Individual Transition Plan: Fill & Download for Free

Early identification, monitoring through programming, and transition plans. We identify at-risk students in grade EIGHT and have transition plans about how to help them.I live in Canada. I taught high school behaviour classes, so these kind of students were assigned to me. My classes were capped at 15, but I usually didn’t have more than 12. All students must be in some kind of educational situation until they are 18.We have programming that works really well. For sustained truancy, we have separate schools where the students do a lot of field trips. One of the teachers there is a friend of mine. She got permission to take her class to the morgue to see what drinking, doing drugs, and driving does to the human body. They donned hats and toured construction sites. They interviewed construction workers about their jobs.Between my class and the outreach programs, we look at apprenticeships and truck driving, and a bunch of other workplaces.We go to court with them and speak on their behalf. When we are concerned about their mental state beyond youth angst or if we see self-inflicted wounds, or know they drink before school, we set up appointments with counsellors and go with them to the first couple of appointments. I have gone to employment interviews with them. Having a teacher waiting almost always gets them the job.We often put the curriculum aside to talk about real things that bother them. Things that come up are how to get more food if they don’t want to go to the in-school lunch program. I am registered at the food bank on behalf of students, so I take them there. What we teach them is that there are always solutions and we will help them.We have a student welfare system for high school students so they can live with a different family and pay their way. Our teachers and in-school social worker are involved with recognizing the need and setting this up. Getting teens to safety is everyone’s responsibility. They don’t feel alone with their anger. This is prevention again. If they leave school, they must agree to attend one of the many job training courses available for free through welfare. Welfare also sends people to rehab if warranted.We have staff meetings about the most at-risk students and gather ideas on how to help them stay in school. One girl really liked the smell of wood so the woodworking teacher asked her to volunteer in his class to organize the different groups and grades of wood. She switched classes to take woodworking and has applied for an apprenticeship.One of my students was acting strange in another class. Strange enough that I was called to remove him and determine what to do.He was behaving as though he was stoned on a combination of drugs — in his conversation, but not his body language. He was not tired. I grabbed another teacher for safety, and got my class covered, and drove him to the psyche ward of the hospital. I didn’t lie to him. His mother would meet us there. The entire drive was conversation about how great his mom was. There were no drugs of any kind in his system. Schizophrenia. The custom is to keep him in the psyche ward for three days for observation and then discuss a plan. Mental health is covered by our Medicare system. We knew early that he needed support and got him help.Another teen stayed after class to ask me if there was a law saying that parents are supposed to like their kids and take care of them and talk to them. This just broke my heart. I told him that his teachers are his parents while he is at school. I looked up his course schedule and emailed his teachers to let them know this boy needed extra attention. This is a normalized teacher reaction.Teachers are well paid here. A teacher with 10 years experience makes about $94,000 Canadian a year. Many, but not all teachers do extra for at risk students.None of these angry young men would think about buying a gun because we don’t have a gun culture.We have millions of guns, but no culture around guns. A student would have no idea where or how to buy a gun. Unless he comes from a farm, there are no guns at home. (Only 17% of Canadians have guns.)Early, meaningful intervention is the answer. Programming to teach them employable skills and help with the transition is essential. That costs money.I just realized how long this answer is. Oh well. (I’ll bet you thought I would say I’m sorry! I’m not sorry.)

I have written about my boss being so upset with me that he wouldn’t even talk to me for 3 days after I resigned and the shenanigans that followed, so I won’t go into it here. I was concerned that my job offer could be torpedoed before I started because I work in a relatively narrow IT field for energy companies in the tiny city of Denver, CO and here, everybody knows everybody. In addition, I was aware of an individual who resigned and had their offer rescinded because a particularly vindictive VP made a single call. The guy who got torpedoed had some karma coming to him, but it was a sh!t move on the VP’s part.I employed the following strategy:Make Peace - I was very factual and rational about the reasons I felt that I was at a dead-end with the company. I didn’t put emotion into the equation for the reasons I was leaving when I did speak with my boss. I smoothed over the relationship with my boss and we continue to stay in contact to this day.Hold up the bargain - I was expected to provide 2 full weeks of notice and I did. During those 2 weeks they got 100% of my effort and attention to tasks at hand. I did my job and I delivered a very solid transition plan with supporting documentation for my replacement. I also offered to continue to answer any questions that came up after my departure for up to a month.Keep a secret - No one in the organization knew where I was going until I had been at my new job for two weeks. Many of my coworkers guessed and guessed as to where I was going, but I would neither confirm nor deny. When pressed about why I was being secretive, I would make reference to the individual who got torpedoed and the questions would stop. Only my wife and a few close friends knew where I was going.In the end everything worked out great and many of my former co-workers work with me again at my new company.

It’s too big. It was expected that the amalgamation of “The Six” in 1999 would save the taxpayers money. It didn’t, or at least it didn’t save any money that could have been saved without amalgamation. The new problem is that the priorities of each part of the city are in fundamental conflict, such as the use of cars downtown (which only really benefits suburbanites - city people generally don’t own cars unless they work in the suburbs). Metro, by contrast, worked well. Each individual municipality dealt with local concerns while Metro dealt with regional concerns.It’s too small. Amalgamation was recommended by The Golden Report (named after the chair of the committee preparing it). However, the provincial government ignored the other recommendation because of political opposition in their suburban strongholds - that a new “Super-Metro” be formed with the amalgamated City of Toronto in the centre. As such, regional coordination is terrible. Transit is terribly balkanized and short trips across municipal borders cost twice what long trips within municipal borders do. Traffic in the outer suburbs is terrible because the arterial roads are both old and overloaded.There’s no planning. Montreal has a good subway system and they also have a plan on how to expand it if the money ever shows up. Toronto has no plan to expand it’s subway system apart from a one-stop extension into Scarborough that everyone except City Council thinks is a terrible idea. Toronto did have a transit plan mixing subways with light rail. Had they stuck with that plan, it would be mostly finished by now and completely finished by 2020. Instead, they abandoned it and they will be lucky to have the subway replace the LRT by 2020. After that, who knows?Not in my backyard! Toronto should be intensifying it’s land use. As Toronto grew, it grew with very low densities. Things being what they are, they have to star thinking about increasing densities where existing transit connections make it attractive. However, there is usually tremendous local opposition to such projects, or any project really. Back in my old neighbourhood, Habitat for Humanity wanted to build a small low-income apartment complex on the site of an old Kiwanis clubhouse. It was on a major street and close to schools. They couldn’t get permission as the rest of the neighbourhood is single family homes and the nearest apartments are about half a mile away. There are lots of sites all over the city needing redevelopment and there is always opposition to whatever is proposed.