Wright School Durham

In the middle of November we got the opportunity to take a guided tour at Wright School Durham. Wright School is  an excellent example showing how effective Re-Education programs can be. It provides cost-effective residential mental health treatment to North Carolina's children who are from six to twelve years of age. All children living there have  serious emotional and behavioral disorders. Wright School  Durham doesn´t only focus on the child, it also supports each child's family  in meeting their child's special needs in their home.

On our guided tour we visited the class, living, and sleeping rooms of the three different groups living there. Each group consists of about eight students living and learning together in a family-like atmosphere. All groups have a special group name like “The Olympians”, “The Royals” or “The Eagles”. Those names do not only emphasize the potential each  team member has,  they also create a strong sense of  togetherness.

Some students gave us a very personal and impressive insight in their lives at Wright School. They told us about their initial difficulties of being away from their families or not getting in with their peers. Despite all those initial difficulties all students agreed that they enjoy their time at Wright School a lot  and that they don´t want to leave that school.

Of course it was also very interesting getting to know the philosophy of Re-Education at Wright School based on its founder Nicholas Hobbs. There are 12 Key Principles of Re-Education. As we consider these principles very helpful we want to share them with you:

l. Life is to be lived now, not in the past, and lived in the future only as a present challenge

2. Trust between child and adult is essential...

3. Competence makes a difference, and children and adolescents should be helped to be good at something, and especially at schoolwork.

4. Time is an ally, working on the side of growth in a period of development when life has a tremendous forward thrust.

5. Self-control can be taught and children and adolescents helped to manage their behavior without the development of psychodynamic insight.

6. Intelligence can be taught. Intelligence is a dynamic, evolving, and malleable capacity for making good choices in living.

7. Feelings should be nurtured, shared spontaneously, controlled when necessary, expressed when too long repressed, and explored with trusted others ....

8. The group is very important to young people, and it can become a major source of instruction in growing up.

9. Ceremony and ritual give order, stability, and confidence to troubled children and adolescents, whose lives are often in considerable disarray.

10. The body is the armature of the self, the physical self around which the psychological self is constructed.

11. Communities are important for children and youth, but the uses and benefits of community must be experienced to be learned.

12. A child should know some joy in each day and look forward to some joyous event for the morrow.

Nicolas Hobbs still functions as a role model for  all teachers and counselors working at Wright School  and they try to live his principles in the daily interaction with the students.

In our opinion Wright School takes  a great approach in working with children with special needs.