At NorthStar Center, Struggling Students Discover Strengths, Embrace Success

Troubled teen. Struggling student. Delinquent. Addict. Failure.

By the time students make their way to NorthStar Center, they’ve likely accumulated more than a few less-than-ideal labels.

By the time they leave, they will have added at least one more identifier to the list:

Successful young adult.

Designed to serve older teens and young adults (ages 17.6 to 24), NorthStar Center offers a wide range of guidance and support services to help students make a successful transition from prior placement to life as an independent adult.

“This is meant to be their last program," said Alice Huskey, NorthStar Center’s academic director. “We help our students do the things they need to do to step up and take responsibility for their lives.”

Embracing Success

Located in Bend, Ore., NorthStar Center exists to help older teens and young adults who find themselves in the following situations:

1. Individuals in recovery who need a structured living program and are open to receiving professional support in order to pursue lifelong sobriety.
2. Older teens and young adults who have completed a therapeutic boarding school, wilderness program or other type of treatment program and need transition assistance in order to live successfully on their own.
3. Students with a history of academic frustration who need additional guidance and support in order to achieve educational objectives such as earning a high school diploma or beginning a college career.

Though these young people have experienced myriad setbacks in their lives, Huskey said her goal isn’t to focus on what has gone wrong. Instead, she and her colleagues make a concerted effort toward turning students’ eyes toward their potential for success.

“We’re very success-oriented,” she said. “Regardless of where students are academically when they enter our program, our goal is for them to walk out of the academic resource center feeling like a genius in some respect.”

Discovering Strengths

For some NorthStar students, embracing their “inner genius” involves learning new skills, while for others it’s a matter of discovering strengths that they may never have known they had.

For example, Huskey said, many students arrive at NorthStar Center convinced that they will never be able to understand math. But after an academic refresher course that is part of the program’s orientation, that opinion often changes.

“My goal is for them to walk out of our math refresher course feeling like a closet math genius,” she said. “I want them to feel good, and know that if they want to do well, they can.”

In addition to enhancing underdeveloped abilities, the orientation period also helps students identify existing skills that they have ignored or overlooked.

“During the orientation phase, we spend a good amount of time looking at what their strengths are,” Huskey said. “We do a learning styles inventory, we do a multiple intelligence assessment and we review any previous testing they may have completed.”

The purpose of this effort, she said, is to help students identify what they can do well, while also starting them on the path toward taking responsibility for themselves.

“Before they leave orientation, they have created a learning strengths profile,” she said. “So instead of saying ‘these are my problems and my disabilities,’ they come out of our orientation phase saying ‘these are my strengths, this is what I do well.’”

The result, Huskey said, is that NorthStar students emerge from the program’s orientation phase with a renewed sense of self and an enhanced ability to advocate on their own behalf.

“They have accomplished something -- they have taken on a challenge and they have come out of the experience with a new script for their lives,” she said. “They can start taking responsibility for what they’re good at, and can also tell their teachers ‘here’s what I struggle with, but here’s how I can get better, and here’s how you can help me.’”

Failing Forward

Though NorthStar Center understandably puts a premium on success, Huskey said that she and her colleagues also spend a fair amount of time talking to students about failure. Surprisingly to some, their conversations don’t center on avoiding failure – instead, they talk about the benefits of falling short of one’s goals.

“One of the terms we use is ‘failing forward,’” she said. “All of our failures are OK if we’re failing forward, if we’re learning from the experience. You can learn a lot from failing.”

Mistakes and other forms of failure, Huskey tells the students, aren’t merely obstacles. Instead, she says, they are growth opportunities that, if handled properly, can propel students on to even greater successes.

“Those who dare to achieve and fail succeed greater than those who never risk anything,” she said. “We tell our students that they have to be willing to fail in order to grow. If they’re so afraid of failure, they’re not going to take the risks that they need to take in order to become strong, successful and independent adults.”

For some students, failure comes in the form of a less-than-successful experience in the classroom. For others, the challenge may involve a problem in therapy, a family conflict or a relapse into substance abuse.

And though program personnel endeavor to minimize students’ experiences with these types of failures, Huskey and her colleagues know that their students’ greatest successes likely lie on the other side of a setback.

“Every day that they’re here, they’re getting an opportunity to do something different, to learn adult skills, to take another step toward adulthood,” she said. “And dealing with failure is an important part of becoming a successful adult.”

For the students who are able to overcome past setbacks, and who are prepared to work through future obstacles, the NorthStar experience provides them with two of the greatest gifts of all – the opportunity to set their own goals, and the ability to achieve whatever they desire.

“If you graduate from this program, you have accomplished a great deal,” Huskey said. “You’ve learned a lot, and you have done so much to prepare yourself to be successful.”