TPC Journal V7, Issue 2 - FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 7, Issue 2 171 no matter how much academic potential they may possess (Kim, 2006). Likewise, there is a sense of disconnectedness to the home school and its faculty and staff (Boutelle, 2010; Kelchner, 2015). Students’ performance tends to be greater when they bond with their school, are connected and feel someone at the school cares about them (Flower, McDaniel, & Jolivette, 2011). Many at-risk youth are not given compulsory support and are not nominated to receive remedial services (Kayler & Sherman, 2009). Because the transition back to their home schools can be very challenging, students who fail to make this transition either are sent back to the alternative academy, expelled from school or drop out. Rumberger and Lim (2008) classified the reasons students leave high school before completion into individual predictors and institutional predictors. There are four major categories of individual predictors: (a) academic failure, (b) expectations (e.g., future academic success), (c) behaviors, especially engagement, and (d) background and life experiences (Rumberger & Lim, 2008). Students who are sent to an alternative school are more than twice as likely to drop out of school as students who have not been sent to an alternative school setting, and support with this transition is needed for students returning to their home schools (Berger, 2011; Brownstein, 2010; Kelchner, 2015; Stone, 2003). Alternative School Transition The literature was reviewed to assess interventions for use in our study. The primary goal of alter- native programs is to transition students back to their traditional educational environment, the home school. There is little research about this transition and how to best meet the needs of transitioning youth. Coordinated planning can minimize the anxiety and negative elements experienced by students, families and teachers that can accompany the transition from one educational setting to another (Kelchner, 2015; Richardson, 2012; Wolf &Wolf, 2008). A lack of appropriate transition and support programming can negate the benefits received from the alternative school. Students have the potential to regress to prior negative behaviors and poor performance because of the loss of support, a return to the environment that already failed them, negative peer influences, and labeling and stigmatization by both peers and school personnel, which may lead to re-suspension (Stone, 2003; Valore, Cantrell, & Cantrell, 2006; Wolf &Wolf, 2008). As a result, students who attend an alternative school and have the fortitude to improve behavior, improve school relations and catch up academically often return to the prior negative conditions in their home school that caused them to fail in the first place. Because of an apparent lack of support and services throughout the transition, many students return to the alternative schools or end up in more restrictive placements, such as juvenile detention or jail (Berger, 2011; Richardson, 2012; Stone, 2003). School-Based Transitional Support Intervention Exiting an alternative school and re-entering a traditional school setting can present many stressors for youth. The purpose of this study is to provide an intervention to support youth returning to a traditional educational setting from alternative school to assist in preventing youth from dropping out of school. The intervention in this study, focused on the area of the individual and how the individual accesses systemic supports within the school community, local community and family. Empowerment, school engagement and academic success were the three major variables focused on in the development of this intervention. The final intervention was based on 10 systemic reviews of intervention programs, eight meta-analyses of various school interventions for at-risk youth, 25 various studies of design, six articles describing implementation of specific programs and six components articles relevant to one or more of the identified key variables. Interventions had to encompass the following criteria to be included in the development of the intervention: target at least one of the factors identified by the target population, be deliverable in a group format, not require direct teacher involvement, and not require unavailable resources.