Take Our Sons and Daughters to Work -- An Update

Written by: Kate Snyder, Executive Assistant

If you’ll recall, back in May, I wrote a posting about our annual Take Our Sons and Daughters to Work Day (TOSD). And today I have a fun addendum to that story. One lucky young lady spent the day shadowing a veterinarian. She had a fantastic time and apparently made quite an impression on her mentor because he invited her to come back and intern with him this summer! Yay! This is really the goal of the TOSD program – creating meaningful and beneficial connections between our young people and working professionals.

This is a neat story under any circumstances. To me, it’s even more special because the young woman in question is a participant in EECM’s Points of Healthy Youth Sustainability and Development (PHYSED) program. PHYSED is an intervention program for extremely high risk middle and high school students. It is a new addition to the Children & Youth services – last school year was the inaugural year. The students identified to participate in PHYSED truly are on the brink of disaster – serious conduct violations at school, failing grades, very unstable families, brushes with the juvenile justice system. They are uninterested in school and angry at the world and the only future they can see is bleak at best.

The PHYSED program seeks to intervene in these young people’s lives before it is too late. EECM staff work one-on-one with students to establish trusting relationships and try to help them overcome their barriers to learning. The goal of the program is to help students replace negative attitudes and behaviors with positive ones, including setting goals and making plans for their future.

And the program is working. Success comes in baby steps but those steps are being slowly taken. Our would-be veterinarian’s story encourages us to keep working .