{"id":2786,"date":"2020-09-22T21:05:01","date_gmt":"2020-09-23T03:05:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/?p=2786"},"modified":"2020-09-30T12:06:39","modified_gmt":"2020-09-30T18:06:39","slug":"my-best-me-offers-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/?p=2786","title":{"rendered":"My Best Me Offers Hope"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The \u201cMy Best Me\u201d curriculum is a program that brings help and hope into both classrooms and into homes.\u00a0\u00a0 Our program has expanded into many districts in Oklahoma with wide range distribution for the 2021 school year.\u00a0 \u201cMy Best Me\u201d helps with the social and emotional (SEL) learning issues children face.\u00a0 There is a delicate balance in dealing with the emotional reality of experiences and the learning process in education. Many students have faced ACE\u2019s (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and have difficulty moving forward in a learning environment, but there is hope.\u00a0 Below is a testimony from one of the school administrators currently using our program who is also a foster parent.<\/p>\n

John, who is a nine year old boy of African-American ethnicity, came to stay with us because he was in foster care.\u00a0 His permanency worker was one of my school board members.\u00a0 She was in my office at school on another matter when she received a text stating that John needed another placement.\u00a0 We were fostering a teen at the time so our home was active.\u00a0 I half-jokingly volunteered and she took me up on it.<\/p>\n

Years earlier, when our children were young, my wife stayed home with our biological children.\u00a0 It was during that time in our lives that we started fostering. We expected this situation with John to be similar to our early experiences.\u00a0 He had just turned 7 and was as cute as could be. He was supposed to stay with us a few weeks and then join another family who were in the process of adopting him.<\/p>\n

Within 24 hours John declared to me \u201cI\u2019m gonna call you Dad.\u201d\u00a0 I was pleased and did feel a special connection to him but didn\u2019t think too much of it until I found out from his worker that this was not normal for John.\u00a0 She said that one of their concerns was that John had never attached to anyone since he was in foster care.\u00a0 From that point forward, she began to work toward placing John in our home permanently.\u00a0 Eventually we became John\u2019s forever home!<\/p>\n

It has been a long, hard, and wonderful road.\u00a0 In many ways, John\u2019s story is a mystery as his parents refused to share any information.\u00a0 Over the past year or so he has shared some things that happened to him while he was with his biological parents, but there is still a lot we do not know. The things we do know place his ACE score in the at-risk category.\u00a0 We do not dwell on those things, but on a daily basis we see the effects of his early mistreatment.<\/p>\n

This past year the SDE conducted a training focused on ACE scores from traumatic events\/circumstances in the lives of children.\u00a0 They presented PACE, positive elements that we can put into a child\u2019s life to mitigate their previous traumatic experiences.\u00a0We were filled with hope when we learned \u201cMy Best Me\u201d bridges the gap between emotional and educational which would greatly benefit our son and many other children in foster care and other toxic environments.\u00a0 We look forward to this program as one of those positive elements!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The \u201cMy Best Me\u201d curriculum is a program that brings help and hope into both classrooms and into homes.\u00a0\u00a0 Our program has expanded into many districts in Oklahoma with wide range distribution for the 2021 school year.\u00a0 \u201cMy Best Me\u201d helps with the social and emotional (SEL) learning issues children face.\u00a0 There is a delicate<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":2787,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2786"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2790,"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2786\/revisions\/2790"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forvidas.org\/blogmg\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}