By Guadalupe Velazquez | Girls Coordinator
New Learnings
We now find ourselves as we were 21 years ago, in the process of accepting young girls in our Puerta Abierta family, now that as you may recall, our eldest have graduated and left the house, and we have a semi-empty nest.
Eventhough, throughout these years, we have developed guidelines, routines and schedules so that new members can enjoy the benefits of Puerta Abierta, current conditions and circumstances, as times, have changed.
We find that girls that want to come to us, are now older than when the previous generation entered, have lost 2 or even 3 years of school, complicating their return to classes, as they are older than the corresponding generation, and well behind in learning skills.
To make matters more complicated, these girls have perhaps suffered more severe violent conditions having lived longer in toxic families and adverse environments.
These conditions force Puerta Abierta to better prepare itself, change its outlook and adapt procedures and receiving mechanisms to help these girls, in surmounting their emotional and educational challenges.
We know that our girls arrive with a severe disadvantage over their contemporary generation, but with the tools that we have offered them, have fortunately resulted in success stories. However this new generation comes with new and apparently more severe disadvantages, thus new challenges.
We have started to look into the strength,endurence,hope and motivation, not only on their intellectual potential, so that we may reinforce their expectations and change their future.
Once we have seen this, we have started looking at new psychological, medical and educational evaluations, specialists that can help us in each of these fields and evaluating new schooling models so that they can recoup lost time, while at the same time, retraining our personnel in new rearing methodologies, emphasizing care, firmness, respect, patience and empathy.
As an institution we are very conscious of the challenging times ahead. But we are convinced we will learn new practices and find proper solutions, emphasizing collaborative work, so that success will come to all involved
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