For the last 20 or 30 years, politicians have used the educational system of our kids as a way gain votes and favor among constituents without really fixing the problems created by previous politicians.  Well, a number of fantastic non-profit educational institutions decided that the old way of doing things just wasn’t getting us the best results, so they decided to do something about it.  One of the most famous charter schools in my part of the country is the Texas CAN! Academies here in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area as well as in Houston and other cities.  These charter schools are non-profit organizations that were set up for a specific purpose, and they fulfill that purpose very well.  The CAN! Academies were set up as second-chance institutions for kids in the area who had dropped out of High School, and a lot of these kids come from very challenging situations.

Last week, Dr. Joyce Phillips, who is the principal at the Houston CAN! Academy invited me to come out and conduct a Creating a Team Culture Team Building program for she and her fellow administrators at the school, and I have to tell you that the folks that I met there are real heroes.  We are often asked to come in and conduct in-service sessions for teachers and administrators, but very few educational institutions realize the value of indentifying concepts and skills that are critical in the business world and teaching those skills to their kids in the classroom, but that is exactly what these heroes do every day. 

In the team building program, we focused on ways to build confidence speaking in front of groups, problem-solving skills, and ways to really build the self-confidence of each other and the kids that they teach as well.  These are the skills, that, if their kids master them, they can break the chains of poverty in just one generation. 

By the way, I had a lot of fun working with these folks.  If you’d like to make a donation to the Academy, visit their website at http://www.texanscan.org/online_donation.asp