Last Updated: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 10:46 AM CST
Your School : Field trip to correctional center helps unite students from different schools
Submitted by Kate Millan
G-AC High School Instructor
On January 10, 2008 students in Mrs. Kate Millan's Criminality class and Advanced Placement Psychology class took a field trip to the McNaughton Correctional Center located in Lake Tomahawk, Wisconsin. The thirty-two students had the opportunity to observe how a minimum security facility, like McNaughton Correctional Center, works to rehabilitate their inmates, and thereby reduce the chance of its population from re-offending.
The McNaughton Correctional Center does not look like a typical prison from the outside. It is set upon a beautiful campus, near a lake. The center had formerly served the state as a tuberculosis sanitarium for children. Inside, there is no doubt, from the plastic cutlery in the dining hall to the close quarters and plethora of security cameras, that the facility is anything other than a prison.
While on the tour, the students observed how unpleasant being sentenced to prison is. Prisoners are allowed very few belongings, live in extremely tight quarters and have really no expectation of privacy that the students themselves enjoy.
The tour was led by the superintendent of the facility Molly Sullivan Olson and by Captain Towne, the assistant superintendent. Students had an opportunity to examine the rehabilitation offerings that McNaughton specializes in with its inmates. An inmate at McNaughton is offered counseling and support in obtaining a high school equivalency degree, financial training, alcohol and other drug abuse training, as well as victim impact groups. While inmates are not forced into these programs, the support that they provide and the skills that they teach will hopefully prevent an inmate, once released into society, from becoming criminal again.
At the conclusion of the trip, the students and their chaperones broke up into groups of twelve and had a chance to question three inmates who spoke with the individual groups. The message from the three groups was similar. Each of the three inmates started using alcohol and drugs and that served as a springboard into trouble near the young age of thirteen. Each of the inmates had problems in school or dropped out of school. Most of the inmates have lost their families due to their crimes and have more importantly lost the respect and support of their families because of their actions. The losses must be earned back, and it will be a hard road that they have deserved.
The field trip had many aspects and the usual trappings of a "normal" field trip that we all can recall from our own school days, except it was the first time that many of the students had met, that is, in person. Some of the students who attended the field trip live and attend school nearly 110 miles apart at the greatest distance. The trip was filled with some rather funny but unique moments that are found when distance education students meet. Comments like, "hey I thought you'd be taller," "that isn't your TV hair color," or "talk so I know who you are" would be quite unusual to anyone else observing the group. Likewise jokes about real or virtual Millan, television adding ten pounds, or you look older in person filled a very educational day with a different sort of laughter. Students from Niagara, Goodman-Armstrong Creek, Laona and Tomahawk High Schools are enrolled in Advanced Placement Psychology. Students from Goodman-Armstrong Creek, Crandon and Phelps are enrolled in Criminality. All participated in the trip together but focused on differing aspects of the McNaughton Correction Centers offerings.
Students are enrolled in the two courses taught by Goodman-Armstrong Creek High School instructor Kate Millan. The courses are taught over the Nicolet Distance Education Network, or NDEN, which is an interactive television instructional consortium, coordinated by Nicolet Area Technical College.
NDEN services ten school districts northern Wisconsin. These NDEN courses allow school districts in the ten districts to share specialized courses that they otherwise could not afford to offer because of their individual enrollments. The courses are live, in which everything that goes on can be seen and heard by everyone else that is hooked up to the particular course through an Internet protocol system. Instead of passing the work to the front of the room like a traditional classroom, work is faxed, mailed or e-mailed in to Goodman.
In these classrooms, while the technology has changed from the old idea of the high school classroom; for the most part the instructional goals of the courses and most importantly the students have not changed. They are just all affectionately known to one another as fellow "criminals" or the "psycho's" instead of separate and different schools; a unique concept considering how fiercely the same classmates compete against one another in athletics.
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