The Rick Ross site is talking about it too.
http://forum.rickross.com/viewtopic.php ... 9509e39b31http://www.cultnews.com/?p=2201Challenge Day: Bringing Transformational Workshops to a School Near You.
Posted in Miscellaneous at 3:20 pm by Rick Ross
By Frank Schwerin, MD
Challenge Day is a California-based corporation that according to its handbook, ?provides youth and their communities with experiential workshops and programs that demonstrate the possibility of love and connection through the celebration of diversity, truth and full expression?
The Challenge Day Corporation does not provide schools with anti-bullying or anti-suicide programs. According to the company?s own literature: ?Challenge Day is not designed as a program to ?fix? students who are struggling.?
Whether such a program should be a part of the high school curriculum has been controversial. A Seattle Times editorial opined, ?It is alarming that nearly 300 Seattle Public Schools students have already participated in Challenge Day workshops. These 12- and 13-year-olds went through sessions reminiscent of est, or Lifespring encounter groups???While the goal of the seminars has merit ? to create a safe school environment free of teasing and harassment ? their methods don?t belong under the imprimatur of public education.?
One year ago, when I learned of Challenge Day while reading an article about it in my local newspaper the Naples News, I was not aware of the controversy surrounding the company. Challenge Day promised to make students feel ?safe, loved and celebrated.? ?No more teasing, no more belittling, no more gangs.? A follow-up headline one week later proclaimed: ?Program stimulates students to be more accepting.?
All this was from a 6-hour workshop limited to 100 students per school - and it was free! Challenge Day previously had been ?given? to two of our high schools by a group of volunteers who had raised money to sponsor the workshops.
It seemed too good to be true. The first Naples, Florida Challenge Days were obviously important to the Challenge Day Corporation. The local press had been enlisted to photograph and interview the participants The founders of Challenge Day, Rich Dutra-St.John and his wife Yvonne St. John-Dutra (you read it right) flew out to Florida from California to personally lead the ?showcase? workshops held here last year.
The Dutras also personally lead the Challenge Day at a Michigan high school that was recently featured on Oprah.
Why Naples?
It may have had something to do with money. At the time, the median house price in Naples was nearly five hundred thousand dollars, the highest in Florida. And a charity fundraiser to benefit local education programs had raised a record twelve million dollars earlier in the year. If they could raise sufficient funds, anything was possible.
Challenge Day organizers didn?t need the financial support of the school district.
The promoters of Challenge Day pitched the program directly to the high school principals. One organizer stated that her goal was for Challenge Day to be in every Collier County high school and middle school by 2007.
Things didn?t work out as planned in Collier County. Two months later the county school board ordered a temporary moratorium on Challenge Day in order to look into safety issues. Three months after that, following an extensive review by the Collier County school administration, a permanent hold was placed on the workshops. And the school board ultimately said ?no? to the program.
What went wrong?
As more information about the company surfaced, it became clear that the Challenge Day press kit didn?t tell whole story............(cont'd)
