By the time our nation’s young people reach age 10 they are entering on a period of almost unlimited possibility. Their brains are entering their “second wave” of development, as the brain’s gray matter thickens, and brains cells get extra connections. This thickening of the frontal part of the brain, the part involved in judgment, organization, cognition, planning, and strategizing – the skills that teens get better at – peaks at age 11 in girls and 12 in boys. This growth spurt during the pre-puberty years gives the brain enormous potential. The capacity to be skilled in many different areas continues increase during that time. Once this second spurt of brain growth is complete, brain cells begin to die off; those cells that are not used are eliminated.

And right at this time when the brain is most vulnerable is also the time when teens are most prone to poor judgment and experimentation. A Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development study found that, of our approximately 22 million teens aged 10-21:

2/3 have tried alcohol
1/3 have tried illicit drugs
1/3 have thought about suicide
More have suffered assaults than any other age group.

They are smoking more (cigarettes and marijuana), having sex more (protected and unprotected) and being murdered more. In Chicago alone, 27 teenagers have died violently during this school year alone. Of these, twenty-one were shot, three were stabbed to death, one suffocated in a burning van, and two beaten to death. Some of these incidents occurred in the students’ own homes. Afterwards, the grief ripples through schools and communities, as families and classmates experience grief, anger, fear and insecurity. Children are tortured by nightmares; many withdraw.

The prognosis for African-American children is particularly dire. Seventy percent of African-American children are born out of wedlock. Of the seven thousand U.S. students who drop out of school every day, an overwhelming number are youth of color. In 2002, there were 3.1 million suspensions from school, and black students were nearly three times as likely to be suspended as while students. By eighth grade African American, Latino, and poor students are three years behind their wealthier, predominantly white and Asian peers in reading and math. By twelfth grade they are four years behind. With no intervention now, about eleven percent of these young people will drop out of school after they reach 16, to become likely victims of a lifetime of poverty and limited opportunity.

How teens spend their time appears to be particularly crucial to their later development. If the “use it or lose it” principle holds true, then the activities of the teen may help guide the hard-wiring, actual physical connections in the brain.

There Is Hope With Action

Recent studies have shown that if students believe in their own capability, they are likely to succeed: student confidence has proven a good predictor of scholastic achievement. Tackling the rigors of an advanced curriculum requires that young people be active, enthusiastic learners who are convinced that their intelligence can grow and that their capacity for learning is enhanced even as they learn. As parents, teachers and mentors, we have the opportunity to help young people to redefine personal intelligence as a power they can control, and over which they have personal responsibility.

How can young people optimize their own capacity to create and achieve? How can we as parents, teachers and mentors guide young people in their choices?

HBO series: Get A LIFE

The new half hour television series title Get a LIFE will celebrate and explore today’s youth who are making positive, healthy decisions about how to live their lives. By telling dynamic stories of students engaged in their schools and communities, the series will inspire children, parents and teachers/mentors to elicit the best for themselves and their communities. Clear pathways and actions will be depicted so young people will see that with persistence, the positive choices that others make can have uplifting results. The series will build on young people’s strengths, encouraging them to cultivate their talents.

Initially, the HBO Family television channel will broadcast this series as a six-episode first season, with a twelve-episode second season. Each episode will feature one or two stories of students engaged in one or more life challenging activities, along with a mentor, a teacher or celebrity who is admired by the student and who has faced a similar situation.

The series will:

explore the success of today’s middle school youth and the myriad of choices they face;
offer today’s youth stories of their peers exploring exciting pastimes and the choices they make solving the challenges facing middle school youth;
model decisions and choices by respected celebrities of the middle school age group;
Offer today’s youth a forum to openly discuss issues critical to their education and lives.

The series will ask of its audience, “What would you do?” and will supply answers by some of the most honored educators and educational organizations in the world, most prominently the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education.

In addition to the primary broadcast and re-broadcasting of Get a LIFE, HBO Family plans to support the series with promotion across the HBO Family channel. For example, Get A LIFE will have two minute interstitials throughout the day’s programming, Internet and possibly other forms of advertising.

The producer intends to utilize the HBO Family broadcast television series as a catalyst for further investigation on the show’s HBO Family website.

An equally important function of the series is its Internet component, to include:

a condensed version of each episode to be broken into two short “Web-episodes.” Stories featured on television will also have the opportunity for follow-up, so viewers can watch their favorite challenge and offer continued support.
Links to apprentice, internship and community programs
Print materials pertinent to helping students and their families pursue interests, career paths, and community service
Recommendations on books, DVDs, and other media
A section specifically designated to assist both parents and children with difficult questions
An interactive posting section allowing students to submit videos showing their own activities. The students will vote for their favorite videos and stories on the website. The most popular videos will be featured on the TV show in a special segment. The winner will also receive an introduction to a leading professional/celebrity in the field of interest chosen by the winner.
Q&A chat style component to help young people in making good choices each day, from facing problems with academics to peer issue challenges, or simply deciding the right clothes to wear: ”What Would You Do?”
Another section will have advice and comments from favorite celebrities and experts as to what they would do, and have done, in certain situations. Educational specialists will also answer kids’ and parent questions pertaining to educational issues

Anticipated Outcomes

We anticipate that this HBO series will (1) raise awareness of both the challenges and the potential of middle school youth; (2) help youth understand that they have choices, and understand how they can develop their own strengths and talents; (3) help parents and teachers/mentors understand their own powerful role in influencing the choices of our youth, again through illustrations and examples; and (4) help youth share with each other the choices they are making daily through dialogue and shared teen videos, to reinforce the messages and illustrate yet other ways teens can “get a life,” and improve their life trajectories. In short, youth will understand the variety of choices open to them and the consequences of good choices NOW, and parents, teachers and mentors will have new tools and the hope to aid youth in making good choices. The program will capture a life message of an African proverb, "If you want to go quickly go alone. If you want to go far go with others." Enabling stories which enable social justice for all of America's students.

Production

The series will be created and produced by SeroyBritt Entertainment and N.A.K. Production Associates.

N.A.K. is a Washington, D.C. based television production company that produces documentary programming concerning children and families. For over eighteen years, N.A.K. has developed and produced programs for an array of broadcast, corporate, and educational clients. Besides being equipped with the technical means to produce high quality programs, N.A.K. is also highly regarded for its treatment, scripting, and planning of programs. Many other production companies utilize their expertise in this area. N.A.K.’s continued growth is due, in large part, to its effective communication of complicated, sensitive, and technical material. Above all, they are communicators, drawing on a broad range of experience from broadcasting to educational training techniques. Their clients are assured of receiving powerful programming that communicates their message. Among the acknowledgments N.A.K.’s programs have received are:

Emmy Award for Outstanding Children’s Program: Special
Gold Medal from New York International Film Festivals for Teen Special
Emmy Nominations for best directing and editing
CINE Golden Eagles for documentaries
Telly Awards for best documentary and Foreign Language documentary

In 1995-96 N.A.K. produced an award-winning documentary using funds from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that aired nationally on PBS entitled “Crisis of Care”. The documentary featured stories of families dealing with U.S. mental health systems.

Executive Producer Norman Klotz, president of N.A.K. Production Associates, has produced numerous series and worked with an array of sponsored including The Annie E. Casey Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, Intel, Ford, DuPont, AT&T, and IBM, among others.

Seroy Britt Entertainment, LLC is a privately held corporation that develops and distributes content through relationships in entertainment and media. Executive Producers Gerald Seroy and Derek Britt have come together to form Seroy Britt Entertainment (SBE). Their individual backgrounds cover over fifteen years of award-winning experience in television and film production, spanning from live network television to music videos and from independent features to documentaries. SBE’s primary mission is to create content for major companies like HBO, Discovery Channel, and Dennis Publishing, while seamlessly integrating marketing strategies for commercial clients in a cross media platform utilizing the Internet, television, music, mobile use, live events, and print.

National Urban Alliance for Effective Education

The Get A LIFE series will feature educators and mentors associated with the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education (NUA) and its collaborating partners and their programs -- school and community based. NUA began as a 501(c)3 organization in 1989 as an outgrowth of the Columbia University Teachers College and the College Board, with a commitment to eliminate the achievement gaps associated with poverty. Underlying their commitment is a simple, powerful certainty: when students are learning what is relevant and meaningful to them, they will achieve and succeed. For the last eighteen years NUA has worked with urban teachers and administrators to refine their strategies in ways that open students to their own potential. NUA mentors use student achievement test scores, staff interviews, and other performance data to assess individual urban school and district challenges. From the findings the mentors design a course of study incorporating dynamic, effective teaching strategies along with leadership training that focuses principals and administrators on the best use of their human and fiscal resources. The classroom activities tap into students’ language and culture to elicit critical thinking.

NUA’s 130 mentors, all former teachers, university faculty, or superintendents, know well the challenges facing urban students. Their understanding of the learning process, based on the most recent brain research, guides them as they prepare and demonstrate to teachers, learning strategies that help students build on what they already know to analyze and evaluate what they experience in the world around them. Once teachers understand and implement the strategies, teacher morale lifts, and student performance improves. NUA’s theoretical and data-based initiatives are yielding measurable achievement gains in urban public schools and districts nationally, including Albany, Indianapolis, Seattle, Newark, Prince George's County, Md, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Detroit, Birmingham, Bridgeport, Hamden, Wyandanch NY, and twelve Minneapolis area school districts. In partnership with the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Birmingham City Schools, NUA is revamping the teacher training pre-service university curriculum so young teachers will be fully prepared to begin and retain their careers in urban schools.

NUA is also addressing a new, related challenge: in recent years where more and more African-American children have been assigned to classes for students diagnosed as having learning disabilities or “educable mental retardation.” Once classified, they are “stuck”: these students are unlikely to be reassigned to regular classrooms as they grow older, and they will fall farther and farther behind academically.

This prognosis is not consistent with NUA’s experience of cognitive mutability and learning potential. NUA’s belief is that many, if not most, of the children diagnosed as “LD” or “EMR” can master a rigorous high school curriculum with effective cognitive intervention. The organization’s new partnership with Prof. Reuven Feuerstein’s International Center for the Enhancement of Learning Potential (ICELP) will put this belief into action. Over a long international career Prof. Feuerstein has demonstrated that learning ability can be significantly enhanced, regardless of age, nature, cause or severity of condition. Clinical observations over the decades have shown that the development of thinking processes depends on the ways certain stimuli are interpreted by parents and educators. Working together, NUA and ICELP will improve student achievement while focusing their programs on engaging student performance through effective teaching and learning.

In April 2007 NUA hosted its second “Believe to Achieve” conference, this year in Birmingham, AL, to examine the strengths and weaknesses in urban education. The gathering brought 1200 educators from 30 states and included teams from Canada, Australia, and Israel. As they witnessed Dr. Feuerstein demonstrating his method of cognitive diagnosis with a young teen previously identified learning disabled, the teams of educators observed for themselves that the young man was fully capable of complex academic tasks. The conference reinforced the commitment to high expectations for all students.

Intended Audience

The intended audience for Get a LIFE are the 22 million youth aged 10-14, their parents, teachers, and mentors. The results will be shared through interactive discussions, videos, and other follow-up.

The series will be available for use in classrooms for the target audience of young people as well as for potential and current educators and mentors – in junior high school and college classrooms.

Success!

Initial success will be measured in numbers of viewers of the series as it is seen first on HBO. Other measures will be the activity during the follow-up sessions; number of participating teens in videos; requests for re-use by schools and universities; and ultimately, by “success stories” of young teens whose behavior was changed by watching the series.

We anticipate identifying additional funding sources, including commercial sponsors.

Strategic Fit

Without intervention now, many of these young teens are at risk for academic and social disorders. Their brains are now at their most vulnerable, and at their maximum capacity. With guidance these teens will make choices that will impact them positively for a lifetime. The Get a LIFE series will focus on the healthy development of all young people, building on their strengths, helping them cultivate their talents, increase their feelings of self-worth, and use the confidence and skills they gain to make positive, healthy decision about how to live their lives.

Young people aged 10-21: potential and risks

Success!