Maine Assembly on School-Based Health Care

Two Calais High Students Present Workshop at The National Assembly on School-Based Health Care (NASBHC) Annual Conference  

 Sean Cavanaugh and Jesse Clark, both long-time members of the Calais Middle/High School Blue Devil Health Center’s Teen Advocacy Group (the TAG Team), recently attended the National Assembly of School-Based Health Center’s annual convention as presenters of a workshop titled Herding Cats!: How One SBHC learned to TAG and Release Youth Advocacy Using the Net. The were assisted and accompanied by Jay Skriletz, the TAG Team advisor and Blue Devil SBHC’s Youth and Community Advocacy Co-coordinator. The convention was attended by over 700 individuals from all corners of the United States, and nearly 50 youth advocacy coordinators, school-based health center administrators and providers, and youth advocates registered for the workshop.

The presentation opened with a brief history of the TAG Team’s first five years. In the overview many projects were discussed, both those that have been big successes and those that were less successful. Time constraints are always a difficulty and one common to many youth advocacy groups. The desire to explore the web for solutions to this difficulty is what led to the discoveries the presentation shared at the conference.

Youth Advocacy is a very important service provided by the school-based health centers. It gives youth a voice in the services that affect them most closely and elicits strong commitments from youth to better their schools, health centers, and communities. Herding Cats! Focused on how various internet tools, many of them beta, or development (and usually free), versions can facilitate the work of youth advocates by encouraging “virtual” meetings and collaborations using the internet. Some of the tools were virtual classrooms like moodle.org and wiziq.com; others are the common social networking sites like facebook.com and twitter.com which, even though are not available on the schools’ web-server, are commonly used by many organizations to connect with similar groups and potential funders; video conferencing sites like skype.com and oovoo.com were also discussed as ways that youth advocates can meet with youth from other schools and also with community partners in several parts of the state without traveling.

Both on-line chatting and video-conferencing were actually used to collaborate with students at Indian Township Elementary School and the staff at the Holocaust and Human Rights Resource Center at the University of Maine in Augusta to make progress on the Telling Truth oral history project the TAG Team contributed to this past year. The virtual classrooms are in regular use as meeting places and bulletin boards that team members use to share information and ideas when their busy schedules make it difficult to meet.

The presentation concluded with the lessons the team has learned during the time spent exploring internet tools. Most importantly is that these tools are no substitute for the bonding that happens in face-to-face meetings. These tools offer support for the working relationships and commitments the Team forges during meetings and celebrations. The presentation was warmly received and both Sean and Jesse were highly regarded as public speakers.