Training Sessions

I must say up front that this blog is being written at the request of my mother, although I will likely appreciate the work that I put into it by the end of the summer.

As many of you know, last year I completed a summer internship at the Yale Child Psychiatric Hospital (aka Winchester 1). I worked with children diagnosed with several different kinds of disorders, from general anxiety disorder to psychosis to all types of autism across the spectrum.
Details of this internship can be found here, in an article printed by my school: http://www.hamilton.edu/news/more_news/display.cfm?id=14186
(Everyone who received funding from the Joseph Anderson program was featured in a Hamilton article, so if you're looking for interesting ideas for internships/jobs, I highly recommend looking through the articles on my school's website.)

This year, I have been presented with the opportunity to work at Camp Menunkatuck, a summer camp in Guilford. For as long as this camp has existed, there has always been a separate camp for the children with special needs. This year, however, the two camps have merged into one and all of the special needs children will be integrated with the typical kids. My job will be to assist the counselors with the special needs children, as well as keep track of the kids who might need a little extra help along the way. I find this to be an especially exciting opportunity because I worked in a more structured setting last year, so it should be interesting to note the differences in behavior (although these cases might not be as acute as some of the ones I saw last summer).

Today was our first day of camp training. Essentially, the directors ran through the regular protocol for lost children, discipline, and the like, but then a new segment of training was introduced. A woman (her name escapes me...) who had actually previously worked at Winnie 1 came in to explain the general guidelines of caring for special needs children to those counselors who were not labeled as paras (ie qualified to deal with those with special needs). She introduced an excellent plan to bring in trained mentor children to help the special needs kids, as well as alternative disciplinary techniques, ways to control certain situations, and how to be especially observant. The talk was reminiscent of my days back at Winnie 1, but it was still a nice review for me. She was extremely informative to those counselors who had never dealt with these kinds of disorders before, which will hopefully make the camp run fairly smoothly.

I look forward to being able to use my skill set in a less structured environment this year. Hopefully, it will give me a good sense of my strengths and weaknesses as a milieu counselor and thus I will be able to improve.

Anyway, this blog will host short stories about kids from camp. In accordance with HIPA, I will not be using real names, nor will I be using direct quotes from children at camp. Rather, I aim to share my experiences in hopes that I will learn something each session.