"They talked about my future until I believed I had one."

Our version of "poverty informed" in my division at Western is still forming and developing, but there are principles we are committed to. As I've mentioned in earlier articles, we are committing to the idea that if a barrier can be removed, it should be removed (Declaring the Movement). We are also committing to unconditional positive regard for our students, which means creating a sense of welcoming and belonging at every opportunity. I believe those things are powerful, but perhaps nothing is more powerful than a strengths-based approach combined with a future orientation. So what does that mean?

Our students are our inspiration and our students with the greatest barriers teach us the most. One of the things students have told us over the years is that one of the barriers to coming back to school after dropping out or maybe not completing high school was the fear of having to explain why. One student even said they expected the "you never should have quit school" speech they had heard many times before. As we have become more poverty informed, we rarely initiate that conversation. We aren't trying to minimize past trauma and if a student wants to share about their past, we will certainly listen, but our focus is on their amazing strengths and all of their future possibilities. No matter their point of entry, we look at options and what they already bring to the table. It is a powerful approach. Let me give you an example.

Fred is a student who came to us almost a year ago to enroll his daughter in an Alternative High School program my division offers. Our Associate Dean enrolls the students in that program and she is fiercely focused on students' strengths and opening up their possibilities. In this enrollment conversation, she learned that Fred had also dropped out of school and was raising his daughter on his own. But that wasn't the most interesting part of the conversation... Because a poverty informed viewpoint looks at strengths and is future focused, she asked him what he did now. It turned out that Fred had worked on cars for years and was a front line supervisor at a local store. Now the conversation turned toward the amazing automotive programs at Western and how his experience would surely grant him Credit for Prior Learning (CPL). And by the end of the meeting, both Fred and his daughter were enrolled in High School completion programs. As Fred said, even though he was currently the boss at work, he might prefer to be the "boss's boss."

Well Fred is a superstar and not only completed his High School Equivalency Diploma, but used CPL opportunities to earn 11 college credits before completing high school. This truly levels the playing field. Now just like a traditional student at a traditional high school, he could get a jump start on college. The use of CPL for students in my area is a larger topic for another time, but rest assured it is powerful and incredibly validating for people who didn't perceive themselves as "college material." But Fred's story is even better. As I mentioned earlier, his daughter not only enrolled, she graduated at the same time as her dad. Oh yeah, and her brother who was at home and unsure what to do with his life decided to follow Dad and his sister back to school and graduated alongside them. That's them up above.

It's a great story right? But I think the beauty of it is in the poverty informed approach. Fred shared with us that he had returned before elsewhere to try and complete high school. He said that it didn't work out in part because he dreaded having to explain why high school hadn't worked and it always felt like they were going to have to "fix" him. A poverty informed program doesn't "fix" anyone. It honors the strengths and life experiences and resiliency of the students it serves. We do that by being relentlessly future focused. In fact, Fred told his teachers that he thought his success here was because everyone here "talked about my future, until I believed I had one..." I try to write every week about what we are attempting here and I have never said it as well as Fred did. Our students teach us every day.

Students deserve a celebration of their strengths and accomplishments and they deserve a look at the future rather than an endless postmortem of their mistakes. Fred is a great story of what every student deserves. If you would like to know more about him, here's a link from a local news story: Fred's story