to you about, just you and me. And the first thing I want to know is, you haven’t called me for a long time. So what’s up with that?

Boy: I’ve been busy.

Andrea S. Taylor:
I think the other aspect of this is that this really is a program that can be very demanding on the classroom teachers. We were not able to pay them extra to participate in this. They did it really because they were motivated by wanting to do something for the children in their classrooms.

Narrator:
Besides motivation, there are other factors that contribute to successful implementation of the program.

Across Ages Guidelines for Successful Implementation: Meet with mentors before assignment to children

Deanda E. Logan:
One thing is its very important to meet the volunteers or the mentors prior to their meeting the children so you get a sense of what their personalities are. They all come to the table with a desire to work with children and to help children. Each of them have their own special gifts and talents, and experiences to share, so its very important for you as sort of the liaison to know who your mentors are, and what kinds of gifts and what kinds of talents they can share and that way you can better match them with the children that they’ll eventually be mentoring.

Across Ages Guidelines for Successful Implementation: Explain classroom rules, policies and culture

Another important piece is to make sure that the classroom rules, and classroom policies, are something that are clearly understood by the mentors. Many of these mentors have a sense of what school was like when they were younger, and of course, schools around today are very different, so its really important to acquaint them with, what the polices are, what the culture is, so that they’re familiar with the rhythms of the school which makes it easier for them to become acclimated to the ways schools are now.

Across Ages Measuring Results: Self-Perception Profile for Children Rand Well-Being Scale Reactions to Stress or Anxiety Problem Solving Efficacy Knowledge About Substance Abuse Reactions to Situations Involving Drug Use Measure of Substance Use

Andrea S. Taylor:
All of the children who participated in the program showed statistically significant positive changes on seven of the measures that we used. The children, however, who had the mentors did the best, so the changes for them were even more significant.

Across Ages Measuring Results: School Behavior Attendance increased Disruptive behavior decreased Grades improved

We also found that the children’s school related behaviors showed definite improvements, so their attendance increased their disruptive behavior in the classroom decreased and we began to see some improvement in grades. And I think that’s a particularly important finding. One of the things that we found was that the more intense the relationship between the mentor and the child, the better their school attendance was, and the less they got into trouble in school and even after school.

Student:
Smart kids like Tracy teach kids like me how to resolve conflict and how not to get into fights.

Second student:
I was about to fight somebody, but um, where I live at, some boy he got up into my face and said I was messing with his sister or something, I was like man I ain’t even going to fight you, I just took a deep breath and said, man I ain’t going to fight you and I went into the house.

Narrator:
Effective mentoring programs require careful planning and structure. In Across Ages, program planners established a strong context to develop and support mentoring activities.

Across Ages Establishing a Context for Successful Implementation

Andrea S. Taylor:
There are a lot of mentoring programs, they’re springing up all over the place now, mentoring is very trendy, but for the most part, people don’t realize the type of infrastructure that needs to be created in order to support a good program.

Across Ages Successful Mentoring Clear Idea of who will be a good mentor Careful screening process Adequate training Constant support

So you really have to be clear about who it is that you’re looking for, as a mentor, you have to be very careful about the screening process, you need to really adequately train them, and you need to provide constant, consistent support, and if you have those pieces in place, you’re much more likely to have a successful mentoring program. One of the challenges really is, how do you fit a program like this into the school day? And as I’ve been working with some of the other sites, one of the things that’s happened is that some of these components have been moved outside of school, so for example, some sites are doing the community service piece as an after school program. Some sites are also doing the life skills training as an after school program. I think that all of those things will work, provided they don’t lose the essence of the program. And the essence of the program is really older adults as mentors, and I think that if you really get the right people, you train them well, you support them well, that the project will work, regardless of where it is.

Parent:
He and his mentor get along excellent. I mean they go out, they have a good time, they go to different events. The mentor is very consistent with him. He has a wonderful time when he goes out with him and he looks forward to it. He does his chores. I have just noticed such a change in him. Across Ages has really been a godsend for my son.

Andrea S. Taylor:
Across Ages is a wonderful program, and I think it’s had a tremendous impact on the lives of many, many children, and many, many adults. I also believe that it’s one strategy, and that for a community to really address its drug prevention issues, or any number of things that it has to be, programs have to be incorporated as part of a broader design. So I think Across Ages has a very definite place in any community’s prevention efforts, but its not a program, for example, that’s appropriate for very young children, its not a program that’s necessarily is appropriate for older teens. I think it’s really designed to address issues for middle school students. Certainly it can go up or down the grades a little bit, but it really is not meant to be a panacea and a solution to everybody’s issues. But it is a program that lends itself, I think, to working in a variety of settings. It can work in a school setting, it can work as an after school program, it can work in a community setting. It can work in a church setting, and as such, I think it has a very important place in a community’s prevention plan.

Deanda E. Logan:
It didn’t work magic, it wasn’t a overnight success, it was something that you have to put in, you have to put something into the pot too, it just, you don’t just stand back and just watch all of this evolve on its own. So it does require some participation on your part, but what I find is that you’re happy to do this. It’s sort of a labor of love, in a sense because, you know that you’ll reap the benefits ten fold, and for some of my most needy children, this made all the difference in the world to them.

The transcript of the video Alternatives is taken from interviews conducted in 1999. The video series was developed as part of our training and technical assistance to the Northeast Region.

Executive Producer: Michael J. Rosati

Produced by Beacon Communications

Special thanks to Across Ages, Center for Intergenerational Learning, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The contents of this program are solely the responsibility of its authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Center for Substance Abuse Prevention.

Funding for this program was provided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, Cooperative Agreement No. 5U1JSP08133-03-1.