What are the Empowerment Statements?

At our recent family day, a parent asked about the origin of our new 8 Empowerment Statements. The following is a short explanation about their development and implementation. 

Within the last year, ScenicView Academy has adopted 8 statements we refer to as our Empowerment Statements. While we would like to say that the development of these statements was intentional, they came about by accident--a wonderful detour which came during the process of evaluating the flow of a student through the ScenicView program. 

The beginnings of the Empowerment Statements started as staff were considering what core skills a student needed in order to be able to build a life of independence. This included surveying staff regarding the most vital behaviors a student needed to be independent as well as looking at the students who have been the most successful graduates of our program and seeing what their lives looked like. Some of the areas we looked at were areas such as gaining and maintaining employment, navigating relationships in healthy ways, and your regular skills of cooking, cleaning, and getting from point A to point B. 

But our focus began to drift toward a group of intangible qualities we realized were not only important to our student's success, they were vital. We realized that if our students could incorporate these values into their lives, they would be alright in whatever life threw at them. Suddenly these values took precedence over the tangible skills of finding work, maintaining hygiene, and other skills necessary for living independently. That's not to say these tangible skills became less important or that we would focus on them less at ScenicView Academy. Rather we began to feel that if a student could truly understand these values, it would give them a firm bedrock and reason to develop tangible skills. In other words, they become EMPOWERED to take control of their lives and rise to their fullest potential. 

From these discussions, we identified 8 values we hoped to help our students develop and along with these values 8 "I" statements to help instill these values in not only the students, but the families of the students and the staff who work with them. 

Since their development, we have sought to incorporate them into everything we do at ScenicView Academy. They have become themes for various activities, they are incorporated into the classes we teach, and daily you will hear them in the halls of ScenicView in the form of encouragement from one person to another or from individuals utilizing them for personal manifestos. 

We believe that if each of us can come to say each of the Empowerment Statements with conviction and confidence, they can serve as a compass to guide us on the path to living our very best.