Posted: Apr 15, 2007  08:49

If you are reading the Boundary County Digest, you know that it is part of the publishing we do at Woodbury Reports Inc. Some of you might even be aware that we also run www.ruralnorthwest.com, an online local news newspaper for the five northern counties. What most of our Boundary County neighbors do not know is that the Digest and the online newspaper are only a small part of what Woodbury Reports is about. Hopefully the local part of our business will grow and become a major part of our publishing. But until then, our time is taken up mostly by publications to help parents of Struggling Teens throughout the country, the kind who have students enrolled in local schools like Boulder Creek, Northwest Academy, Ascent, Northwoods School, Echo Springs and more than 500 other schools and programs around the country that work with similar children making poor decisions.

There are a lot of changes in our society since I was growing up in North Idaho. One of the main changes is the increasing number of people deciding to take care of problems for themselves in many areas, like their health or in deciding the proper education for their children. When I was growing up, people almost universally looked to "experts" or the government to take care of many of these problems for them. You also had to live close to your work.

Now, with improved travel, reliable phone systems, and especially the Internet, increasing numbers of people are living where they want while telecommuting to their work hundreds or thousands of miles away. Others establish world wide successful businesses out of the comfort of their own homes, or from a small office close to their homes with a good Internet connection.

Physicians tell me they no longer "tell" clients what treatment to take, they "suggest" treatment because their clients insist on having the final say. The explosion in the food supplement industry is a sign also that an increasing number of people are taking their own health into their own hands. The same thing is happening in Education. The number of home schooled children is increasing every year, as are small private independent schools, mostly religious oriented. This same trend is seen in the public schools by the development of the Charter School movement, the popularity of Individual Educational Plans (IEP) for students with special needs, and School Board battles over curriculum or basic school policy. These all reflect the decisions of parents to take the basic decisions on the education of their children into their own hands, or at least to have a say in how their children are educated.

Woodbury Reports Inc. was founded in November 1989 as an Independent Educational Consultant practice, partly to take advantage of these societal changes. Our focus has been to help parents of children who have serious emotional and/or behavioral problems and since the child has not responded to local interventions but continues to make serious self-destructive decisions, the parents need to look for some kind of residential placement. Our main job here is to provide them with as much information as we can so they can make informed decisions. In the process we have become the unofficial spokesman for this rapidly growing $2 billion industry, the vast majority of that coming from tuitions paid directly by the parents to the highly structured schools and programs. Many of these schools and programs are designed to work with spoiled and self-centered teens making self-destructive decisions, and only some of them are designed to treat them for serious mental illness.