After earning my BA in Psychology and working in a psychiatric hospital, I decided I wanted to focus more on at risk youth, especially the younger population.

It’s really important for our students that I come up with new and exciting things for them. We do a lot of creative art projects for the students and incorporate nature walks, yoga, meditation, and bring new and relaxing activities to their daily schedule.

I appreciate when I see students that I have worked with coming back to the school and sharing their success. Even with new things, where you don’t think they appreciate it, seeing the impact it makes is very rewarding.

Some of the most meaningful victories are seeing students graduate, knowing how hard they’ve worked to get to that accomplishment. Another amazing victory was bringing a yoga instructor to the school. At first everyone was very skeptical and by the end, the kids were looking forward to yoga every Tuesday!

We all try to introduce our students to new things that they haven’t been exposed to in their realm of life to create new habits for success. In general, we use a lot of humor and that is definitely helpful for out students. Being able to laugh with our students and co-workers helps ease a lot of tension that might exist.