


Rethinking What Constitutes Impact

Why the 20th Anniversary of Columbine Should Be About Listening to Students
By Sonya Heisters, the director of partnerships for YouthTruth It was April 20,1999, and I was a high school junior. Though generally a compliant student, on this day, I convinced a cute boy from drama class to cut school with me. It felt risky and fun. It felt dangerous. That evening, my 16-year-old definition of…

How’s Discipline at Your School? Don’t Just Look at Referral and Suspension Data, Get Perception Data
By Sonya Heisters, the director of partnerships for YouthTruth As a student-teacher, and like most early-career educators, I struggled with classroom management and discipline. The beautifully articulated theories of positive behavior intervention and support that I was learning through my credentialing program seemed at odds with the realities of time and resource constraints in the…

‘Something was Wrong’: New Report Shows Bullying on the Rise the Past Three Years
Sonya Heisters, YouthTruth’s director of partnerships and outreach, first observed the rise in bullying in Quincy, Washington. When the team at Quincy Junior High got their student feedback back in the winter of 2018, they saw a surprising increase in the rate of bullying at their school between the 2016-17 and 2017-18 academic years. Heisters…
New California Accountability System Signals Progress- YouthTruth’s Sonya Heisters in Education Week
It’s good to count parent engagement and school climate, says Sonya Heisters . . .