NorthStar's Mission

Purpose:  The purpose of the NorthStar program is to add value to the region that we serve by providing outstanding educational and therapeutic services and supports to the students, families, school system representatives and community service providers that we interact with on a daily basis. Our ultimate value is determined by the value we bring to those we serve. 

Value:  As a governmental entity, it is our first responsibility to be good stewards of the resources that are provided to us from the tax payers. We will work with all of our operational partners to advocate for the resources that are needed to carry out our responsibilities but will always look for ways to provide services and supports in a fiscally responsible manner. Each staff member is expected to maintain high ethical standards in the utilization of program resources.

Organizational Structure: In order to ensure a fiscally responsible approach, the organizational structure must be as flat as possible, with most resources being devoted to positions that provide direct service to our consumers on a daily basis.  This organizational structure means that every staff member has leadership responsibilities in relation to their role within the organization and within their circle of influence. Our effectiveness as an organization is dependent on each team member’s leadership abilities and effectiveness in carrying out their job duties.

Organizational Influence:  Our organization recognizes that leadership effectiveness is grounded in our ability to influence others in positive ways. At NorthStar each employee is expected to engage in behaviors that demonstrate admirable character, exemplary skills and knowledge, and respectful and intuitive teamwork and collaboration with others. It is through these behaviors that we gain the trust of our consumers which increases our ability to provide positive influence in our daily interactions with others.

Importance of Relational Connectedness:  We recognize that in any organization working with other humans, that our connections to others are vital.  Each employee is expected to promote healthy relationships through open, sincere, and respectful communication.  This communication must have as a pre-requisite a focus on others. This means that we always consider our consumers first, taking action to understand their barriers and concerns, as well as their hopes and dreams. This understanding of all perspectives provides the foundation for sensitive, empathic, and respectful communication and collaborative problem solving.

Professional Development:  At NorthStar, we recognize that to attract the best, we must be the best.  This means that each staff member has the responsibility to be a self-reflective practitioner, always evaluating their own strengths and weaknesses and developing plans for improving their own performance. We also recognize that to develop as professionals and leaders requires sacrifice.  Each staff member must commit to a process of continual personal and professional development.

Organizational Development:  At NorthStar, we also recognize that our success is a result of our cumulative effectiveness. To develop to our maximum potential, we must continually have a commitment to empowering and developing those around us.  We develop others first by our example, always seeking to demonstrate the highest level of character, integrity, and skill in relation to our roles within the organization. We also develop others by sharing our own expertise, through modeling, collaborative learning, training, and coaching activities.  Finally, we develop others through our ability to model the habits of being a reflective and self-motivated continual learner.

Commitment to Success:  At NorthStar, our employees above all else must have a commitment to success. Each staff must recognize that there will always be barriers and challenges that must be overcome in order for success to be achieved. Each staff must demonstrate an unquenchable passion for ensuring that we alongside all of our consumers will succeed. Each staff recognizes that conditions will never be optimal, the challenges will always be daunting, and still we will commit to finding ways to help our organization and consumers succeed.

At NorthStar we recognize that there are many diverse philosophies and approaches for educating and caring for students with disabilities that result in severe behavior. A pre-requisite for employment with NorthStar has to be the alignment of the employee’s personal beliefs and values with the core program beliefs and values.  Organizational expectations flow from these beliefs and values, so it is important that each staff member reflect on them, to ensure that they do not have philosophical conflicts that would interfere with their ability to act in accordance with the program beliefs and values.

• Many students have had negative experiences in relation to school and learning prior to entering the NorthStar program. Our first job is to help students have a positive learning experience. To create this reparative experience, staff must focus on ensuring that an individualized teaching plan is developed based on the needs of the child, that classrooms are safe, positive, supportive and engaging places where students want to be, and that learning tasks are appropriately challenging and effectively help students begin to experience success.
• Each student has unique neurological strengths and weaknesses that influence how they learn and the rate at which they learn. In order to maximize each child’s ability to learn, we must understand their needs and create individualized learning plans that maximize their ability to use their strengths and provide appropriate interventions to build up areas where they do not have natural strengths. In situations where disabilities prevent further development (e.g., traumatic brain injury) accommodations are provided to help the student cope and manage despite these challenges.
• Students should be provided an appropriate level of challenge to ensure continued growth and development, with the goal of closing achievement and performance gaps. This includes providing exposure to grade level standards with the appropriate accommodations and modifications to ensure that students can approach these learning tasks, remain engaged, and achieve success. This also involves managing negative perceptions and beliefs about their ability to learn, ensuring that lesson design and teaching strategies promote active engagement, while also ensuring that tasks are designed with sufficient resources and support to ensure success. It also requires the provision of remedial learning activities in areas where students have gaps that interfere with their ability to succeed in age appropriate learning experiences.
• Students must be present and engaged to benefit from learning activities. Educational activities, policies and procedures should promote the involvement of both the students, their families, and other care providers. These consumers must be full members of the team with real opportunities for input into goal setting and decisions related to the student’s educational program. In addition to promoting involvement, policies and procedures should focus on retention of the student in the learning environment instead of relying on exclusionary procedures, except in situations where such exclusion can reasonably be expected to have an educational benefit for the student. This philosophy is carried out to the maximum extent possible given the limitations of federal, state, and local policies, procedures and legal requirements.

Therapeutic Beliefs / Values

• Successful therapeutic interventions recognize that the origins of severe behavior problems are complicated. Most severe behaviors can best be understood from a biopsychosocial perspective. This means that treatment interventions should focus on the whole child, including all of the environments where the child interacts on a daily basis.
  • Biological focus: Each individual has a unique genetic make-up that results in a unique biological make-up. That genetic/biological inheritance can have a strong influence on the presence of disabilities, mental health issues, and overall neurological driven tendencies and personality traits. Lifestyle issues (nutrition, exercise, sleep, life-space support and stability) can exacerbate these biological factors. When genetic or biological/neurological based differences exist that contribute to learning and behavioral difficulties, helping the family access appropriate assessments and medical evaluations to assist in the treatment of these issues is essential. Program personnel are also often involved in helping to carry out appropriate interventions and treatments based on these assessments/evaluations (e.g., provision of related services [speech/occupational therapy], medication administration, special diet requirements, seizure prevention and response protocols, etc.).  As professionals, our ability to understand and help others understand the difference between “brain/biologically driven” behaviors and “learned behavior” and why different responses are required is a critical part of the work in helping our children succeed.
  • Psychological: The way a student thinks can have a powerful effect on their behavior. Some thinking patterns are learned, while others are a result of a complicated response to biological states/neurological firing patterns in combination with environmental variables. Teaching students to identify when they are not thinking in positive and balanced ways that promote healthy interactions, decision-making and coping is usually an important part of any successful therapeutic intervention.  It can also be helpful to engage students in therapeutic dialogue at teachable moments to help the student build insight into the connection between their feeling, thoughts, and behaviors. These reflective dialogues are necessary to help students replace problematic thoughts and behaviors with healthy replacements that help them avoid negative outcomes and achieve greater levels of success. 
  • Social: Each individual is influenced by their environment. While our genetic and biological make-up has a strong influence on behavior, our environment is believed to have an equally important influence. Experiences throughout our lifetime can alter how our biological systems develop, influence our thinking and provide instruction and models for how to respond to different situations. To a large extent, we are our experiences. If children have had negative life experiences (trauma/abuse/neglect, broken or unstable relationships, chaotic and un-dependable care givers), then reparative experiences must be provided that will assist the student in making therapeutic progress. Treatment providers must be informed about the ongoing effects of these life experiences and be able to connect how current behaviors relate to those experiences. It is only through a full understanding of these experiences that we can form an effective and comprehensive plan that will address the needs of the child.

Critical Elements of the NorthStar Therapeutic Approach

• Our therapeutic approach relies first on the creation and maintenance of a safe, nurturing, and predictable environment filled with individuals that consistently show care and concern for the child.
• Individuals working with children and families must approach education and treatment with an understanding of the biopsychosocial factors that impact student success. For this reason, every member of the NorthStar team receives training that allows them to be Trauma-informed, understand the connections between the brain/body and behavior, as well training in using cognitive-behavioral techniques to ensure appropriate learning experiences.
• In order to carry out the above approach to care, the NorthStar approach relies on the development of healthy and supportive relationships with students and families. Positive treatment outcomes will be limited if students and families do not like, respect, and trust the individuals attempting to work with them.
• Treatment proceeds as staff assist students in examining different life situations to help them gain insight into behaviors that tend to lead to success and those that tend to bring negative outcomes. Expectations are then set for utilizing behaviors that lead to success.
• Once expectations are set, the environment is structured to cue and prompt positive behaviors and ensure that meeting expectations ensures positive outcomes. The use of praise and positive outcomes must far exceed the frequency of redirection of problematic behavior (at least 4 to 12 times as much) and corrective consequences in order to effectively overcome past learning experiences. There is a recognition and appreciation of the fact that old habits are difficult to replace and the student will need a high number of experiences of using the replacement behavior with positive outcomes before it will become a new habit.
• Failure to meet expectations, results in supportive dialogue and re-teaching and when necessary co-management of behavior when the student is overwhelmed by their emotions and unable to move from previous habits of responding. Corrective consequences (usually restorative in nature; including natural and logical consequences) are used to give clear feedback about how the behavior impacted individuals in the child's community and emphasize taking responsibility and repairing relationships that may have been damaged.
• While appropriate management of contingencies is an important part of treatment, it is vital that treatment continues to focus on the whole child and that intervention plans are comprehensive in addressing all of the factors influencing the child’s behavior. Whole child education requires that our staff consistently work to ensure that our students are healthy, safe, supported, engaged and challenged.
  • Healthy (focus on promoting and modeling good nutrition, exercise, sleep and stress management habits; clear thinking strategies, social-emotional skills)
  • Safe (Environment is safe, attractive and friendly; individuals show care and concern, high expectations based on understanding of developmental and learning needs, prosocial and social-emotional skills modeled by all)
  • Supported (A variety of assessments are used to guide and inform instruction and supports, learning is personalized, teaching staff are skilled in developing supportive relationships with students and families, staff are also skilled in sharing resources with families and advocating for student needs)
  • Engaged (instruction should be active and routinely include inquiry based or experiential learning activities, activities help students to set and monitor goals and collaborate in decisions, learning should have relevance and show real-world connections, activities should promote civic involvement, citizenship and how to be of service to the world around you)
  • Challenged (Staff have high but reasonable expectations for students based on their individual needs, data is collected and used to guide instruction and treatment, students are taught both critical content, as well as life-long learning skills such as critical thinking, reasoning, and problem solving. Students are prepared for our ever-changing world through exposure to technology, new innovations and exposure to global cultures and world issues.
• There is also a recognition and appreciation that the most critical elements of treatment occur before problem behaviors occur, not after.

• Students must be present to benefit from therapeutic activities. Here, one sees the extension of the previous commitment to retention of the student. A common problem in the way services are delivered to students with severe disabilities is that there is often an absence of intensive, sustained interventions over time. This is unfortunate, as research clearly suggests that it is the provision on intensive, high quality services over prolonged periods of time that will most likely lead to treatment success.  For this reason, interventions in response to severe behavior should focus less of exclusion from the therapeutic environment and instead focus on what can be done differently within the therapeutic educational environment, or in conjunction with the home or community environment (medical consults, initiation of outside therapeutic or external supports such as wrap-around service providers) to promote better outcomes for the student. In a very small number of cases, exclusion may be used if it can reasonably be expected to promote therapeutic benefits for the child. This philosophy is carried out to the maximum extent possible given the limitations of federal, state, and local policies and procedures and legal requirements.

NorthStar services are part of the continuum of services in each of the local school districts we serve.  Service decisions for special education students are always made within the framework and protections of the Individual Education Plan (IEP) process. If you think a student might benefit from services offered by the NorthStar program, please contact the special education director or coordinator for your school system to help you guide you in determining if NorthStar might be a service that could be considered for a particular student.

Please contact any of our individual sites if you have other questions about the NorthStar program or services.

We are always looking for talented individuals whose beliefs and values are in alignment with the NorthStar beliefs and values.  If you think you might be a good fit for our program, please fill out an application and submit this document to the location or site where you wish to be considered for employment. All available positions are routinely listed on the Teach Georgia website.

https://www.teachgeorgia.org/home.aspx