Melissa Tucker, Amanda Groller & Tom Munoz  

Vickie Rabino, Hitchcock ISD               

Rotary Drills Down on Service Above Self

Both the Rotary of Texas City and La Marque Rotary focused on individuals who spend their days going well above and way beyond as they provide service to those of us who have suffered trauma, are coping with challenges both physical and mental, or simply live under difficult circumstances whether it be due to the ongoing recovery from Harvey, generational poverty, or family upheavals. 

These are what we refer to as “Our Better Angels”. These are people who have dedicated their lives to understanding how these kinds of difficulties can impede not only the victims but those around them and they go to work each day with the idea that this day, they will find a way to make a life better, a day go more smoothly, a child, a Mom, a Granddad feel that there is hope for them and someone really does care. They spend a lot of time listening, so it was quite special to hear them tell us a little bit about the mountains they climb each day to provide that light at the end of someone’s tunnel.

Melissa Tucker is the CEO of Gulf Coast Centers and brings over 25 years of social and clinical services and her associate Amanda Groller, shared all the unique and valuable services provided through Gulf Coast Centers through initiatives that address mental health and intellectual and developmental disabilities,  as well as disaster response, veteran services, even transportation services which you might recognize as Connect Transit, psychiatric and substance abuse services, forensic services and an around the clock Crisis Hotline at 1-866-729-3848.

Gulf Coast also provides educational opportunities including  Mental Health First Aid, CPR/First Aid training, and Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST).

Amanda Groller is quite often the face of Gulf Coast Center to support our local communities as we have struggled with the incredible damage done by Harvey, the horrific trauma suffered by so many as a result of the shooting at Santa Fe High School. Both of these incidents have resulted in long term recovery situations that require support for years after the actual incident.. Gulf Coast Center continues to have emotional support in place to support our local community.

One of the Gulf Coast Center programs highlighted was Harvey Support Services  which has been so vital to helping Harvey victims reacclimate to their situation post-Harvey, especially children and seniors. Outreach, Screening, & Referral (OSAR), and other substance use services provided through Gulf Coast Center, help  address the opioid and other drug related challenges many face within our communities. At the second anniversary of Harvey, Groller acknowledged that there are still people dealing with trauma related to the storm and its aftermath – school children to respond to rain storms, adults who are dealing with what might seem to be outrageous time lines as they attempt to  get “back to normal” or just back into their homes.

The La Marque Rotary  invited Vickie Rabino, Trauma Counselor for the Hitchcock School District who also served as a social worker for Gulf Coast Center. During that time, she felt a strong pull to take what she had learned and share that information with teachers and administrators within the school district environment. After Santa Fe,  Rabino saw a posting for a Trauma-At Risk Counselor and thought that the position just might be the way to bring that knowledge to the schools. She applied and was accepted and began with Hitchcock ISD. She began by looking at the challenges to the community as a whole and saw that there were three primary challenges to families with school age children; poverty, transportation, and the fact that Hitchcock is a food desert.

She went about the business of finding ways around the challenges each school campus was facing. They began with forming their own ISD Police force. She started a Parent Educator Program to work with children who were ending up in ISS due to behavior problems. Parents who attended were able to lessen their child’s time in detention.

It became obvious that far too many children were going without meals during the summer months, so she acquired a school van and  found a way to get meals, books and games to kids up to the age of 18, delivered to their homes. She spoke about CAP where kids from schools throughout Galveston County are sent for disciplinary problems and she visits them regularly too to work on social skills and coping mechanisms  to get them back into the classroom.

Every member of Hitchcock ISD has been trained in Restorative Justice to cut down on ISS and suspensions. In addition, students not only receive breakfast and lunch, they get a dinner meal to take home with them each day. These are just a few of the programs now available in Hitchcock schools.

 To implement restorative justice with fidelity, start with these steps.

• First, intentionally create a community that is anchored in shared values. June Jordan School for Equity uses the acronym RICH to describe its four core values: Respect, Integrity, Courage, and Humility. This provides a common language for students, parents, and teachers to understand what is expected of all members of the school community.

• Second, make participation in the community a requirement, not an option. Lots of things are required in schools: Number 2 pencils, backpacks, binders. Why can’t you ask every student to adopt the core values that signify membership in your sacred community? Think of this as benevolent branding: “This is a special place where you want to belong.” Requiring students to participate in the community means a couple of things. First, they must do their best to practice its values in word and deed. Second, they commit to engage in restorative processes if they have harmed the community or been harmed by another member. There is a reciprocal principle implied here: We will keep you safe, but in return you have to show up as a full participant.

• Third, model and teach your community values. We know that it takes students four to 40 exposures to learn a new vocabulary word. Internalizing your school’s values is no different. If you want the values to live beyond a slogan or poster, take time to teach them in interactive ways like role-playing, reading and writing stories about the values in action, and asking students to recall their life experiences related to the values. Leverage your most personalized school structures–advisory, circle time, community-building days–to explicitly teach the values of your beloved community.

• Finally, enforce the values and be willing to hold students accountable. There’s no cookie cutter approach to restorative justice. You are asking students to make a commitment to stay in relationship with each other and their community. By extension, if they violate or harm that relationship, they need to make amends. Accountability might look like a verbal “talking-to,” having to reflect on their choices in a restorative circle, engaging in a restorative conference with the harmed party, or perhaps even being suspended. There must be real, felt consequences along with opportunities to make amends and learn from mistakes. A helpful guiding principle is that consequences should always be educational in nature rather than punitive. Matt offers, “I don’t care about the quantity of suspensions, I care about the quality.”