CasYL's Policies

• Developing consciousness:The fundamental foundation of an effective program for helping children be safe are the components which deepen the children's level of awareness. Such awareness must include knowledge of what is safe, experience practicing safe behavior, and most significantly a consciousness that is observant and alert.

• Encouraging independence: Children must learn to use and trust their own eyes, ears and especially their higher, intuitive senses. When they come to expect others to tell them what to do and where to go, or come to rely on artificial barriers to danger (especially rules), they come to have a false sense of security. All of us are subject to natural laws, including the law that what we sow – even with our minds and hearts – we must reap. The more we make up rules to protect children from these natural consequences, the less clear these consequences are to them and the more they are inclined to test the rules.

• Allowing risk-taking: In order to expand into one's full human potential, everyone must eventually take risks. Children are espcially aware – at least subconsciously – of this important ingredient of growing up. It is very important that we not obliterate this need in the name of safety.Without sufficient opportunities to take risks and develop both physcial and social skills, children become vulnerable to even the little hazards of life. As a civilization we are constantly devising more and more ingenious means of expaning our limitations while assuring our safety. "Don't touch, don't climb, don't cross" severely narrows the child's world and simply doesn't work with most children.

• Meeting needs: Cascade Youth Lighthouse is dedicated to identifying and meeting the basic needs of children – often ignored by a busy and distracted adult world. One of the most important of these needs is simple attention – genuine listening to and seeing them as fully human. Another important need is the need to belong. By acknowleging children and including them meaningfully in community, they learn how to give attention rather than to devise elaborate, and often, desparate and dangerous strategies to get it.

• Giving choices: When children have a meaningful say in what they do with their time and energy, they have little incentive to assert themselves in an explosive manner in an attmpet to counterbalance their small size and clout against large, looming authority figures.

• Linking lifestyle to wellness
• Understanding energy management techniques such as relaxation, meditation, and yoga
• Studying life extension research
• Developing the body as an instrument of the self
• Practicing sound nutrition
• Providing adequate physical activity
• Fortifying emotional well-being
• Fostering mutually supportive relationships
• Enhancing healthy relationships
• Abstaining from the medication of behavior
  • Given the lack of understanding on how psychopharmacological medications work and their long term effects
  • Given their dissonance with the natural physiology
  • Given their suppression of the vital force
  • Given their use as a substitute for age and individually appropriate learning conditions

    CasYL advocates diligent research into alternatives to psychiatric medication for youth, e.g. proper nutrition, adequate physical activity, natural health care, peer counseling

• Carrying insurance

Re-Thinking Evaluation

• Pitfalls of Grades
• Self-Evaluation
• Portfolios
• Resumes
• Letters of Recommendation

Updated: July 11, 2002