Staying Connected

You’ve been a long-time friend to the field of emotional and behavioral disorders. Could you tell us how you got into this field?

It was an accident. I had a position at a residential facility. My career path was in clinical child psychology, but I found out that educators didn’t work holidays, weekends, and rotating shifts. A position was offered to me at Minneapolis Public Schools. I was not trained as a teacher, I knew nothing about teaching, but ended up in the classroom. That was when I was told I needed to go to the University of Minnesota and meet this guy, Frank Wood. So I think a big part of my experience has to do with the mentoring and encouragement that Frank provided to me in those early years. But, it was an accident and that’s kind of how it happened. I think Frank gets a lot of credit for encouraging and mentoring me when I didn’t know what I was going to do.

Well, that led to a distinguished career. Congratulations on receiving the 2013 Howard Muscott CCBD Distinguished Service Award. Would you describe the arc of your career in the field?

The easiest thing to say is that it was completely unplanned. Nothing happened that I intended, really. I got into school by accident. Within a year and a half, I started in administration, which was by accident. I discovered in the first year I was in a classroom that I had no clue on how to teach reading. The principal of the school told me that would take 10 years to learn. I thought, “It won’t take me 10 years” and decided that I was going to learn to do this thing. Obviously, I had to start at the university so I did two things. One was I completed three credits shy of a specialist degree in reading and very nearly went for my doctorate in reading instead of special education. I just thought that was an important thing to do. But when I finally figured out or thought I knew how to teach reading, the district decided that they needed an administrator. I had no desire to be an administrator, but I did that as a temporary thing for a year. Then when I thought that was the end of that, they opened up a new school and said, “Well, we need an administrator for the secondary school.” When they first asked me to do that, I said, “No thank you, I like the smaller kids.” They were a little less dangerous at the time. Then they asked me a second time to which I replied similarly, “No I don’t think so.” The third time they said, “You’re not being asked. You will do this.” So, I got into working with adolescents, and that meant that I had to pursue a principal’s license. So, at that time, I had a position that required three licenses that I did not have. I got into education unintentionally, I got into administration unintentionally, and I got into adolescence unintentionally.

But it was quite intentional that you received the CCBD Distinguished Service Award.

In every case, the things that happened to me are, as I think back, better than what I had planned for myself. I don’t think I could’ve planned things to work out as well as they did.

You are a great friend to the field. What events, policies, innovations, and people have had the most influence on your professional career? You mentioned Frank Wood. Have there been others?

Well, in addition to Frank, who certainly had the greatest influence, Eleanor Guetzloe is another person in the field who was and continues to be a very dear friend, mentor, and family friend. I’ve had a relationship with Eleanor for a very long time. Obviously, my wife—who basically told me it would be okay to do things that I didn’t think I should be doing, like deciding to start a conference with no money and helping me do that—took some risks with me and has stood by me over the years. There are so many people, it seems that to mention one would be like, who are you going to leave out? Well, CCBD has been my family, professionally. Events? That’s hard to say, but certainly P.L. 94-142.

Did you participate in Frank Wood’s series of Institutes in Serious Emotional Disturbance?

I did. In fact, I was at all of them. I suppose that’s another example of the influence of events and of Frank. I think in the first of those Institutes, he asked if I would do a keynote presentation. I had no image of myself as a keynote speaker back in ’77 or ’78, but he said, “No, you’ll be fine. You’ll do that.” Those institutes, of course, are where I met nearly everyone the Janus Project has archived in the oral histories. That was a wonderful model. Frank and I are talking about redoing that model, where you bring in three or four experts on an important topic and invite a group to participate. It was a terrific experience having the chance to meet the writers, thinkers, [and] researchers, and spend a couple of days talking with them. A small group meeting is an exceptionally good experience for me at my age. So yes, I did get to participate in all of them.

What has had the greatest positive impact on the field?

That’s a tough call. Following P.L. 94-142, I’m going to say that what’s had probably the longest and maybe the most positive impact was the PBIS [Positive Behavior Interventions & Support] movement—Positive Behavior Support System. Now we have over a decade of data on PBIS, and it’s really the only program the feds have continued to support for more than a decade.

We also have early intervention, which was clearly needed, clearly supported, and clearly the right thing to do. I think the Safe Schools Act emerging from the violence of the early 1990s added a lot to our knowledge base for dealing with aggression and violence in the country. Sadly, there’s not a single dollar of that money left, but what is interesting is that people still have the perception that today’s kids are out of control, aggressive, and violent, but the data don’t support that. Actually, all of the aggression data indicate that they are better behaved now than 20 years ago, and the data are very consistent. So, I’d like to think that the money invested in developing school violence and safe school programs during the 1990s worked. When I was in the school system in the early ’90s, violence in the United States peaked. That was 20 years ago and there’s been improvement ever since. Even though we have had the Connecticut tragedy and others, youth violence is not what it was then. In Minneapolis, where I was in 1993, we had 253 shootings that year. We haven’t had anything like that since, so I think that the Safe Schools Act did have some benefit. There were a lot of resources devoted to trying to learn more about it.

One of the sad things to come out of that era was a shift in public policy for youth in the direction of seeing public safety as a priority and emphasizing the juvenile justice system rather than rehabilitation. I think that was a mistake, and that took well over a decade for people to rethink that what we need to do is lock up these kids. It troubles me that we lock up more kids in the United States than any nation on the planet, and the cost of that far exceeds what we would spend to send them all to Harvard.

Have there been other negative influences on the field?

Well, this is where I get to say something that may be politically incorrect, but I like to think it’s empirically correct. I’m very concerned about the declassification, if you will, de-categorization, and homogenizing the whole special needs group into one category. That makes zero sense to me. As you may know, I’m just on the recovering side of heart surgery. I want a specialist when I have a tough case. I don’t want to go to someone who is generically trained and not motivated in my particular disability. The behavioral group needs specialists, so that would be my biggest troubling issue: the watering down, homogenizing, and minimizing of the seriousness of these kids’ problems. I am very concerned that we’re nowhere near turning the corner on that one.

What would it take to turn the corner? In an ideal world, what should we be doing?

Well, there are so many moving parts. First of all, there’s a problem with the idea of getting people through the higher education system quickly and efficiently. The whole higher education process could be retooled in some way and still produce specialists. As a country we are so fearful or sad about any kind of labeling because of negative associations with labels. Certainly for anything that’s considered emotional or behavioral, we’ve never done well, whether for children or adolescents, so we have a long way to go there. I like Jim Kaufmann’s suggestion that we don’t want to label anybody, but to not label would mean parking lots without handicapped designated parking spaces. It makes as much sense as saying here is a handicapped space that’s not marked because we don’t want any labels. That’s the kind of nonsense we’re into and I don’t know a better way to talk about how foolish this is. If you don’t have a label, you get no help. Labels don’t have to mean categories of kinds of people, but they do communicate the sorts of resources that are important for somebody to receive help. I think we have to come to terms with that. We’ve spent 20 years undoing these categories. The support systems for specialization and expertise are being dismantled. It will take a long time to rebuild them, but I think it’s going to happen in my future.

Do you think it will take a lawsuit to trigger that?

That wouldn’t surprise me. It took the Park and Mills cases in the 1970s. Now I’m a big fan of the concept of RTI, response to intervention, as a model to do individual assessment and individual intervention planning, but what I’m learning is that RTI is more classroom-based, not student-based. So we have a movement away from the whole concept of IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) from an individual to a classroom focus. The RTI model is going that way and I’m worried about that.

People think that’s the right way to go, but I guess I’m old fashioned. I worry about things that a lot of our heroes and leaders created and advocated for individuals who were difficult to serve. I see so much of the infrastructure that took years to build being eroded. I’m terribly concerned that it might take a class action lawsuit and then all we’ll have to go through to rebuild those protections and programs. The great thing about your project is that you’re preserving a lot of the history so maybe it won’t have to take so long.

The other thing I’m hopeful about, but that’s not happening at the pace I’d like, is the merging of a common vision between education and mental health and juvenile justice. That has been a very long process. They still like to sit in their silos, but at least the conversation has been going on for a long time. When we look at the best practices in in mental health, guess what? They’re the same as the best practices in special education. So we’re sharing the common database about best practices. Juvenile justice is discovering again—they knew it once—that those things apply there as well. I think and hope for trans-disciplinary application of best practices, which is basically what I tried to start in 1982. Our first conference was trans-disciplinary (BICA).

We have heard from various leaders in the field that they were trained in trans-disciplinary approaches that seem more successful for kids with EBD. If you were to pull together this kind of conference using Frank Wood’s model, who would you invite?

They would certainly be representatives of different disciplinary frameworks. To do otherwise would be contrary to what I spent the last 40 years doing. I can’t imagine, at this point in my career, anything that wouldn’t include representation from the three primary sectors of service. One thing that I might want to do, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, is an examination of how our higher education system model either gets in the way of or could be refocused to be more efficient but also produce more genuine specialists. I’m kind of intrigued with a medical model. We’ll produce GPs, if you will, and then there will be tiers of expertise with genuine specialists. That makes some sense to me. I’m looking more at medicine as a framework of direction than anything we’ve done in education.

Well, we would like to participate in that meeting. What do you see as the future for the field of education for children with emotional and behavioral disorders?

Here’s where your question about a lawsuit might be relevant. At the moment, the future looks bleak. Resources are diminished, public advocacy is almost nonexistent, training is homogenized, and certainly resources, economic and otherwise, are lower than in years. Bill Morse, a keynote speaker at the 1988 Midwest Symposium for Leadership (MSLBD) in Kansas City, said, “It’s a bad time to be a kid.” That was in 1988, but I’m thinking if Bill were still with us today, he would say that same thing. I’m hopeful through the work that you are doing, preserving some of this history, that the vision and the knowledge base that we’ve invested a lot in will continue to be an inspiration to the future. I don’t think it’s appropriate that special education should, as it did through much of the ’70s and ’80s, take the lead and almost exclude a role for mental health for children, but if it hadn’t been for special education, the EBD population would’ve gotten pretty much nothing. I think the future has to integrate mental health services and resources and educational resources. Blending into that framework, we also need juvenile justice for lots of issues. One approach that I am hoping we will become more recommitted to is the habilitative approach. Nobody has massive resources, but they could be applied in a much more meaningful and powerful way if having less resources means that we use them better, more smartly, and make sure the kids who need help get help. I’m a big fan of Eli Bower’s diagnostic model. Bower said, “We only have two kinds of kids: kids who need help and kids who don’t.” I think Eli was right. Are we as a society willing to invest in the kids that need help? That’s a political question. That’s a social issues question. At the moment, I’m a little concerned about that one.

What advice would you offer to persons just entering into the field, either as practitioners or into higher education?

Get connected and stay connected. Join an organization, go to conferences, go to meetings, network, talk to anybody, meet anybody, and stay involved, because that’s your lifeline. I’ve always enjoyed the fact that throughout my career, I’ve had friends from one coast to the other and even in foreign countries and I could talk to them at any moment. Choosing not to be isolated, choosing not to stay at home has meant that I’ve had a wonderful career.

Great advice. Thank you very much.