Teach life skills and change our world: Jill Siegal Chalsty at TEDxCharleston

40 years ago, a girl named Sarah bullied me so horribly that the things she did affect me to this day. In eighth grade, I spent breaks and lunch hours alone in the library crying. And then at our 10-year high school reunion, this girl Sarah, she came up to me and she apologized. She said that to make amends for things she did to me and others, she was teaching young people life skills and that if we had learned them when we were young, our lives would be very different. Now Sarah was a National Merit Scholarship finalist and a cheerleader. She graduated and went off to UC Berkeley where she says her house of cards came tumbling down. It turns out that while Sarah was coming to school and bullying me and other kids, she was going home and being bullied by her alcoholic mother and her mother's boyfriend. At Berkeley, Sarah says she did every drug other than inject something into her arm. She dropped out of school and life by the time she was 20. I hope by now you're wondering, what are those life skills that Sarah told me about? Think about the abilities that you have and that everybody needs to be successful. Think of life skills as a fourth R. Reading, writing, arithmetic, and the skills relevant to success. What are those? Communication skills, decision-making skills, and goal-setting skills. Those are the base of the learning pyramid. Two additional skills that would have been very helpful for Sarah and me back then, conflict resolution skills and knowing how to ask for help. We definitely needed life skills instruction when we were young, but think about our kids today in this complicated world of the 21st century. Back then with bullying, she did a lot of horrible things to me. One of them was she posted ugly handbills of me around campus. I could go and tear those down. Kids today with cyberbullying and the internet, a posting there is forever. One more thing about our kids today. Think about this. This is the first generation that doesn't believe it has a shot at the American dream. How sad is that? Here are some statistics about our kids, and when I'm sharing these with you, please don't think I'm talking about black kids or white kids, yellow, brown, rich, or poor kids, because these statistics are about all of our children, and they break my heart. 90%, 9-0% of our kids are victims of bullying from fourth to eighth grade. They report they've been bullied, 90%. Next statistic, one out of seven of our kids is so desperately sad about their life that they will contemplate suicide, and thousands of those kids will follow through with it. Substance abuse, it's endemic in our society today. And let's face it, kids are experimenting with things we've never even heard of. And the last statistic is about millions of our children. Millions of children will drop out of school this year, and of those who actually graduate, half of them will leave school without the knowledge they need to find and hold a job. This past year I met one of my heroes, former U.S. Secretary of Education Dick Riley. He told me, I am not at all satisfied with where we are today. And my question for you is, who among us could be satisfied with where we are today? Those statistics are frightening and terribly sad. Since the reunion, I've devoted my life to helping ensure that all young people learn life skills. What I want to do right now is share with you some of the similarities and differences between a traditional class and a life skills class. First the similarities. English, math, history, science, and life skills. All of those formally taught, they have a curriculum. Now the differences. In a traditional class, the teacher lectures, and a lot of young people are disengaged and actually some are bored. In a life skills class, education literally comes alive for our children. They not only learn from their teacher, but they're learning from their peers as well in group work and activities. Kids learn to respect each other and classroom cultures change completely. Last difference. What kids learn in a life skills class not only helps them with their academic achievement, but it helps them in their interactions with their peers, their family members, and ultimately in the workplace. One of the first students I met in a life skills class was back in the early 1990s in South Central Los Angeles. This young man's name is Gus, and I want to tell you Gus's story. Gosh, when Gus was four, his father left home and Gus never saw him again. Four years later, Gus says, his stepdad was on his way home from the corner grocery store carrying a carton of milk, and Gus says he was shot dead. By middle school, Gus had checked out. He thought he wouldn't even be around. He'd either be in jail or dead by the time he was 30, so Gus says he had no goals. He was cutting class and getting into a lot of trouble. However, by his first year of high school, his school principal made sure that every student had one semester of life skills instruction, and Gus said life skills instruction changed his life. Gus learned how to create a plan, formulate a plan for himself. He learned about stepping stone goals, small range goals, to get to medium range goals, to get to a long-term goal, which for Gus was to get out of South Central Los Angeles. It was the job-seeking skills that Gus learned that he says opened the door to that future he dreamt about, and today, Gus lives in Northern California. He has a job that he's proud of. He has a home in a safe neighborhood, a loving wife, and three terrific boys. If you ask Gus could he have had those things without a life skills education, he would tell you no way, no way, and now I want to share Cindy's story. It's very different from Gus's. Cindy learned life skills the hard way. She learned them doing time in prison. When Cindy was young, her mom was a nurse, her sisters were nurses, and she says her mom and dad wanted her to do well in school and to go on and become a doctor, but instead Cindy says she was bored. All they taught her was one plus one is two. She rebelled. She cut class, and she joined a gang. In 2007, Cindy broke into a stranger's home that she chose at random. It could have been your home. It could have been my home, and she not only robbed those people, but she tied them up and she beat them. All of that was part of her gang initiation. Today she's serving a 12-year sentence in a woman's facility in New York State. As part of her time in prison, Cindy has life skills counseling, and she says she gets it. She knows now that she needs to surround herself with positive, not negative people. She too has a plan for her life, but let's think about the cost of not having taught Cindy life skills when she was in school. In dollar terms, it's more expensive to house a felon in prison than it is to send a student to an Ivy League college. In people terms, the cost of not teaching life skills to Cindy in school is immeasurable to her and to the people that she hurt. Here in Charleston County, our superintendent so believes in the importance of life skills instruction that she has brought it to every one of our middle schools and high schools and with tremendous results. In fact, one of our schools was on the failing list for years, and this past year it went from failing to A, F to A, and that school principal says life skills instruction was a major part of her education reform plan. One last thing about Charleston County. Superintendent McGinley says if we don't teach life skills to our kids, we are cheating them. Year after year, studies show when we teach life skills to our children, graduation rates increase, incidences of violence, bullying, and substance abuse decrease, and the employability of our kids improves dramatically. But today, there are only about 1,000 schools formally teaching life skills to our children, and 1,000 is less than 1% of all of our schools, which means we're missing 99% of our kids. And what I'm asking today is for you to please think about Sarah and me. Think about Gus. Think about Cindy. Think about your children. Think about your neighbor's children and all of our children. The ripple effect of their learning life skills is profound. And I'm asking to not next week, not tomorrow, but today, please, please pick up your phone, make a call, send a text, send an email to any and every school superintendent, principal, and teacher that you know. Ask them to bring life skills instruction into our schools. This is the way we can change our world. Thank you.