Asking for what they want is hard for students. Sometimes they don’t even KNOW what they want. Unfortunately, if someone else has always made decisions for them…well, the likelihood of them even participating in a discussion of their plans for the future is not extremely high.

This is the exact predicament in which many students find themselves upon entering junior high. After years of having someone else make decisions for them, they’re all of a sudden expected to make decisions themselves. What they’ll be when they grow up. What they’ll learn. How they’ll learn it. When they’ll learn it. You might as well throw a baby into the ocean and expect him to swim.

With the Self-Advocacy Strategy program, however, students receive the training they need to navigate the educational ocean before them. Specifically, they learn to become active participants in their planning their education. They do this first by learning to identify their strengths and needs, by setting their own goals, and then by learning a set of behaviors to use to express their ideas to others who can help them make their dreams come true. Thus, within this program, students learn important skills that can be used for life. They learn how to organize and present information about themselves and advocate for themselves in mature and positive ways.