Is your child a casualty of our out-of-date 19th Century education system?

WATCH THIS VIDEO!

Does your son or daughter say things like?

•    I hate school

•    My teacher makes me feel stupid

•    I learn more by watching National Geographic than I do in school

•    My teacher walks by me when I raise my hand

•    My teacher pretends to care about me, but she really cares more about teaching the other kids in the class

•    I hate my life, and I don’t want to live anymore

Do you get calls from school that sound like this?

•    I have 20 other kids to teach

•    Your child is disruptive to the other kids in class

•    Your child is “making poor choices”

•    Your child doesn’t complete assignments and can’t focus for very long

Is your son or daughter . . .

•    Very bright and intense

•    Insatiably curious about how things work

•    Can’t stop talking about what he knows and asking questions about what would happen if

•    Creative with things like scotch tape, binder clips, stickers, paper, rubber bands and items like this?

•    Verbal, able to participate in conversations with adults

•    Make strange noises, break out in song walking through the house, spin, jump and just can’t sit still unless he’s rally engaged in something

•    Love to go deep into topics

•    Wants to feel normal, fit in and have friends so badly, but just can’t seem to do this successfully

•    Easily embarrassed


I’m tired of making excuses for teachers, principals, superintendents and school board members for why my son hated school and didn’t want to live anymore because going to school caused him so much anxiety, not to mention the stigma he lived with as he became a target for other children in his classroom and adults in the school building.

I could go on and on about how my son’s schools failed him, but I want to focus on inspiring and empowering people who find themselves in the same situation.  

You’re Not Alone!

1.    Always trust your instincts!  I used to give the benefit of the doubt to the teacher or principal over my son.   If you have a feeling that something isn’t right, you are most likely right. 

2.    Always advocate for your child!  Being polite and respectful, doesn’t mean going along with what the teacher says.  Keep the focus on what your child needs in order to thrive in school.  Do your homework and work with the teacher to identify when your child is engaged and learning and when he/she is not.  The answer about what he needs is in the answers to that question.  The school has promised to meet your child's needs for learning, so the focus needs to be on how to make this happen no matter what. 

3.    Don’t waste time!  Don’t stand for starting over every year with a new teacher who three quarters into the year is absolutely lost about how to meet your child's needs.  I used to give the teacher the benefit of the doubt every single year.  What I was actually doing though is putting the teacher’s need to control the situation and resist making changes above my child's needs.   Every day a child does not feel cared about in school is a tragedy.

4.    Get Involved!  In our country, we could be rushing to rebuild our education system to be the best in the world, but there’s a lot of resistance happening because it’s always hard to change.  Change will not happen without agitators and disruptors.  You’re not alone.  


If you want to learn more about the most innovative education initiatives that could be happening in your child’s school, let us know.  Send us a comment, an email, a tweet.

Innovation: From Business to Education

Have you noticed how the word “innovation” has become one of the biggest buzz words right now?  Just google it, and see how many times it pops up.  It’s everywhere! From Forbes, to Business Week, “Social Innovation,” Innovation Magazines, even the Whitehouse has a page dedicated to innovation.

So what does "innovation" really mean?  I decided to find out exactly. 

According to Wickipedia, innovation means “the creation of a better or more efficient product, process, service, technology or idea that is accepted by people.”

Other definitions surrounding it include “bringing something new into an environment.”

I realized that I’ve mistakenly assumed innovation always had something to do with technology.  But let’s be real.  The invention of the screwdriver, the hard hat, and even the toothbrush changed the way we lived our lives and got things done. 

And today, what's really innovative might be how a business or nonprofit achieves it’s mission, or delivers its products and services in an exciting new way.  In thinking about this I reflected on alinea.  I realized that if you took apart our formula of Story + Direction + Relationships, which equals effective community engagement, all the pieces could be considered commodities that any number of people could say they do for clients.

But what makes alinea innovative and successful with clients however, has less to do with us, and more to do with our clients.   The two most important criteria for success has to do with clients' mindset (we can do this) and their behavior (willingness to learn how to connect with people) and less to do with actual resource strategies.  We promise them this:  If you do what we tell you to do, you will attract resources!

Innovation in Wisconsin Schools

You may have noticed me tweeting on the road as I’ve been visiting with almost 20 small public school districts around Wisconsin.  Speaking of innovation, I’ve been blown away by all the innovating thinking going on.  I wanted to share some examples.  If you live in Wisconsin, you might be surprised at all the great things going on right in your own backyard.  Check this out:

1.              Mt. Lebanon Lutheran School, right here in Milwaukee, loves working with the children that other teachers and schools think are too hard to teach.  Some of the parents come to Mt. Lebanon having been told by their last school not to expect much of their child.  I don’t know about you, but I think a teacher or principal should be arrested for saying that to a parent. 

So, what’s innovative about Mt. Lebanon?  If a child isn’t successful, Mt. Lebanon teachers find a way.  For example, one of their younger students has sensory integration issues.  The parents informed the school of a brushing strategy that helps at home.  Now, the teacher takes a couple minutes every two hours to brush the student, and it makes a world of difference.  This school doesn’t have enough resources to have all the expertise they need to meet some of these children’s needs.  Instead, they aggressively seek out knowledge, education and training on strategies that usually only special education teachers employ.  This is innovative

2.              Altoona School District in the Chippewa Valley in Wisconsin has an aging population.  As the school district seeks to become relevant to all community members, they have begun offering adult education programs to older adults, as well as cross-generational activities for youngsters and older adults.  Something else that they’re doing really blew me away.  Typically, school districts are very protective of their enrollment, because there is a time during the year when parents can try to enroll their children in “any school.”  Because government resources are tied to enrollment, there is tension between school districts and competition for families.  Altoona school district is in talks with two other school districts in the area to figure out how best to provide education in a way that meets student needs and the needs of their communities.  This is innovative, because I have never heard of separate school districts collaborating for what is truly best for kids.  They envision each school district possibly offering a unique program based on their strengths.

3.              Montello School District in Wisconsin is really on the cutting edge.  They have launched the “Montello Idea,” a long-term plan to become a truly community-based school.  They’re on the fast track having already launched several initiatives.  The first is reaching out to home-schoolers, not to talk them into coming back into the school, but to offer them resources to improve what they’re doing at home plus opportunities to fill gaps like group activities, extra curriculars, foreign language, etc.  That is truly innovative, because typically schools see home-schoolers as taking away resources from the school and have misperceptions and stereotypes of people who choose to home school their children.  The second is designing classroom environments that are actually conducive to learning and meet the needs of different types of learners.  I saw a classroom that looked more like a living room, with soft light, and a variety of seating and some high top and conference size tables.  The children sat more in a big circle where they could really engage with each other.  There wasn’t a traditional desk or row in the room.  The teacher has already noticed an improvement in attention and performance.

 Oh, this next one is really amazing!  Montello is actually allowing teachers who have expertise in certain areas like science and math to focus on teaching in their area of expertise.  This is so common sense, but today it is truly innovative to have teachers who are experts teach the topics that are critical.  The results are already there.  In addition to students gaining a deeper understanding of the subject, teachers are so happy and students are more excited.  When you’re being taught by a teacher who’s really excited about a topic, the impact is going to be greater.

4.              Oconto School District in Wisconsin is seeing the true talent of their young adults in high school.  A group of students actually prepared a business plan for a small business in town.  Community members were blown away by the professionalism of the plan.  Other students are involved in designing logos for local businesses. 

5.              Cedar Grove-Belgium School District already has so much support from local and surrounding communities.  People are just waiting to invest in their next big initiative.  They have a partnership with a local two-year college to create a skilled trades program that will be offered to adults as well as students.  They envision separate programs and spaces for trades related to wood, metal, robotics and more.  They’ve received significant donations already for the latest equipment. 

6.              Wisconsin Dells School District is in a very unique position.  The Dells, known for its huge tourism economy has very few actual residents compared to vacation homeowners and visitors.  Many of the huge resort and water park owners grew up in the area and went to the public schools.  They realize how important their businesses are to the local and international young people who get valuable work experience during the summer.  Students who graduate from Wisconsin Dells Public Schools are used to working with people from all over the world speaking different languages and from different cultures, have a strong work ethic and have an entrepreneurial spirit.  Right now, led in no small part by the business community, the Dells is for the first time building their amazing story and embarking on connecting with all of the tourists and non-resident property owners.

I haven’t even talked about all the ways these schools are using technology.  But I wanted to give you a taste of all the amazing innovative things going on in the State of Wisconsin.  I’d love to hear what’s happening in your community around innovatively delivering quality education.  Please share your story!

A Personal Story

As I excitedly get ready to launch our plans for 2012, I thought I’d take a moment to share some the motivation and passion behind the work my company does.

I never anticipated building a company full of people that love helping schools and nonprofits attract resources and achieve more than they think possible.  But here we are at the beginning of a new year and after eight years of creating a model that works and a reputation of results for almost 100 schools and nonprofits. 

They say that when you find the work that results from your passion intersecting with your talents, it doesn’t feel like work – it feels like play.  That is how I feel about the work of alinea. 

I want to share a story about my journey.  Three things happened at about the same time that put me on my path.  

Three Gifts From the Universe

As I look back I realize that the challenges on my life journey have been gifts from the universe that have allowed me to combine my passion to have a positive impact on the world with my talent to inspire and empower people and organizations to achieve more than they think they can.  

The First Gift – My Son Billy

Within four weeks after my son Billy started kindergarten at a school in one of the top two schools districts in the state, we got our first call from his teacher.  During group time down on the carpet, Billy couldn’t sit still; he would do a somersaults.  When standing in line Billy would be the one to swing his backpack around and inadvertently hit another child.  That was the start of what has become a very long journey of two parents trying to meet the needs of their child within an education environment that values its systems over meeting the education needs of individual students. 

The most important thing I learned was to trust my instincts about whether my child’s needs were being met and if I hit a road block to move up the chain of decision makers.  For five years we battled against language like “this is our system,” “Billy is making poor choices,” and “bad behavior.”  Until this year, none of his teachers took much time to get to know Billy as an individual.  Billy was evaluated by the school system, outside of the school system, never finding any type of definite diagnosis.  Billy has a little sensory integration issue, is very verbal and likes to use his hands.  All his teachers agree he’s bright, but he’s awkward with his peers.  We’ve seen child psychologists to help him with his behavior in school.  Having an IEP (individualized education plan) was a disaster, doing more harm than good because of its focus on special education versus individual needs.   

After all these years, today Billy has the best teacher ever.  She focuses on finding ways to keep Billy engaged, and she helped us discover that anxiety drove many of Billy’s distracting behaviors.  The love and creativity of his teacher, our unwavering message to Billy that he is unique and wonderful, and a very low dose of medication to help with his anxiety has changed his life.  He’s making friends, focusing in school and most important, he doesn’t start the day with a stomach ache anymore.   

The Second Gift – Launching a New School

About the same time my son entered kindergarten, I was asked to be the first founding board member of a new charter school located in the inner City of Milwaukee and serving low-income families.  During my interview with the founder, I asked “Why me?  I don’t have any experience with schools or education policy.”  I added, “I’m just a parent with children who go to school in a top performing school district.”  But the founder of this school said, “That’s why I want you on my board.”  She didn’t want an insider.  She wanted someone who wasn’t tied to the status quo, as well as someone who would know how to secure resources for the school and build community support.  This experience taught me a lot about education reform, how charter schools get approved, the extent to which politics impacts and gets in the way of making decisions that are in the best interest of children. 

The Third Gift – Charter Schools Ask for Our Help

In about 2000 the City of Milwaukee was blessed with an $18 million donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for the Small School Initiative.  An organization was created to facilitate the creation of ultimately about 40 new charter schools.  In about 2005, one of these charter schools came to us feeling very nervous about their ability to keep their new school sustainable over the long term.  The group of teachers who designed an amazing curriculum realized they didn’t have expertise to build community support.  For nine months, we worked with this school to help them tell their story, build community awareness, communicate with parents and recruit professionals to sit on committees to help them with marketing.  Soon after, we were asked by another charter school to help them build community support, and then another.  We became sponges for education reform, and we began to make observations about a very important gap not being address in schools, namely sustainability through community engagement.  This experience became the seed for what is now our proven model for securing community support and resources.

In a way, I was personally led to this work, this way of having a positive impact on the world.  And it has not been difficult to attract people to the alinea team who also have a passion for education.  People want to help, but they don’t know what to do.  When a school hires alinea, they learn how to inspire people with their story, be clearer about what they need and how people can help, and strategically cultivate relationships in order to build community support and resources. 

The overwhelming response I get from people who attend my presentations is “You give us hope that we can do this?”  You see, the issue isn’t money; there’s plenty of money in the world.  The issue is doing what’s in the best interest of children and then learning how to effectively engage the community in your mission. 

Every day, my son William is a constant inspiration and reminder of the importance of the work that alinea does and the need to bring our message of focusing on what’s possible to communities everywhere. 

I hope you will join the alinea team and me on our journey to provide education to children that engages and inspires them to bring their passion and talents to others so they may fulfill their unique purpose.  

How You Can Help

Here are four easy ways you can contribute to the reach of our work:

1.     Become a follower of my blog and pass it along to others, and join our email list.

2.     Refer us to a school or nonprofit that could benefit by alinea’s unique community engagement program.

3.     Purchase my book, The Secret to Better Schools; A New Mindset For Engaging the Community, and give it as a gift.

4.     Make a donation to the alinea Foundation in order to empower organizations with few resources to benefit by our community engagement program. Please email me for more information.

Deb Lukovich's Very First Blog Entry

Welcome to my brand new blog!

This is a blog about education. Well, mostly. Why do we need a blog discussing our schools and education system? Simple. We have enough blogs about celebrities and food and music. What would you say is the most important resource for the future of our planet? It’s not oil. Or water. Or wind. It’s our children.

And our education system is in trouble. Which means our children are in trouble. We should pay as much attention to the education of our kids as we do to the economy, the environment and certainly more than we give to all those tabloid and celebrity gossip stories. We should be horrified by the statistics. The dropouts. The failures. The closings. It should be unacceptable to us.

So, this will be a blog about helping to make our schools and non-profit organizations work so well that our children all have the opportunity to learn and grow into individuals who will go to college and become the people that will eventually make our world a better place.

You may ask, who am I? What makes me an expert? And why would I care enough to write a blog on the topic?

It’s a question I would ask myself. And, to be honest, it’s the surprise of my life. I never imagined myself as a person that would dedicate herself and her company so passionately to the mission of improving schools and education. I’ve had other issues and causes I’ve been an activist for, like reproductive rights, women and politics, young women as leaders and entrepreneurship. At this stage in my life, my priorities have changed.

In the Beginning

Here’s what happened. First, I was shocked and disappointed by my own children’s experience in school. And I live in a pretty wealthy school district. If my children were not receiving the highest quality education, what did that mean for children in the other districts? Then, as coincidence (or not) would have it, my consulting firm stumbled onto an opportunity to work with an MPS (Milwaukee Public School) charter school about to launch. They were having many issues and hired us to determine what their shortcomings were and ultimately to fix them.

We worked with them for twelve months and learned so much, most of it horrifying, about how new schools are formed. Interest groups often focus on what’s best for them, not the children. We made it our mission to help this school be a wild success. And so it began…

I realized that it doesn’t matter if a school is public or private, voucher, religious, Montessori or Waldorf. If a school does a good job helping children prepare for success in life, we support them.

A Lack of Vision

A huge issue we were confronted with was that many schools really have no vision for what successful education looks like. With no vision, there is no direction. And every day another child graduates without even learning to read.

It’s Personal

For my company, and me it became very personal. I even became a founding board member for another charter school, Milwaukee Renaissance Academy, chartered by the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. All of this experience gave me vast insight into what a school needs to not only survive, but to thrive.

I will nutshell it for you. It all comes down to two words: Community Engagement. It’s what makes or breaks a school.

What is it and why is it so important? My website, www.alineaconnect.com defines it for you in detail, but in simple terms it means communities and school must form a partnership to create and secure the resources needed for every child to achieve success.

The Community FEELS responsible for and ACTS accountable for their school’s success.

It may sound easy. I guarantee it isn’t. But for the many schools we’ve worked with since—we’ve developed a plan that works. And I’ll share it with you in this blog. We’ll visit the steps and the principles behind them in future blogs. Note that the plan works best with professionals leading you through it, but there are things everyone can do to make small changes now with big results down the line.

This will be a two-way conversation. You can ask me questions as we go along… You can make comments. You can give us all the benefit of your own experience and wisdom. Hopefully, we will grow together. The goal is to determine the best way to help our communities to help our schools to help our kids.

And that’s what this blog is about.