What Will The Story Be?

               When this project truly comes to fruition and becomes a reality it is my sincerest ambition to make a change in the lives of foster children as well as in the lives of the DCF workers. While I do want to reach out to the general populace and inform them of this subject that they know so little about, I know that simply doing that will not invoke real change. Instead I would like to target the legislators and people in the government who decide the budget of the DCF. If they see that not just those involved with the system, but also those outside of it can see the issues and truly want change, they would consider increasing the DCF's funding. Were this to happen, more case workers could be hired which would reduce the stress and improve working conditions, and they in turn could provide more help to more children and provide more support to the parents. With this audience in mind hard facts fall by the wayside compared to stories from those close to the story, this is because those who make the decisions in government have already seen the facts and that has not spurred action, but perhaps a cord could be hit with interviews. By representing the physical, emotional, and psychological damage people in the system endure we could really send a message.
               Recently I made a life-changing presentation, and I learned a few things on reaching an audience. Some people who presented had extremely interesting topics, but they just read out facts and it made it so nobody could care less Instead you need to do as others did and play peoples emotions, pain, sadness, shock, and rage, these emotions grab the audiences interest and really make them care. With this in mind I would start the documentary with stories from foster families/children, hitting the pain/sadness chord of the audience. Then I would do the critical and most impressive statistics to bring about a shock value. I would then buckle down into interviews with professionals talking about the foster system, talking about their experiences and the current issues in the system, making the audience want to change change something. I would finish off with a look at the future and what could be if people take action. While this is a serious documentary, it still needs to be a movie, and like all good movies, the audience has to be engaged, so we do have to edit the information to target them accordingly.
               In terms of why I am doing this, it is simply because of the Laura Sobel story, I heard it on NPR and wanted to learn more. As to why I stuck with it and why it became my topic for this class, it is simply frustration. Frustration with the portrayal of the DCF in the media, frustration with the working conditions of case workers, and frustration at the hardships that foster children and their families have to go through. This is a massive issue that effects the most important people in our society, the children, yet we still spend huge amounts of money on shovels and rakes and implements of destruction (the military, i just had to use that phrase!) and neglect this vital part of society. This is what truly pushed me to do this. It is of the utmost importance that we get our priorities in order and start to take care of what is truly important.

Marianna- What IS the story?

    The story that I hope to tell should bring to light some of the issues that most people are unaware of and inspire them to take action to solve them.  The general public might be aware that there is an issue with the foster care system in Vermont but they will usually not know the whole story behind what is happening.  Another one of the audiences we might target is potential foster families.  The number of children in the system can not be fixed without a larger number of parents willing to take them in.  Of course these are just some of the audiences that we might target.

     Our documentary might begin with what could be considered a brief overview on how everything works within the system.  After this we might be able to give quick sections with different interview and photos, each focusing on a different layer of the system, such as the lack of social workers and foster parents, to the drug problem that is putting so many infants into foster care.  We could end it with telling our audience about what is being done already and what they could do to help.  However, I think that this is something that my group will discuss much more in-depth at our next meeting.  I can not wait to see how it actually unfolds.

    I think that a few of the changes that we could ask our audience to make is to maybe consider fostering kids.  There is a severe lack of people willing to foster children and without them nothing can be fixed. One of the things that people could do to help is to give more support to the social workers who give their entire lives to giving these kids the best possible future they can have.  Another thing that people could work together on is setting up drug and alcohol awareness workshops to help prevent teens and young adults from making the mistakes that will put their future or current kids into the system.  The last thing that pops into my head is trying to give families better access to treatment so that they can try to keep their kids safe.  That is one of the reasons we need more foster parents.  If we focused a little more on the parents care as well as the kids, there would be less of a need for people to take them in.
 
     The biggest  purpose I have for telling this story is the struggles that I have seen firsthand some of these kids go through, even years after having been in the system.  When this topic came up at our first meeting, I knew that it was what I wanted to do, so that I could try and help make a difference in more people lives.  At the start of this class I just wanted to change the inner working of the system, now I would like to get more kids into homes that actually care about them and their future.










 

 

Lydia- #5- Whats the ACTUAL Story?

Hi my loyal blog readers. Hope you all had a great holiday vacation and a happy New Year. I certainly did!

There’s no reason to say that my target would be the people at DCF because that's not logical. All those people already know its a problem. That’s why I think the target would be the people, everyone. When I talk to older friends of my parents they realize that there is a problem within the DCF but they only know the outer layer. They only think about the social workers who go crazy and are suicidal after working with the DCF because of what their job requires. But there's a lot more to that, and if that's all people really think about when they think DCF then that's the real problem. That’s where everyone comes in. This project isn’t based on pointing blame it's based on getting the knowledge of the problem out there. People need to know it’s a problem before anything else. While getting the problem out I would like people to understand the message of this project. I want the message of this project to be “help” I want people to see and understand that there is more of a problem then everyone is letting on. That the DCF needs help whether or not they want to admit it. I think that the audience can do a lot just by knowing that there is a problem, so I think after the problem is out there I really want them to go with it. See what they can do at their sons or daughters school, see if anything needs to be done at VT DCF and simply help out. I think that after everyone knows the whole story the can’t help but feel bad and want to help.

That’s why I am doing this. I felt bad after hearing those few presentations about DCF. And I really wanted to see a change. I not only felt bad for the children who have to go through all of this and experience these things, I also felt bad for the social workers. I could never imagine having to do a job like that. The constant stress, pain and sorrow feeling for the children, and being overworked. I don’t know how anyone could ever do that. After really thinking about how horrible it must be to experience those things I decided that I really wanted to help out.

I want people to feel like they could relate to this. or atleast picture themselves in their shoes. So I might start with a few pictures or videos of kids. Some of good times and some of bad times so they can understand it’s not always fun and dandy. I would then want to place the videos of interviews with social workers. I want this in the middle so the people who are watching can get both points of view. I want to show not just the struggles of the children but also the struggles and pain that the social workers go through. I would probably end with ways that people can help and more pictures and videos of social workers and kids working together.

Thanks for reading! Have a great day!

Adrienne-So...What IS the Story?

                Throughout this project, I don’t think my ultimate goal has changed all that much. Maybe I became more aware of it, and the details became concrete, but my plan for this project remains the same: I want to educate others on the reality of Vermont’s foster care system and what life is like for the children living in it. I want to shed light on the problems in the foster care system and propose possible solutions. In the end, I’d like to inspire others to help solve these problems by educating them.

                I believe my audience is pretty broad, as foster care is something that’s rather mysterious for those who aren’t involved in it. Everyone knows about it, but few know the specificities of how DCF works or how being a ward of the state affects the life of a child. Because of my possible audience, my team and I will need to be careful not to alienate. Alienation can be caused by placing blame on specific people or groups, so this will definitely be avoided. I want everyone to be intrigued by the project.

                In terms of structure, I think it would be difficult to condense all the information I’d like to gather into a single narrative. Of course I’ll need to confer with my group members at the next meet-up, but I think maybe a couple short films would be better than one longer one. I think one on the problems faced by children in foster care would be good, and then a second one on DCF, it’s function, and the effect of recent history on the organization.  To complete these narratives, I think my team should have a set of interviews from a variety of people in the field, like social workers, foster parents, foster children, and DCF workers.

                For the narrative on foster care, I think that showing differences in life within and outside foster care would be a good springboard. A segue into discussion of various problems could follow, then some proposed solutions could finish it off.  In the second, I think my interview with Alix Gibson will be very helpful. As the director of my local department of DCF, she has several years of experience and a wealth of knowledge on the organization’s history, function, and practice. I think a brief montage of news headlines could begin this video, which would end with a clip about the death of Lara Sobel. After that we could insert part of Mrs. Gibson’s statement about the event, then something about how the public perceives DCF. After that, I think information about DCF’s function and how it operates could be tailed by changes that could be made to help the organization work to it’s best capacity. I’m not as sure about the DCF one as I am about the foster care one, though.

                I chose my initial topic because I care about the well-being of children, and I still do. I’ve said it before, but I see children as the embodiment of potential.  A child raised in a bad environment is having their potential squandered by forces out of their control, so it’s up to responsible adults to care for all children in the most nurturing way possible.

I’m working on this project because I believe spreading awareness of the problems that children struggle with will lead to others coming up with solutions and enacting them. I also think that DCF is a better organization than recent headlines make it out to be, it just lacks the resources to perform the best it can. The message I want to convey is two-fold, and rather hard to condense. Firstly, I’d like to educate about DCF’s functioning. I don’t really have an intended “message” about DCF, I just want to educate others. Secondly, I’d like to tell the public “Children in foster care are struggling with x, y, and z, here’s how x, y, and z can be solved, and here’s how those solutions can be carried out by people like you.” 

I have plenty more research to do before the project is done, but I think these goals are feasible. I can’t wait to see what I’ll be able to accomplish with my group by the time May rolls around!

Alex-Reflection on the Learning Process

          There is truly no way to compare the styles of learning found in your traditional high-school setting and those found here in WTS. Passive vs. active learning, group vs. solo environments, heavy guidance vs. initiative and personal drive, these two types of learning are such polar opposites that it is hard for me, a person who has only learned in said traditional school setting to even think of this program as school, it is such a foreign experience that it does not compute. This new system is something that depending on the student may work or fail, but it is something that everyone should experience.
          The benefits of this system to a new student such as myself are clear cut from the start. We have the independence to pursue our interests in the fashion of our choice and to do so on a timeline that we ourselves create. It also teaches life skills that one would not other learn otherwise. In our school every english class is the same, you memorize vocab, you read books and have tests on what you learned, you write the same essays over and over again and while the words change, in the end the sentiment and the learning is nothing different year after year. This is not the fault of the teachers, it is just how the system works but here we are completing interviews, doing research, making videos, making a difference. This class is something different and it is braking the mold. The drawbacks of the class are more subtle and may be more subjective to the individual but to me they are as follows. The lack of daily updates as to what is happening leads to my forgetting what needs to be done as classes with whom I interact with daily out compete WTS for my attention, and reaching out to and meeting up with high powered people with whom I need to interview is frankly a little terrifying. The last be issue to me is that I work best when I can discuss things heavily with people face to face. I am not terribly eloquent in virtual conversations but being able to sit and work on things with someone helps me hugely and this leads to an issue as I am far removed from the rest of my group. I can only hope that I can learn from this in the future.
          As I touched on in the last paragraph I have discovered that I really need face to face interactions with my peers to do work, or at least someone who knows the subject to be a sounding board fro my ideas. Without this I can begin to tailspin and get out of control in my work. Another thing I have found is that I am excellent at research, diving deep into a topic and finding key data, but I am less than stellar at reaching out to people and completing interviews. In terms of how I can apply this to my work for the remainder of the class I can think of no other option other than to "suck it up buttercup." These are not issues that can truly be solved, but simply something that must be dealt with and so be it.
          In the future I will try harder to "keep my eye on the ball" as it were and focus down, and hopefully bang out a few interviews! I think in the future I will also work a little better on keeping track of time, as demonstrated by this blog post I rather messed up on that and let the Christmas break catch me off guard, and oh boy did that end up badly. So from now on I am going to check the dates of important events in advance and make sure that if there are any conflicts that I do my post early instead of letting it catch me off guards end end up late.

Until Next Time!!!