2017: Collaboration: Youth Services and School District Change the Story for At-Risk Youth

But after leaders of five key sectors—education, mental health, law enforcement, juvenile justice and child welfare—began to learn about the Sanctuary Model, ACEs and trauma-informed care, the conversation took a significant turn.

“What we started to look at was: All these children are our children. What can we do to meet them where they are and change the story for them?” Armstrong says.

She, along with Youth Services Director Molly Rogers and other members of the core team, started to understand that habits of divisiveness and blame were rooted in decades-old cultural upheavals such as the displacement of Native Americans and the bifurcation of the area into two separate-but-not-exactly-equal school districts.

“There’s a lot of historical trauma that came out of The Dalles,” says Rogers. “Every time we would try something new, we’d get told, ‘That’s not going to work here. That’s not the Wasco County way.’”

But since 2011, area leaders have embraced trauma-informed ways to address the region’s toughest problems. The Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities (MARC) project furthered those efforts through a partnership between the Columbia Gorge Health Council, a community-based governing board for the local Coordinated Care Organization (COO) that manages care for poor and vulnerable patients, and the Resilience Network of the Gorge, a multi-sector network.

So when they began talking about those truant high schoolers, Armstrong, Rogers and members of their staffs were willing to try something new.

Typically, the kids would show up at school for three or four days, then vanish. All had been suspended on at least one occasion. They often missed appointments at Mid-Columbia Center for Living (MCCFL), which provides behavioral health services. “They were pretty high-risk for substance abuse, mental health issues, criminal thinking, lack of attachment,” Rogers says. “These students were not compliant, but we [at Youth Services] were seeing them every day.”

That was no accident, Rogers reasoned; when the kids entered the two-story Victorian that houses Youth Services, her receptionist would thank them for coming, say something appreciative and offer them food and hot cocoa.

“This idea didn’t come from the top down,” Rogers notes; it originated with probation officers on her staff. And it got a thumbs-up from the students themselves. Without her training in the Sanctuary Model principles of democracy and inclusion, she adds, “I’d never have talked to the boys and said, ‘What do you guys need?’ I’d never have had that conversation with them.”