Webinar Transcript - May 2023
HHRF WEBINAR 5/14/2023 SCHOOL PROGRAMS WITH HORSES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSZW-b_GwIQ
https://horsesandhumans.networkforgood.com/events/55577-free-may-webinar-schools-horses-and-research
Octavia Brown: Welcome to this webinar which basically explores the idea of a school also being involved with an equine assisted services program in a general way. I’m not going to try to introduce everybody because they’re much better at it than I am. So, I’m going to ask each of you to give us about a five-minute rundown on how this works in your particular center. I think I’ll start with Deborah. Debbie, if you would tell us where you are and what you do.
https://stridestosuccess.org/ https://stridestosuccess.org/services/school-programs/
Debbie Anderson: Okay. My name is Debbie Anderson. I serve as the executive director at Strides to Success, which is located in Indianapolis. We are a 38-acre farm that is smack dab in the middle of the city and about 10 minutes from the airport. It has been an interesting journey being in that location because it has been rather convenient for schools, which we’ll talk a little bit later about some of the barriers that schools seem to have. Our program is a program where kids come in as part of their school day. They may just be there for about an hour-and-a-half, sometimes two hours. We like to get them as long as we can. It’s really interesting. We have been working in the schools for about 30 years. As we went in there, I had no teaching background, I had no PhDs, I had a PhD from the school of hard knocks and that’s about it, but a passion to serve the kids that were falling through the cracks. Walking into the schools not understanding any of the hierarchy, any of the red tape that you had to do, it was very eye-opening just to go in there in all of my innocence and observe what was going on. There were kids in in-school-suspension that were in rooms with their hoodies up and their heads down, and I thought what a waste, they sit there all day and that’s all they do. At the time, I was with a therapeutic writing center and we were desperate for volunteers, so we started out bringing those kiddos out of in-school-suspension, teaching them how to be a volunteer, how to serve others. It was amazing in six weeks’ time what would happen to their body language, to their confidence, to their self-worth. That’s kind of what started me on the journey to figure out how we can serve those kids. Those kids may not have had a diagnosis, many of them probably didn’t even have families that were very involved in their education. AllI knew is that they were failing and there was no reason for it other than they needed a different way to learn. That’s kind of how we got started. That led to a 30-year journey in really looking at what the schools needed, why they were failing, and how with our facility and our horses we could help. That has led to our work today.
Octavia: Great. You can discuss maybe later how your school day goes, because we’re going to go there later. Next, I’d like to call Michael. Michael, would you introduce yourself and tell us what your program looks like?
https://www.greenchimneys.org/ https://www.greenchimneys.org/therapeutic-special-education/
Michael Kaufmann: Hello, everybody. I recognize a lot of familiar names. It’s exciting to be here. Thank you, Horses and Humans Research Foundation. Currently, and for the last 18years, I’ve been the director of the human-animal interaction programs, the nature-based programs at a school called Green Chimneys in Brewster, New York. We’re about an hourand15 minutes outside of the city.
Green Chimneys as a facility was founded in 1947by Dr. and Mrs. Ross, who early on had this idea of running a school, of building a school in the country where children would be connected to animals and nature. All of these years later, we have grown. We serve 200 students in our main population, 100 are residential students and 100 roughly are day students. They all have psychiatric diagnoses. They are sent to us, both residentially and as day students, from school districts around New York state. These are children who have failed in their home district, either academically, mostly behaviorally and socially, and a higher level of care is needed, which is us. They come to Green Chimneys at ages 6 to 18, boys and girls, the majority are boys. The average length of stay right now is three years in the program. Some kids stay quite a bit longer, some shorter. We have a fully functioning PATH accredited center with about 20equines, but we also have animal programs that involve farm animals, wildlife rehabilitation, dogs, gardening, and horticulture, so there’s a whole lot of other nature-based programs. The concept is that the students go to school at Green Chimneys, we have a fully functioning regular school, but during the school day, and before and after the day, there are opportunities to learn at the farm, to play at the farm, and to participate helping take care of the animals at the farm. I think in a nutshell that’s kind of the history of Green Chimneys.
Octavia: I do have a question. Is your school also itself an accredited school as such in the New York system?
Michael: Yes. It’s in New York state, it’s a private school and recognized. We have to follow state standards. Of course, because of our students’ ability levels, oftentimes it’s a special education environment, so state testing and all is adjusted for that.
Octavia: Alright. Jo Anne...
https://brookhillfarm.org/ https://brookhillfarm.org/schooling-with-horses
Jo Anne Miller: We’re actually having a thunderstorm, which is killing my internet, so I do apologize for no picture, but at least I have sound. I am the executive director of Brook Hill Farm. We began our mission in 2001 of rescuing horses, and along the way we discovered the magic combination of horses and teens, how they help the at-risk teens develop life skills, enabling them to have success in school. Our youth have all kinds of challenges, such as emotional disabilities, learning disabilities, illnesses, eating disorders, trouble with the law and abuse, so they really fall into two categories; students with disabilities and students who are economically disadvantaged. The horses that work in our program all are from county seizures, are lame or no longer useful to their owners, making them unwanted. Professional staff at the Brook Hill School, we have three full-time credentialed teachers and a part-time counselor that run the academic program. The students range in grades from 9 to 12.We have a 100% graduation rate of our students. As a college professor of equine science, along with some of my colleagues, we wanted to know why we were being so successful. Really, we’re basing our program on Dr. Shazer’s solution-focused therapy model, which targets the solution rather than the situation that brought the person to treatment. We modified this theory to become solution-focused learning where the students focus on outcomes, identifying the long term goal of high school graduation. We as a staff design a positive roadmap toward the future by breaking down the goals into little pieces. The method is not therapy-based, rather it’s based on educational behavioral skills which help the students be successful in school. Our students are partnered with one rescue horse throughout their time in the program. We all know that horses can be motivators for them to stay in the program. Then we provide a teaching method that is action-based, allowing our students to interact with their environment, including the people, horses, and of course, the green space of the farm. With the help of the horses, the students learn skills to foster resilience, helping them to be able to have positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity. They build confidence and self-esteem, increase a sense of mastery and self-efficacy, and develop empathy through horses. They’re learning leadership, teamwork, a work ethic, confidence, relationship-building, and other essential life skills. Then we have college interns at the program hoping to encourage the kids to realize that they too can go to college. Our kids really ride well. We are a certified therapeutic riding center through PATH. We work with a credentialed educator, along with an equine specialist in mental health and learning. The difference with our program is our equine specialist also has a degree in child psychology, so she is able to identify the warning signs of youth in crisis and can work with the youth during the riding session. Our farm is a United States Pony Club center, using their curriculum for a riding program. Last year, five of our students earned the right to go to a horse show, and they went all the way up to the nationals and placed in the sixth in the nation over fences. I’m really proud to say not bad for at-risk youth on rescue horses.
Octavia: Was that through interscholastic?
Jo Anne: No. United States Pony Club.
Octavia: I see. That’s great.
Jo Anne: The one thing that I really want to say, too, is we have a 100% graduation rate, and most of the kids have either gone on to trade school or college, and we’ve had 7 PhDs come out of our program.
Octavia: That’s fantastic. Are you also a recognized school as such in Virginia?
Jo Anne: Yes. We are a recognized school. However, unlike Michael’s school, we actually work under a regional school here and we’re assigned a principal.
Octavia: I see, so slightly different. Debbie, I’d like to get back to you. If you could describe how your curriculum works with the other school systems that send your people, because you’re not a school, correct?
Debbie: Correct. We are an accredited PATH center, and we provide multiple different equine assisted services. We have four mental health practices that are kind of separate. Our big thing, and our largest program, is the equine assisted learning program. We started out and the first thing that we did when we went into the schools was realize that there were certain conditions that the schools needed us to integrate into any program that we were going to submit for their approval. One was that they’re in the business of academics, so academics had to be involved in any curriculum that we were presenting to them. The other thing was that they’re accountable to taxpayers, so you really had to make the benefits and cater to the benefits that were important to them. You couldn’t go in there and talk about how wonderful the horses are, because that’s really not what’s important to them. It’s about the results. What can you do? Can you increase attendance? Can you decrease absences? Can you increase grades? Those tangible things that were meaningful to them. Can you decrease behaviors in class that interfere with learning? Most of all, can you reengage these kids that are shut down for whatever reason? Maybe they’ve fallen behind in school years ago, and they got so far behind and nobody noticed, then the behaviors start coming because they’re lost. Can we reengage those kids? So, those are the things that we focused on. We ended up creating what we call the Strides learning model, because the other thing that the school boards, in order to pass contracts needed, was something that’s grounded in research. At the time when we started, we didn’t know anything about research.
Octavia: I’m going to stop you just for a moment because we will get to research later, that’s further down the road. For each of you, could you tell us what does the day look like at your program? Describe an average child coming from wherever they come from, what happens. Deborah, go ahead.
Debbie: Okay. When they come, the yellow twinkie as we call it, the school bus brings them. They come in, we have a little line where we shake everybody’s hand and we look them in the eye, we teach them how to meet and greet each other. At first, they don’t want to do that, but after a while, they love doing the introduction and the little receiving line. They come into class, they’re gathered in class for about 10 to 12 minutes, as little as possible. In the classroom, they are presented with the life skill of the day. Our learning model is based on the Search Institute’s developmental assets, and then academic standards, and then life skills. So, the kids are presented with a life skill. What we’re interested in as facilitators to begin the lesson is: What do they know about that? For example, if the life skill is responsibility, what does that mean to them? We know what it means to us, but we want to find that learning platform where we meet them at. So, we write on the big whiteboard, and we talk about what responsibility is. Then we’ll come back later, after their experience with the horses, and we’ll talk about what does it look like to you now, and then why is it important and how can you use in that in your life. We use a coaster model type of facilitation where we do check-in, we do the opening of the activity, and we do the activity, and then we do a shift if needed, and then a transfer of the learning. Each lesson looks like that. It’s kind of hurried in an hour-and-a-half or two hour time to get all of those in, but the transfer is probably the most important because if the kids are good at the barn but the lessons don’t transfer back into the education system, then it’s not going to be effective.
Octavia: I think we’d all agree on that. That’s great. Michael and Jo Anne, how does your day look? Who wants to go first? Michael... https://www.greenchimneys.org/ https://www.greenchimneys.org/therapeutic-special-education/
Michael: Of course. Before we go to the day, we have 500 staff members at Green Chimneys, and that includes everyone from psychiatrists to kitchen staff, school staff, residential staff. The staff to student ratio is very high compared to public schools because of the needs of the students. In the morning, day students come in for the day and they join the residents to become one population during the school day. At the farm, what we call our nature-based programs, we have teachers in each farm area. We have a farm teacher, a wildlife teacher, riding instructor, garden teacher. Monday to Friday, the students as classes, and we split them into half-classes, rotate into these nature-based areas. With riding being a little bit more difficult because we can really only have four students at a time riding, and in terms of supervision it requires a higher staff ratio for safety. Once you have connected with one area, students have opportunities to choose additional time in these areas by way of work sessions, which we call learn-and-earn, where you are paired with an intern, maybe to come and clean stalls, to feed horses, etcetera. After school, we have program staff that do things like drill teams. The intent of all of our nature-based programs is to address exactly what Debbie talked about. The type of student who comes to Green Chimneys is often shut down academically, unable to keep up, has huge social deficits. Really, our job is not to be this fantastic academic school, but to really stabilize the child back into the ability to learn, back into the ability to sit in a classroom, to function as a group in a group. That happens rather slowly. The farm areas are often the first area where the students can decompress, maybe reboot themselves, because itis so different from what they might be used to. I think a strength of our program, and it’s one that we really encourage others to look at, is to lengthen the amount of time that children can be with animals. We’re often very focused on you come for your lesson, you have 45 minutes or an hour, and then you go back in the van and go back to where you came from, rather than actually living with animals in all of the types of weather, being in nature. I think that’s something very unique about our program in addition to us really functioning as a treatment team. The 500 staff that I mentioned are all part of the same team. We work in trauma-informed models, we get additional training on how to work therapeutically with the students. We bring our individual skills, and then together we try to support each student. That always is very powerful when it works. It doesn’t always work. It’s hard work, frustrating work, and I can tell you that it’s not paradise.
Octavia: I think everybody would agree with that. Let’s move on to Jo Anne. You’ve heard the others talk about their model, as it were. Tell us how yours is the same or how it’s different.
https://brookhillfarm.org/ https://brookhillfarm.org/schooling-with-horses
Jo Anne: Okay. Our kids are paired with a rescue horse, and the rescue horse is their responsibility. When they come in the morning at about 8:00 AM, they’re responsible for feeding that rescue horse and taking care of it. From there, they go and work on their academics until about 12:30. From 12:30 to 1:30, they have lunch and access to the counselor. Then they have their EAL program from 1:30 to 3:30.All of our kids have either flunked out of alternative school, so they’re referred to us by courts, but behavioral centers, by the schools, so they really struggle, especially with the academics. Our riding program is very academic based, we do a lot of our riding and groundwork on actual math, for instance. If you think about dressage, it’s very much geometry based. We take those geometry theorems and we put them in the riding arena. It's about two hours a day in the horse part of the program, and the rest of it is with licensed educators on the academics.
Octavia: Great. Deborah, obviously, your model is very different. Yours is more portable, in a way, because these other two have this one wonderful specialized center which does nothing but the school and the horses. Do your students mostly do groundwork or do some of them get to ride as well?
Debbie: Most of the school program is groundwork only. We just don’t have the time that. Michael was talking about that you need in order to develop the riding program. But through our data collection–Michael, you were so spot on–we were able to prove to the schools that when the kids first came it was like there’s a honeymoon period and you wonder why is this kiddo here, why has this kid been chosen for this program, because they’re great, we have no problem with them. Then about the fourth or fifth time that they come, it’s like oh, there it is, and you start to see that behavior, or that block, or that challenge that they have. Our programs at first were 12 weeks long because that’s all we could engage the schools with. At the 12-week mark, right at about that 11thor 12thweek, we started seeing the charts go up where they were just starting to get it. That was the baseline for what encouraged the schools to then develop a year-long program, so the kids got to come for the whole year, which was good. Even though it was only two hours a week, it was much more time that we could build on something and really get some better results.
Octavia: That’s great. I love the fact that each of you does really have a very different model. That’s exactly what we’re here to hear about. Now, just to ask each of you to give an example or whatever of barriers that you’ve come across in providing your model. Deborah, you said basically convincing the school systems that they should contract with you to do this. Have there been other barriers that you’ve come across as you went along?
Debbie: Absolutely. That was the biggest one. I have a Post-It Note story. The first time I went in to the director of special education with Indianapolis Public Schools, she oversaw 7,500 students. She had the most ability to manipulate travel and to get kids out of class and do all of those things that would make it possible for the kids to come during the day.
When I first scheduled a meeting with her, she canceled on me like five times. At first, I thought she’s busy, you know. Then it kind of made me mad. I was like I got dressed up in my city clothes five times to go to see her and she canceled on me. The last time she canceled, I was actually in her office. I looked at her office, and there were three or four phones, there was even a red phone like you’d see in the President’s office or something. I saw all of the work that she does, and I started to get it that this a really busy position, it’s a really tough position. I did leave her a Post-It Note on her desk, and I said, “I have money for your kids. Call me.” I just left my phone number, I didn’t even leave my name, I didn’t say what it was for or anything. You know what? She called me. I put up $2,500 as a little starter program, and that’s how we got started.
Octavia: Wow. That personal touch. Jo Anne, how about you, what barriers have you seen?
Jo Anne: I think one of the biggest problems we have is there’s no model to follow and nothing else was really being done like what we were doing. We didn’t really fit in with any umbrella organization. Even though we are part of PATH, our programs offer services that are very different than the typical PATH model. Also, like Debbie was saying, there’s an awful lot of paperwork, regulations, etcetera to get approved by the state of Virginia as a fully accredited educational program. I think the barriers for us started there. Today, one of our biggest barriers is transportation for the kids. If they live in my county, we have the yellow bus as well. But if they’re outside of our county, we’re regional, we don’t have bussing, so it takes volunteers, parents, and carpooling, and everything to get the kids to us.
Octavia: Michael, what about you?
Michael: I’m sort of thinking as we talk. There are two big challenges that I see. One is time. There are only so many hours in a school day. In the day for each child, there are always competitions between the social worker needing time, the occupational therapist needing time, the classroom teacher needing time, then students have some other activities to do. Really finding enough time to be with the horses in the barns can sometimes be a challenge. One of the bigger ones is, as a private school, Green Chimneys does receive state money per child. It’s not the parent who pays for the child to be in care, it’s the school district. They pay a significant amount for the child as a daily rate each day the child is in our care. That pays for education, for the school, for the medical care, and the food. It does not pay for any of the animals, the animal care, or those costs. So, Green Chimneys annually has to raise almost $2,000,000 to support the farm, the animal care, the staff in some cases. Some staff we can bill as teaching staff. That’s a real challenge. That’s, of course, where Molly Sweeney’s HHRF dream comes in, because very often the lack of the documentation and research still just makes it seem as something nice. Everybody loves the farm, the horses and the animals, but when it comes to actually paying for it, we have to go to private donations and fundraising just like a lot of therapeutic riding centers do. Unfortunately, we have a lot of people who share the dream, who get it, who support it. But I would definitely say that’s maybe a weakness, if you can call it that.
Octavia: That segues into Horses and Humans Research Foundation. If each of you could talk about the research that you have in fact conducted in the past and on an ongoing basis to support this general idea that we all truly believe in. Jo Anne, I’ll have you go first.
Jo Anne: Like I said in my introduction, we were kind of curious about why we were having such success. With some of my fellow colleagues at the college, we decided to do a research paper, which I do have available upon request if you’re interested. I think my email is there, if you would like a copy. We really went into what we think was causing what was happening and why. Obviously, there isn’t a lot of research in this field, which is why I support HHRF so much. We need more research because, again, with the school system it was really hard to prove that this worked. Our research compared the cohorts of public school students, those with disabilities, and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds from 2008 to 2018. We found that all 68 at-risk youth that participated in our program graduated from high school on time compared to only 80% of the public school students with the same diagnoses. We know that 100% of our students entered postsecondary education or technical job training. Of course, we don’t have any data about the school system. Like I said, that’s available if anybody is interested.
Octavia: That’s great. Are you currently looking at a different kind of research, of any kind at all?
Jo Anne: We do a whole lot of research with all of the different colleges. We just did a study on autism, which is going to be published within the next couple of months.
Octavia: Great. Deb, how about you? We’ve talked about research. How does it work from your point of view?
Debbie: On a much smaller scale, we wondered when we first started how do the teachers grade the kids, what tools do they use, because we felt like it was important for us to be learning their language and incorporating all of their ways into our program. We learned about rubrics. They kept talking about rubrics, and I’m like what is a rubric? So, I learned what a rubric is. We created one that was specific to the horses. We measured 21 different indicators, things like level of engagement, listening, cooperation, treatment of staff, respect, all these things, 21different indicators measured on a scale from 1 to 4. We clearly identified what did 1 look like. A 1 would be just totally disinterested, not being respectful, disengaged. A 4 would be the complete opposite. Then everything in between would be a 2 and a 3.We kept these points on them and measured using these rubrics. Then what we would do is convert them into Excel sheets so that we could actually chart each of those 21 indicators. It was really amazing because it followed the truth of having the kids come for a honeymoon period, they’d drop off, and then the chart very nicely displayed that around that around that 11th and 12th week is when they started to really engage, and then it was up from there.
The rubrics were helpful, but we also incorporated the teachers to gather information like the behaviors that were happening in school, or the lack of incidences. They tracked grades for us. They tracked attendance. They tracked all of these things and we would gather that information as well. That really went over well with the school board. They loved seeing that because, apparently, there is funding attached to what they call seat time, so it affects their bottom dollar. The other way that we collected data was through anecdotal stories from the kids themselves. We would ask the kids to write a paragraph. We do a lot of photography, and we would match that up and submit that to the school boards as well. We also got into brain mapping, which was really interesting. We have a wonderful scientist here that started referring clients to us, and she kept telling us you can rewire a child’s brain with your horses. I’m like dang, I didn’t know that. Sure enough, she would do pre and post. We were just getting started, and we’ve submitted for some big grants, which again is all new to me. So, we’re still working on that, trying to come up with some significant grant funding that can fund that pursuit.
Octavia: It sounds like each of you has yourselves learned and developed all kinds of new skills because you’re involved with these programs. That’s what I find, even at my age, I’m still learning and it’s all still developing. Ain’t life grand? Michael, your turn.
Michael: Absolutely. So, 75-year-old program, hundreds of staff from psychiatrists to everything, all incredibly educated people. Up until about five years ago, people would come and say, “What research have you done,” and we would just kind of look at them, just sigh and shrug our shoulders, we have no time to do research, we are practitioners, we are doing this work, we work with these kids, how are we going to do this. Then very quickly they would say you should have some graduate students come and do some research, which sounds amazingly easy, and we would always have somebody pitch something to us, “I want to come and measure your horses,” but it never really worked. Up until our very wonderful relationship with the Denver University Institute for Human-Animal Connection. Once we formed the partnership with that university, it became realistic for us to do a research project. This was about five or six years ago. We are still in that project. Somethings have been published along the way. The most difficult part was for the IHAC team to come in and study our whole setting, how it works, what we do. We do some animal-assisted therapy. We do some animal-assisted education. We do some animal-assisted recreation. It’s all different things. We have students with different diagnoses. We couldn’t do a control group in our setting because everybody interacts with the animals. Our staff team was very insistent that we cannot change what we do, we have to keep doing what we do and can’t alter it for the research project. In the end, a research design was created that, in short, measures the impacts positive youth development, that’s a scale that’s used. It involved cameras placed in classrooms, actually coding behavior of children after they come from the nature-based programs. We chose not to separate whether they went to the horses or the goats or the wildlife center, because we felt and Denver felt that some of the mechanisms in all of these nature settings are quite similar. Some of the outcomes that they’ve already published are very encouraging and impressive. They are available. Unfortunately, Green Chimneys doesn’t own them, they are owned by IHAC, so we will need to connect you with them if you want to get some of that information. It has been very good once they understood who we are, once we understood what IHAC needed, their research team. In the horse barn, for example, we have cameras now in the aisles that photograph the main area where the horses get prepared for class, groomed, cleaned, and medical care. We now have another segment of the research which developed in the last couple of months where we’re going to be recording the behaviors and the interactions of the students with the horses in that part of the program. It's difficult. A research project is difficult financially, too, certainly once you start getting into years of it. That really was an obstacle for us, and one that the board had to address. Of course, Denver was very generous with us and they donated quite a bit of their time toward it. That’s really our experience. It’s a positive experience, but also an ongoing experience, and it took a lot of years to get there.
Octavia: think they have your email, Michael, if somebody wants information about it.
Michael: Just write to me, yes, please.
Octavia: A couple more things. What advice would you have for somebody who says I think I’d like to get involved with the local school system? What are a couple of things to really be wary of and then go for it? Who wants to go first? I’ll leave it up to you. Debbie: I will. Octavia: Good for you, Deb.
Debbie: Along this journey, we documented our process because nobody else had done this30 years ago. We went from the Post-It Note lady, we ended up getting a $250,000 a year contract with her for several years, for many years, like 15 years. That was really great, that stabilized our budget and sustainability and everything, but we’re a small center. We’re not like Jo Anne and Michael, we’re just a small center. To us, that was awesome. I think the advice that I would have is do your research and learn their language. We go into a lot of the different websites that have the statistics listed on the schools. You can find out how many kids graduate, how many get expelled, what the demographics are, what the testing scores are. Where do they need help? Is English a first language, do they need help there? Is there a lot of remedial reading that is needed? You research out the problems, because you are a solution. We have the solution for many of the problems that schools have if you can do your research. All of this is available online. I’d be happy to give you some websites if you email.
Do your research. Understand their needs. I always even like to go in as far as get the strategic plan for the particular school system that I’m working with, because there is funding behind the strategic plan. If you’re part of that strategy, and if you can help them to achieve that strategy, chances are there is funding that will back that. Help them see your value.
Octavia: And now we have your program to point to and say, “See, they do it, so you can too.” I think few people are going to create a Green Chimneys or a Brook Hills Farm, but many people might be able to duplicate what you do in the much smaller way, which is still very effective. That, of course, is the point of this whole discussion. The other two, do you have anything to add?
Jo Anne: I’d like to pigtail off. First of all, we’re not that big of a center, even though we sound like we are. My advice is what we’ve found is having licensed, credentialed professionals - that means educators, who are directly on-site and working with the program really helps your program be credible with the school systems. When we started this process, we were just like Debbie. The only difference is we had credentialed educators already working in our program. Once we were able to show that that’s what we were doing, the school system then allocated $189 per hour per student because we had credentialed educators working with those students. Again, it becomes a fabulous revenue stream for centers. One of the things that I promote, because our mission at Brook Hill is education, so it’s educating about rescue horses, it’s educating about the school program, EFL, ELA, all the different things. One of the things we go out and do is say, yes, you can create a program like we have at Brook Hill if you have a classroom and you have licensed professionals. Please don’t think that you can’t. Again, we have people starting this up now with the idea that it is workable, and there is now more research showing that this works. Michael, I’m excited to get yours.
Michael: Of course, Green Chimneys is unique in the fact that our students come to us in part because of this identity of involving them in these nature-based models. Drawing on experience from even before Green Chimneys, I think of three aspects. Ask yourself why are you doing this, or why do you want to work with schools, what is it that you hope to get from that? Is it money, is it a certain target population, is it community engagement? What is your motivator? The second piece is just to realize schools are in yet again a tremendously pressurized environment right now. There is financial stress on schools. Budgets are an issue. There’s not a lot of money laying around to do a lot of extra things. The demands that the states put on schools are increasing. Of course, that’s a struggle that prevents them even from going on fieldtrips to the zoo, which they used to do. Many schools can’t do that anymore, so keep that in mind. I think any program that has had success, let’s say a therapeutic equine program, it comes down to individual relationships. You have to know someone or you have to meet someone who is on the school board, or someone who is a principal, or a teacher who has higher standing in the school. Once you have that person to sort of team up with, especially what Debbie said, they know the language of the school, they know the strategic planning maybe, or they know the terminology that might really sell your idea. I think those three would be my thoughts.
Pebbles: We have about eight minutes. I don’t know if you wanted to do questions, but also I would like to hear one of their favorite stories from their school.
Octavia: Questions first. Is there anything out there that we need to address?
Pebbles: One question that was there was about sharing a favorite story or a failing forward story.
Octavia: Alright. That’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to arbitrarily choose Michael to go first. Do you have a favorite story?
Michael: I have a current story. It’s not so much a favorite story. We have a young man who just turned 18 who is a student in the program, and who four years ago was struggling tremendously, very introverted, not speaking, socially isolated, fairly hopeless. Over the last few years, his real connections came in our horse barn, to the point where he now is an apprentice in the horse barn. He knows a great deal about horses and he has become very competent in caring for horses, working with them, handling with them. He has completed shifted his mindset that a horse career may be something that he would want, that he may want to work at a farm. To see that happen, and it’s actually rather unique, not many of our students choose to go into animal careers. Most of them enjoy the farm, they benefit from it, and then they go back home, back into their school, doing other things. To see his connection with the animals, his connection with the staff who work with the animals, it has really reminded us how powerful this environment can be for an individual and how much it can change a life. When we work with large numbers of students, you forget that it’s about individuals.
Octavia: Yes. Jo Anne,...
Jo Anne: I think one of my favorite stories is we had a young man who was headed off to an alternative residential school, he was very angry, yelled at the principal a lot, wore an ankle bracelet for a felony charge. He came to the farm while he was waiting to go off to this residential school. We taught him how to halter a horse. He said, “This is too easy. Give me the hardest horse you have.” Little did he know, we had a feral horse that had just come in. So, we put him the arena with a feral horse. Of course, what did he do? He spent two hours chasing this horse around the arena. That being said, emotionally he just broke down and sat down, and the nice little horse came and put his head on his shoulder. We asked him, “What did you learn from this experience?” He said that his demeanor was the problem. He came to that conclusion. So, we said, “This principal that you’re having such trouble with, how are you acting?” Of course, he said in the same manner. We talked to him and told him let’s try this tomorrow with the principal. Of course, we warned the principal what was going on. He went in the next day, and within two days the principal was buying him coffee because he was also very manipulative. But when he went back to court, he told the principal that he needed to be sentenced to Brook Hill Farm because that’s the only place that he could succeed.
Octavia: Love it. Deb, your turn.
Debbie: Okay. What comes to my mind is we had the opportunity to work with a residential facility that was specific for kiddos that have been sex trafficked. They had been sent to this residential facility and they were to stay there at least two years because they said that’s how long it takes to break the bond between the people that were trafficking them and it gave them shelter from there. There was this one little girl, I’ll never forget her. She had massive scars all up and down her arms from where the people that trafficked her had kept her drugged up. Her little arms were just terrible. She wouldn’t speak to anybody. We got a little gray pony. We have minis, we have a mini donkey, then the ponies, then the happies, then on up. She was so terrified, she would just work with the pony. She always had her hair down in her face, covering it as if she was hiding. Finally, after working with this pony, we do a lot of natural horsemanship type of stuff, and really focus on the relationship, the connection, and all of that, and she laid her hands on this pony and she was just glued to this pony. She just started crying, and the faucets just opened. She looked up at me and she said, “The pony doesn’t mind my scars.” It was just like oh, my gosh. She stayed in our program for about a year-and-a-half. The confidence and everything just fed into that. She looked forward to coming so much that she conformed in attitude and in participation when she wasn’t at the farm so that she could come to the farm. I hate it when the schools use our program as leverage. There’s just something wrong about that, but they do. Hey used it for leverage, and it worked for her. She just makes me...
Octavia: I know. I think we’ve all got big smiles and maybe a glimmer of a tear in our eye when we hear stories like that. Thank all three of you very much. Are there any other questions that we have, Pebbles?
Michael: I wanted to just very quickly say something, if I may. We’ve talked a great deal about the schools, the children, and what we do. I don’t want to forget the horses. I just want to throw a cautionary note in there. Working with students like we do at Green Chimneys is very emotionally difficult for the staff. It also is challenging for the horses. There’s a lot of emotion flying around, a lot of anger. We need to always be aware that the animals are at our mercy and we decide their day. In the last year or two, we’ve started as a team to really talk a lot more about what cooperation with the horse means, what choice means for the horse, and how we can integrate the horses into this work in a way that doesn’t just benefit the students in our program, but that also really meets their needs.
Jo Anne: I want to segue into that and give Pebbles and Molly a hats off for forming the HHRF Horse Wellbeing Committee, because that is our entire focus on that committee. Thank you to you guys. Pebbles: And thank you, Michael, for adding that piece.
Debbie: I have one more thing, too. If you’re interested in pursuing and learning more about working with schools, PATH has just launched a new equine assisted learning certificate program. The certificate program is kind of broad and teaches about facilitation, but then there are micro credentials attached to that, and one specialty is education. The way that the whole program will work is a lot of different people that have different programs that work with the schools, you’ll be able to choose from those. If you want to specialize in a reading program, there’s going to be a course there for you. It won’t be packed, but the certificate program will lead to that. If you’re interested, you might take a look at that and see if there is something that would benefit you.
Octavia: Well, I can’t top that. I think we’re ready to wrap this up. It has been a wonderful discussion. Thank you, everybody. I see much appreciation being shown in the questions. Any specific question that anybody has that we need to deal with? Dr. Debra Thompson: We’ve answered those in the chat. Unless someone has not yet added their question.
Michael: One more thing, just quickly. Anyone who is near New York City, if you have half a day, come out to Green Chimneys. We do professional day trips, visits, and tours. We’d love to see you. If you haven’t been there already, please come.
Octavia: Watch out for those peacocks. They’re very noisy, they’re very showy, and they’re all over the place. Pebbles: I want to come see the camels when I get a chance. Octavia: That, too. Okay, everybody, we’ll wrap it up. Thank you so much, everybody.
https://horsesandhumans.networkforgood.com/events/55577-free-may-webinar-schools-horses-and-research
https://brookhillfarm.org/ https://brookhillfarm.org/schooling-with-horses
https://www.greenchimneys.org/ https://www.greenchimneys.org/therapeutic-special-education/
https://stridestosuccess.org/ https://stridestosuccess.org/services/school-programs/