The Youth Worker's Guide to Helping Teenagers in Crisis - Hardcover

Rich Van Pelt trains thousands of educators, counselors and youth workers each year in adolescent crisis intervention and teen suicide prevention and response. His expertise springs from more than three decades of youth and family work, including ten years with incarcerated youth in the Colorado Department of Corrections. He is president of Alongside Consulting, a Denver-based leadership development organization, and is national director of ministry relationships for Compassion International. Often called on to offer counsel and direction after major teen incidents, like the Columbine shootings, Rich is also the author of Intensive Care: Helping Teenagers In Crisis and co-author of The Youth Worker's Guide to Helping Teenagers In Crisis.

The Youth Worker's Guide to Helping Teenagers in Crisis Copyright 2005 by Youth Specialties Youth Specialties Products, 300 South Pierce Street, El Cajon, CA 92020 are published by Zondervan, 5300 Patterson Avenue Southeast, Grand Rapids, MI 49530. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Van Pelt, Rich. The youth worker's guide to helping teenagers in crisis / by Rich Van Pelt and Jim Hancock. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-310-26313-1 1. Church work with young adults. 2. Church work with youth. 3. Pastoral counseling. 4. Crisis intervention (Mental health services) I. Hancock, Jim, 1952- II. Title. BV4446.V365 2005 259'.23--dc22 2005011502 Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible: New International Version (North American Edition), copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means---electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other---(except for brief quotations in printed reviews) without the prior permission of the publisher. Web site addresses listed in this book were current at the time of publication. Please contact Youth Specialties via e-mail (YS@YouthSpecialties.com) to report URLs that are no longer operational and replacement URLs if available. Editorial direction by Will Penner Art direction by Holly Sharp Editing by Laura Gross Proofreading by Joanne Heim and Heather Haggerty Interior design by SharpSeven Design Cover design by Holly Sharp Printed in the United States of America 05 06 07 08 09 10 / DCI / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Rich Van Pelt: You probably don't live anywhere near Columbine; you may not even know where Columbine is---which is fine. It's in Littleton, Colorado---not exactly the center of the universe, or anything else for that matter---more the southwestern edge of the Denver metro area. But on April 20, 1999---and for about a month after---Columbine seemed like the center of the universe, judging by news coverage. On that day two students came to school armed to the teeth and started shooting people. They killed 12 students, one teacher, and themselves in a bloody rampage. Until the felling of the World Trade Center towers in September 2001 there was, I suspect, never a more photographed crime scene. Like the terror on 9/11, the Columbine coverage was all from the outside---a crisis covered from every angle except the one where people were caught struggling between life and death. Jim Hancock: Ask a dozen youth workers about life beyond Columbine and you'll hear about tipping points, wake-up calls, and rumors of revival; about law enforcement cover-ups, gun control, and Michael Moore; about increased school security and purely cosmetic changes; about freaks, geeks, jocks, and bullies; about a terror notable mainly for its demographics (meaning the shooters and victims were mainly suburban and relatively affluent). Ask a youth worker on the south side of Chicago who met with his group on the evening of the massacre. He'd tell you the adult leaders in his church followed the news from Littleton throughout the afternoon and arrived early to pray and prepare to deal with the trauma once students started showing up. What was truly shocking, he'd say, was how little emotion there was of any sort---not anger, not fear, not even compassion. Kids were fooling around like it was just another Tuesday. He could hardly believe it. What emerged from the group as leaders tried to engage the students in talking about the shootings surprised him even more: What's the big deal? his students wondered. We feel bad for those people and all, but we have shootings in our community all the time. 'I got shot,' a boy said, lifting his shirt to show the scar. 'My brother got killed,' a girl said. And one by one the adults learned that every kid in the room was acquainted with violence and brutal death to a degree none of the leaders knew before that night. That youth worker would say he felt terrible for the Columbine families and he felt terrible for the children and families in his own church whose loss went unrecorded all those years because it was--- what? Less concentrated? Less affluent? Browner-skinned? (He wouldn't include that last question, but I certainly would.) So that's one version of life beyond Columbine; one where it would be nice to grieve the loss of strangers if we just had the emotional reserves. But most of us live well beyond Columbine, and, due respect, we have our own crises. Ask a youth worker who actually had kids at Columbine, and you may hear about outsiders swarming Littleton to profi t from the misery; about cameras, microphones, and relentless scrutiny; about quick in-and-out visits from fear-mongering and fund-raising Christian carpetbaggers who came mainly to talk about themselves. All these years later, the anger and sadness about those things are just under the surface for some folks, mixed with images and memories they can't quite believe another person would comprehend: Crouching behind a hardened police vehicle listening to gunfi re inside the school. Six, seven, eight, nine ambulances screaming out of a cul-de-sac, every one bearing injured students---23 in all. A fi reman hosing blood off the walkway of a house repurposed as a triage center. Walking about in a fog. Burying youth group kids. Working to exhaustion and sickness. Feeling guilty about an ordinary pleasure enjoyed for the fi rst time since the killing. RVP: Here's a story you maybe haven't heard: When all hell broke loose at the high school---and before, during, and after the outsiders came and went---there was a network of youth workers quietly looking after kids in Littleton and the communities that weave around it: Highlands Ranch. Southglenn. Greenwood Village. Cherry Hills. Englewood. Sheridan. Bow Mar. Ken Caryl. Columbine. It's always been a relational thing---this network, formalized only to the extent that we gave it a name---The Southwest Connection--- just so we'd have something to call it. No Web site. No agenda. Just relationships with people who understand each other in the ebb and fl ow of ministry with kids and families. Youth workers in the Southwest Connection come from all over the theological and ecclesiological map: Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Bible church, Catholic, independent, nondenominational. They come to know each other as colleagues in ministry to students at a dozen or so high schools and probably twice that many middle schools. That's what's always drawn us together: Our love for kids. And shared space: 80123, give or take. With physical proximity, theological diversity, shared identity as youth workers, and the nurturing that blossoms when we come together, these remarkable people walked each other through the terror; finding each other here and there in the craziness and taking strength from the horrible, blessed realization this was really happening and we were not alone. In the process, we learned that relationships are everything in a crisis. It wasn't the public extravaganzas that helped; it was one person listening to another. It was off-sites with a few students. 'I suppose the big public meetings were helpful,' one of my friends says, meaning most weren't very helpful at all. 'I mean they were well-produced and all, but what really helped was contact with people.' His wife takes a softer tone toward the high profi le gatherings: 'Some of the big meetings gave groups of four and fi ve students a place to focus their attention on each other and process their experiences together.