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January 24, 2010

CHICAGO NEWS COOPERATIVE

More Than Academics at Morton Alternative

By GIOVANNA BREU

A gritty industrial patch of a blue-collar Chicago suburb seems an unlikely setting for the pioneering curriculum at Morton Alternative High School. The program, which combines intensive psychotherapy with conventional studies to help gang members and emotionally troubled teenagers finish school, has reported promising results and has attracted the notice of educators nationwide.

José Moré/Chicago News Cooperative – Morton Alternative High School is the last chance for students who are expelled from Morton East High School and Morton West.

Dr. Mark Smaller, a Chicago psychoanalyst, started the program at Morton Alternative three-and-a-half years ago as a contrast to schools that take a strict disciplinary approach to youths with behavioral problems. Dr. Smaller and his team of social workers conduct weekly group and individual therapy sessions to help students deal with emotional problems and social pressures common to life in neighborhoods where families struggle with job losses, crime, violence and immigration issues.

Morton Alternative in Cicero is the last chance for students who are expelled from Morton East and Morton West High Schools. An average of about 100 students are at the school at any one time — those judged to have some chance for improvement — though they come and go throughout the academic year.

The students’ levels of anxiety, depression and self-esteem are tested in standardized surveys at the beginning and end of the school year. In 2007-8, the average depression level of students who had both group and individual therapy fell to 17.4 from 20.7 on a scale that measures severe depression at 16.

José Moré/Chicago News Cooperative – The staff at Morton Alternative listened to Dr. Mark Smaller, who started the school’s unconventional program.

“Based on clinical and qualitative data, we are actually having a significant impact,” Dr. Smaller said. “After a year of therapy, their anxiety and depression index goes way down and we are able to help troubled kids learn and hopefully graduate.”

Dr. Smaller estimates that 18 percent of the students return to traditional high schools each year. About 60 percent of those who stay at the alternative school graduate, and the rest leave school because of unacceptable behavior, poor attendance or failing grades.

A few students have gone on to Morton College, which has a two-year program, and to four-year colleges, school officials said. They said graduates often got good jobs because they improved their social skills and learned to present themselves favorably.

Experts in school violence say it is unusual to have an extensive psychotherapy program in a school. “It is a very exciting program that has helped many students turn their lives around,” said Dr. David Terman, director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, which oversees the program with the school.

R. (initials are being used to protect the students’ privacy), an 18-year-old senior, was admitted to Morton Alternative his sophomore year after being expelled for writing gang graffiti in school. “Art can get you in trouble,” he said with a grin.

R. said he was in a gang, but left when a relative died because of gang violence. He said the counselors taught him to talk through his problems so he could decide, for example, that he did not need to fight to resolve an issue. He said he wanted to be a science teacher, and he helps teach a class, as do other students who excel in the program.

Dr. Smaller said he was originally reluctant to visit the school when David Myles, a social worker, invited him to attend a group counseling session six years ago. “To my dismay, I have been coming back ever since,” he said with a smile.

Mr. Myles said: “You get hooked. There is so much potential for these students and how much you could do with them.”

After two years, Dr. Smaller decided that students could be helped by more frequent psychotherapy sessions. He persuaded a private foundation and the American Psychoanalytic Foundation to provide money to hire him as the in-school psychoanalyst, as well as to bring on three part-time social workers.

“We needed to see what was going on inside these kids,” Dr. Smaller said, “not just their stupid behavior.”

The Morton program has won favorable notice in academic circles. Dr. Carla Solomon, director of the Peter Blos Center for Adolescents, which supports the George Jackson Academy in Manhattan, has asked Dr. Smaller to help develop a replica of his Morton Alternative program at the school for underprivileged boys. “I think his work very much needs to be done in a widespread way,” she said.

Dr. Smaller is also starting a pilot program in Saugatuck, Mich.

Stuart Twemlow, a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and an expert on school bullying, said troubled students “need someone like Mark to have faith in them. If he can replicate the Cicero project in Michigan and New York City and train people in other schools to do this well, it will be dramatically effective,” he said.

José Moré/Chicago News Cooperative – A sign near the alternative school.

Dr. Smaller said the Cicero program owes much of its success to Rudy Hernandez, the principal of Morton Alternative. “He has an intuitive sense of what the kids needed, a responsiveness to whatever was going on internally,” Dr. Smaller said.

On Wednesdays, Mr. Hernandez meets with teachers, social workers and Dr. Smaller to discuss the students they are most concerned about. Recently, the focus was on girls who had been involved in shoving matches that had escalated into a fistfight.

“We explained we would not tolerate their behavior and would help them have more self-control,” said Sara Monner, a school counselor. Parents were invited to meetings at the school to help deal with the behavior.

Gangs are pervasive in the neighborhood and in the schools. One student, J., was transferred to Morton Alternative in his sophomore year after he was caught selling marijuana. At one time he lived on the border between rival gangs, and he said that when he was 9, he was shot at when he tried to “tag” a garage in a rival gang’s territory.

In a group therapy session, J. talked about his desire to turn his life around. “My parents wanted to teach me things, and I wasn’t around for it,” he said. “Now I want to learn what they wanted me to become.”

José Moré/Chicago News Cooperative – Dr. Mark Smaller.

Even with the school’s efforts, students still struggle. In March 2008, J.’s girlfriend gave birth to twin boys. A month later, he was charged in connection with an incident in which one son’s leg was broken; J. had pulled the child out of a car seat without removing one of the restraining straps. J. said it was an accident, and an orthopedic surgeon submitted a statement to a court that the child’s injury could have been unintentional. His case has not yet been resolved.

Despite his problems, J. graduated from the Morton Alternative High School last June.

“I never thought that because of this school I would one day walk in the right direction,” he said. “I don’t want my sons to need anything, just as my father wanted for us when he left Mexico.”

Matt Landa, a social worker who often conducts home visits to help his students, said, “Nobody here has a ‘Little House on the Prairie’ background.”

Sometimes, he said, the parents are involved with drugs or gangs or are in jail. What goes on outside strongly affects the students’ ability to focus on school and develop academically.

“But they are amazing to work with,” he added, “when I don’t feel like pulling out my hair.”