Counseling for troubled kids

District readies for launch of program to help students who are struggling at home and in class.Advocates Supporting Kids, a federally-funded program for at-risk students in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, prepared to launch this week, as administrators moved desks and other equipment into a vacated schoolhouse in Costa Mesa.

At the start of the current school year, Newport-Mesa received an $8.23-million Safe Schools and Healthy Students grant from the federal government. The grant, which extends over three years, provides money for new programs and counselors to help students who are struggling at home and in class.

On Tuesday, district officials began setting up their offices at Lindbergh School, a former Newport-Mesa elementary campus. The grant program, dubbed Project ASK, moved into one of the front wings of the building.

Jane Garland, Newport-Mesa’s spokeswoman and the director of the program, said it will launch when school returns from winter break.

“We want to do a real paradigm shift so we can get these kids today and, in three years, see a district that’s a lot different,” she said.

Project ASK, which covers all preschool, elementary and secondary campuses in Newport-Mesa, provides counseling for students as well as classes and support groups for parents. The team led by Garland includes 20 district employees, eight of them newly hired counselors.

Though Newport-Mesa employs counselors at individual school sites, those participating in Project ASK will concern themselves strictly with interventions and not with academic issues. The program will offer services at the Lindbergh School headquarters and at school sites.

By coincidence, Project ASK kicks off at the same time as another federally-funded Newport-Mesa counseling program, Project Safe Connections, which the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools awarded $1.2 million in October. That grant covers only elementary school sites, with much of mentoring done in group settings.

Jeff Gall, the counseling coordinator for Project ASK and the former principal of Rea Elementary School, said the new program would enhance the smaller one.

“As you’re dealing with things as a big picture, you’re able to deal with those few who aren’t coming along,” he explained.

Project ASK has three main divisions, with Gall in charge of counseling, Amparo Ames in charge of family outreach and Pepe Montenegro handling truancy and gang prevention. The program’s goal, Garland said, is to lower the number of student suspensions and also to reduce the factors that lead to drug abuse and other problems.

This year, the district ran data searches on Newport-Mesa students who were ninth-graders in 2004-05 and earmarked ones who had suspensions, poor grades or other signs of struggle. This week, the counselors are meeting with the students to check on their progress over the last year.

“This is one of those cases where more is better,” said Robert Cunard, assistant principal at Newport Harbor High School, about Project ASK. “We ask teachers in the secondary grades to not get to know more than 185 students, and those are kids they see every day. We ask counselors to get to know 450 kids who they don’t have daily contact with, so it’s difficult.”