Atlantic Behavior Services, Inc.

Midcoast Mainers:

My friend is moving to the Camden - Rockland area this August to work as an outdoor educator at our school, Atlantic Academy.

She has found a place to live starting this November, but needs a residence from Aug until then.

She has a dog, and is probably one of the most conscientious / thoughtful, kind women you would ever meet!

Please message me for any leads you may have for temporary (August - end of Oct) housing.

Thank you!

🌟 Teaching Mindfulness to Kids 🌟
Mindfulness is more than a buzzword; it’s a practice that helps kids regulate emotions and improve executive functioning by noticing their feelings, thoughts, and surroundings without judgment.
🧠 Benefits of Mindfulness in Kids:
•Emotion Regulation: Kids learn to see emotions as passing phenomena, leading to more stability and vitality.
•Executive Functioning: With trained focus, kids stay anchored even during life’s storms.
📚 Modeling Mindfulness: Share your feelings openly and without judgment. For example, saying, “I’m feeling scared,” and taking slow breaths teaches kids that it’s okay to have difficult feelings.
🎲 Mindfulness Moments: Make mindfulness part of daily activities. Ask kids what they notice around them or within them. Use mealtime, music, or special moments to explore their senses and feelings. Adult modeling can kickstart this practice.
👂 Mindful Listening: Be present and listen actively. When a child says, “I’m mad,” acknowledge it by saying, “Thank you for telling me.” This shows you’re listening and encourages self-awareness.
Let’s nurture little minds together! 🌈✨

🌟 Biofeedback at Atlantic Academy! 🌟
We are thrilled to announce the addition of neurofeedback and heart-rate variability (HRV) biofeedback to our service offerings in support our students. These therapies are evidence-based and designed to help our youth thrive.
🔬 Neurofeedback has shown great promise for children with emotion dysregulation and behavioral disorders. This personalized treatment measures brain waves to identify patterns linked to these challenges. Through visual and auditory cues, neurofeedback helps kids strengthen their ability to regulate emotions, leading to greater success in various aspects of their lives.
💖 HRV Biofeedback focuses on heart activity as an indicator of stress levels. By monitoring HRV, this therapy provides immediate feedback, empowering our students to improve their stress management skills.
Both therapies are backed by research and support our mission to equip at-risk youth with critical skills for better emotional and behavioral regulation, resulting in enhanced social and academic outcomes.
Join us in celebrating these innovative additions to our program! 🎉

The Critical Staff Skills Needed to Teach At-Risk Youth

📚✨ At Atlantic Academy, we understand that to help our kids meet their goals, we must prioritize teaching our staff the skills they need to be successful with our students. In brief, here is what we aim to teach our staff:

1. Understanding Behavior: Identify and recognize the conditions and variables that contribute to behavior challenges. Understanding leads to effective and personalized care and treatment.
2. Building Positive Relationships: Engage with empathy, validation, reflective listening, and a high ratio of positive to corrective feedback. Avoid coercion.
3. Managing Disruptions: Use techniques like prompting, pivoting, and differential reinforcement to evoke appropriate behaviors and minimize problem behaviors. Avoid coercion.
4. Effective Reinforcement: Utilize the principles of deprivation, immediacy, size, and contingency to increase the effectiveness of our feedback and programmed reinforcement. Avoid coercion.
5. Teaching Critical Skills: Utilize behavior teaching skills like modeling, setting expectations, skillful prompting, and role-playing to optimize learning. Avoid... you guessed it...
6. Responding to Escalation: Using our own self-regulation skills to effectively address crises, maintain safety, and honor functional communication. Avoid the C!
7. Professional Flexibility: Learn to adapt to curve balls that life throws beyond our control.
8. Data Recording: Maintain accurate data tracking and incident reporting using a functional-contextual approach, and to ensure data-based decisions are made (i.e., follow the hard evidence versus the stars 🙂)

Together, these skills create a supportive and effective learning environment, helping our students thrive and achieve greater opportunities and choices in life.

🌟

How we approach challenging behaviors at Atlantic Academy...

At Atlantic Academy, we believe that understanding behavior challenges is the first step toward effective treatment. Our approach to understanding our students’ complex challenges is rooted in contextual-functionalism, as succinctly expressed by one of our favorite psychologists, Dr. Patrick Friman, in his talk, “There is no such thing as a bad boy.”
🧠 Behavior challenges often stem from inadequate teaching and learning environments, both historically and presently, as well as from injuries to the learning and emotion-regulation centers of the brain. By recognizing these factors, we can better support and teach our students. Instead of labeling behaviors as “bad,” we seek to understand the variables that contribute to them and address them with compassion and evidence-based strategies.
🌟 We believe that every child has the potential to succeed when given the right support and understanding. We focus on creating a nurturing environment where students feel safe, valued, and empowered to overcome their challenges.
🌱 Join us in embracing this compassionate approach to behavior. Together, we can make a difference in the lives of our students, helping them grow and thrive.

🎬 Middle School Movie Night Fundraiser 🍿

Join us for a fun-filled evening at Atlantic Academy’s Middle School Movie Night!

Come and enjoy a movie with friends, all while supporting a great cause.

Pre-registration is required for this event. Registration link in our bio.

Date: Friday, May 31
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Atlantic Academy, 10 Knowlton St.
This special movie night is dedicated to raising funds for our Playground Project. Learn more about our vision and plans for the playground here (https://www.atbehavior.com/blog/donate).
Entry: A suggested donation of $10 grants you access to the event, complete with a cash-bar for concessions. Don’t miss out on our popular s’mores making kits and fresh-made popcorn, perfect for a movie night treat!
Movie Selection: We’ll be selecting our feature film based on your votes. Please participate in our survey through the pre-registration link to choose from the following options:
•The Goonies - A thrilling adventure of kids searching for pirate treasure.
•Adventures in Babysitting - A night of unexpected events with one babysitter, two kids, and a city full of surprises.
•Mean Girls - A clever comedy about the challenging social dynamics of high school.
•Ferris Bueller’s Day Off - A day in the life of Ferris Bueller, who’s decided to skip school and embark on an adventure in Chicago.
•Pitch Perfect - The hilarious and heartwarming story of a college a ca****la group competing to win nationals.
•Twilight - A romantic tale between a teenage girl and a vampire set in the misty town of Forks.
•Napoleon Dynamite - Experience the quirky world of Napoleon Dynamite as he navigates the challenges of teenage life.
Your choice will shape our movie night. Don’t forget to cast your vote when you pre-register!
Come out, grab some popcorn, and enjoy a movie under the stars! It’s a fantastic way to contribute to a great cause while enjoying a night out with the community. We look forward to seeing you there!

📚✨ At Atlantic Academy, we believe that understanding behavior challenges is the first step toward effective treatment. Our approach to understanding our students’ complex challenges is rooted in contextual-functionalism, as succinctly expressed by one of our favorite psychologists, Dr. Patrick Friman, in his talk, “There is no such thing as a bad boy.”

🧠 Behavior challenges often stem from inadequate teaching and learning environments, both historically and presently, as well as from injuries to the learning and emotion-regulation centers of the brain. By recognizing these factors, we can better support and teach our students. Instead of labeling behaviors as “bad,” we seek to understand the variables that contribute to them and address them with compassion and evidence-based strategies.

🌟 We believe that every child has the potential to succeed when given the right support and understanding. We focus on creating a nurturing environment where students feel safe, valued, and empowered to overcome their challenges.

🌱 Join us in embracing this compassionate approach to behavior. Together, we can make a difference in the lives of our students, helping them grow and thrive.

Tickets going fast 😁

From confronting personal challenges to assuming a role of transformative leadership, Jed Schwalm, M.Ed., BCBA, journeyed from a tumultuous childhood education experience to the establishment of Atlantic Academy in 2017, where he presently serves as the Executive Director.

Similar to many of his students, Jed encountered formidable obstacles throughout his early education, contending with a system primarily focused on disciplining behaviors through punitive measures rather than delving into and resolving underlying issues. It wasn’t until after high school—a period marked by transformative experiences such as studying in Nepal, backpacking across the Western United States, and undergoing significant personal development—that Jed embarked on his studies in psychology. While founding a school wasn’t initially part of his plans, his consultancy work in Maine with at-risk children underscored the pressing need for more compassionate educational programs for this under-served population. This realization led him to establish Atlantic Academy, where he seeks to build a transformative environment for the Atlantic Academy students and staff.

To learn more about Jed, follow the link in our bio.

Atlantic Academy was founded in 2017 with a clear vision: every child, no matter their challenges, deserves a chance to succeed.

After many years working around Maine and in Colorado in various education programs for children and young adults with intensive behavior challenges, AA Founder and Director Jed Schwalm saw a need for real change in the field. Too often, he felt outdated strategies and coercive methods were being employed, and that kids were not getting the support and care that they needed.

At Atlantic Academy, we take a different approach. Through ongoing training and supervision, we believe our staff can create the positive environment necessary for a strong therapeutic relationship to develop, which is foundational to our learning approach. Please join us in our mission to provide at-risk children with the opportunities and environment that they need to thrive and grow. Because when we change our approach, we can change lives. 💙

Our new sign is up at Atlantic Academy!

Please take a look at one of our Blogs....The ABC View: Our Staring Point. This will help explain what we do and the paths we take with our students. Click the link below:
https://www.atbehavior.com/blog/the-abcs-of-behavior-our-starting-point

Longer days and warmer weather is almost upon us!
I think all of us are looking forward to Spring!!

BCBA or BCaBA in Unity, Maine at Atlantic Behavior Services, Inc. - Unity, ME Atlantic AcademyFull-time BCBA August, 2022 Unity MaineOverview: Atlantic Academy is a special purpose private school based in midcoast Maine, serving gradeskindergarten thru 8th, that strives to provide effective, meaningful, and life-changing treatmentand learning to at-risk children and adolescen...

Another beautiful sunny day here in Camden, Maine! Some of our students are going to visit Fort Knox today! What a perfect day for it! I hope you all get to enjoy some sunshine and fresh air today!!

Would you like to change lives working with some amazing students and even more amazing staff? I mean, who wouldn't, right? We are currently looking for a few new members to our family here at Atlantic Academy. If you are ready to help change lives, including yours, visit atbehavior.com to see what we are all about, then reach out and say "Hi" .........we'll be waiting! 😀

Atlantic Academy hiring for entry-level staff interested in working with youth-at-risk.

Are you interested in making a positive difference with at-risk youth? Do you wonder what it would be like to work with a team dedicated to supporting and empowering staff to be the best they can be, both professionally and individually? Are you the kind of person who enjoys solving challenges within a team environment? If so, Atlantic Academy may be the right place for you!

Atlantic Academy is a small, day treatment school for grades K-8th, based out of Camden and Unity, and committed to helping the region's most at-risk youth be the best they can be--emotionally, behaviorally, socially, and educationally.

We are looking for staff with at least 90 college credits, and who can pass a background check, to work directly with our students teaching social, emotional, and behavioral skills.

Benefits: Hourly position that starts between 20.00 - 23.00 per hour DOE and education. School calendar schedule, PTO, health insurance, retirement, and clinical supervision towards BCaBA/BCBA.

Please visit https://www.atbehavior.com/careers for more info.

We're hiring! Apply now.

Atlantic Behavior Services, Inc. updated their address.

Have folks seen this, "Toward trauma-informed applications of behavior analysis." Thank you to the authors for finally bringing the trauma topic into serious consideration within ABA.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xb66-lDsSLjADB3PFOKou09nn0hBKU6A/view?usp=sharing

jaba.881.pdf

Atlantic Behavior Services, Inc. updated their phone number.

Folks, we are hiring for a variety of positions at our school for at-risk youth, for locations in both Unity and Camden, ME. These positions include very competitive salaries and benefits packages, and working within an organization committed to transforming the lives of our state's most vulnerable youth, while teaching and supporting our staff to embody the change they hope to engender in our students!

For a complete description of our jobs, go to our "Careers" section of https://www.atbehavior.com/. To get a sense of who we are as a company, check out our blog on the website. Please share!!!

Atlantic Academy | Atlantic Behavior Services Atlantic Academy and Atlantic Behavior Services collaborates with administrators, teachers, staff and guardians to provide effective outcomes for individuals with behavioral challenges.

ISO used Fat Bikes for our school, Atlantic Academy, that serves at-risk youth, in midcoast Maine.

Atlantic Academy is seeking a full-time licensed clinician to join our growing team! Please check out the posting on our website.

Careers — Atlantic Academy | Atlantic Behavior Services We provide evidence-based programming, treatment, and training to school districts and human service providers throughout greater Maine.