When the Shipmans began Happy Hill Farm Academy/Home more than 30 years ago, they had no way of knowing what the United States would be facing today. According to a series of television specials on ABC-TV on foster care, the following information was given. Each week, nearly 60,000 children in the United States are reported as abused or neglected. About 520,000 of those children end up in foster care each year -- nearly double the number of 25 years ago.
A residential school, such as Happy Hill Farm Academy/Home, is a creative alternative to foster care, enabling larger numbers of children to be helped. With the need so great and growing, the Farm is expanding its program ultimately to provide care for 225 at-risk children.
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THE MISSING OPTION FOR DISADVANTAGED YOUTH
Long recognized as desirable for children from wealthy homes, boarding schools are needed at least as much, and are cost-beneficial for, youth from abusive, neglectful, homeless, and otherwise disadvantaged families, and dangerous neighborhoods. Leaders of the new "Residential Education Movement" contend boarding schools are a sorely needed missing option, which can meet the needs of some of our nation's most socially and economically disadvantaged youth.
What is Residential Education?
Residential education is education provided in an environment where students both live and learn, outside of their family homes. Varied forms of residential education include boarding schools, preparatory schools, orphanages, children and youth villages, residential academies, and, most recently, residential charter schools.
How Does Residential Education Help?
Similar to boarding schools for wealthier children, the programs seek to create a feeling of safety and community while providing social, academic, vocational, recreational, and sometimes spiritual components otherwise unavailable to these young people. Though varied in size, student demographics, setting, and funding sources, the different programs have more in common than differences. These 24-hour, education-focused settings become students' "second homes." They have positive roles models. Students receive a quality education, learn social skills, have positive role models, and gain a positive sense of what they can become. Values and lessons learned are consistent 24 hours a day. Most students spend at least two years in residential education programs, the amount of time a young person needs to understand that he/she is in charge of his/her own life outcomes.
How Does This Differ From Other Out-Of-Home Options for These Children?
Residential education is not residential treatment, foster care, nor group homes. Foster care is a short-term care option that hopefully results in adoption or reunification with the child's natural family or relatives. Residential education is a long-term option that provides a safe, stable, nurturing environment and education, while encouraging relationships with the child's parents and relatives. While both residential education and residential treatment provide 24-hour care, residential education focuses on the developmental needs of young people, whereas residential treatment emphasizes their deficits. Residential treatment is usually shorter (6 month limit), more intensive "treatment," and is more expensive than residential education.
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RESIDENTIAL EDUCATION HAS IT'S ADVANTAGES
"Residential education programs -- settings where young people both live and study -- have existed in the United States for over 350 years. Traditional preparatory schools, geared toward children from well-to-do-families, and whose primary goal is preparation for college, have flourished since the eighteenth century.
There are approximately 25 residential programs in the U. S. that focus on providing educational opportunities to economically and socially disadvantaged young people.
Americans across the political spectrum are discovering the advantages that residential education programs offer to children from disadvantaged families and violent neighborhoods. These provide students with essential life components that are otherwise largely unavailable to them, including safety (both physical and emotional), education community, structure, and self-esteem. Students who enroll in residential schools receive invaluable assistance in overcoming their environmental challenges; the vast majority are able to graduate and go on to college.
Residential schools provide a much needed alternative to other social and educational systems, including foster care, school reform, juvenile delinquency prevention and diversion, and school-to-work transition."
Heidi Goldsmith
Executive Director
Coalition of Residential Education
Washington, D.C.
Who Are Best Served by Residential Education?
- Youth who live in unsafe homes – homeless youth, and those in abusive and neglectful homes
- Youth who have been bouncing around from foster home to foster home with little hope of adoption or reunification, or youth who would likely fail in the foster care system
- Youth whose parents won't go into residential drug treatment programs because they are afraid to place their children in the foster care system. So they continue their self-destructive habits and habitual abuse and neglect of their children
- Youth whose well-meaning parents, struggling to make ends meet, beg the boarding schools to accept their children, to keep them safe, and away from the drug culture
For most of these children, existing options are not meeting their needs. Boarding schools offer a safe, stable, education-focused environment to these youth, and to their parents, judges, and school counselors.
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