Verity
Why do teenagers engage in risky behaviour? For 17-year-old Verity it was due to a string of unfortunate incidents that affected her personal life and, inevitably, her education.
Verity’s first year of high school went well. ‘I was a good kid ... I did all my work’, she says. But in the following years she experienced problems at home and the death of her best friend in a car accident. She started drinking and taking drugs, moved out of home and engaged in other dangerous behaviour.
‘I started to play up a bit and my grades started to go down’, she admits. ‘I was in and out of home ... and I was disrespectful to my parents.’
Verity’s journey was a rollercoaster ride. Sometimes she would engage at school and feel positive and then an unsettling incident would bring her back down again.
‘I didn’t want to get out of bed’, she recalls. ‘At this time my body was all out of whack, my sleep patterns were out of whack ... I hardly ate.’
In August 2009, when Verity was struggling in Year 11, her teachers recommended she attend the Brotherhood’s Community VCAL (CVCAL) course. The program offers flexible learning, provides wellbeing and career planning support, and teaches a variety of engaging ‘real world’ topics, such as personal development, goal-setting and budgeting.
Since attending CVCAL, Verity has moved back home and is excelling in her studies. She attends the program three days a week while also completing her Certificate IV in Youth Work. To add to her achievements, Verity was voted Chair of the CVCAL Senior Committee by her peers and has represented CVCAL at a conference about flexible learning.
Verity says that through CVCAL she is gaining skills that are relevant to her everyday life and now has a new outlook on education.