Each week, “Pop Quiz” features an interview with a member of Greater Houston’s education community. To suggest someone we should interview with an interesting story to tell, email us at education@houstonlanding.org.
Meet the interviewee
During her time working at Aldine ISD in the mid-2010s, former elementary school counselor Megan Wilburn prioritized helping students manage their emotions. But when the district placed more administrative work on her, she took a leap and left.
“I wasn’t allowed to do a lot of preventative work,” she said. “I’d seen from previous years of being a counselor that building those relationships and having conversations with kids before things happen, going into those classrooms and really trying to figure out what’s going on in their lives, doing little questionnaires, letting them know that I was there — that was what kept me effective as a counselor.”
Shortly after departing Aldine ISD, Wilburn in 2018 founded MOVE, a nonprofit organization focused on helping students manage their emotions and acquire coping skills through physical activity, such as yoga and Pilates. Wilburn hopes her work will teach students from lower-income areas of Greater Houston how to address issues before they hurt their well-being and future.
The organization first piloted the program at Aldine ISD, where Wilburn went back to Stehlik Elementary School to guide students with behavior issues through the program. Over the span of five months, she said they noticed students’ behavior issues decreased.
Now, three part-time employees and about 20 volunteers work with students in the area. The Houston Landing spoke with Wilburn about her work, signs for behavior issues in students and advice for parents and teachers.
The following interview has been condensed for brevity and lightly edited for clarity.
Tell me more about MOVE and how you started it.
So a lot of my kids express themselves with physical aggression, right? And so as a counselor, I would call boxing gyms. I would take them outside. Our biggest thing was taking them outside for a walk, taking them for a stretch and allowing them to move their bodies when they became frustrated, because that physical aggression came from them being frustrated and not knowing what to do with that frustration. So I realized that they needed to get that out before they displayed it in another form. So that’s where the physical piece of MOVE comes from.
And then during my first few years, I had very strong groups. So my kids, who are some of the toughest boys in the school, one year came together in a group about domestic violence. And originally they didn’t want to talk, but we did all these different activities, and they began to support each other during situations outside of school. And it made me realize that if they were taught the tool, then they would use it.
So we do physical fitness. We use physical fitness and group counseling to help students learn how to navigate their emotions, manage their stress, learn how to resolve conflict, and learn how to build healthy support systems within their groups. Because a lot of times culturally, we will kind of talk about one another when we’re all going through similar things, and so that’s what we would point out in those groups. And so they learn how to create those healthy support systems while they’re doing their group counseling.
We also have personal development. We work with the teachers and the parents, because we want to make sure that when they go to class and they’re using these tools, the adults in their lives are aware of these tools and they’re reinforcing them. But also our teachers and our parents are just as stressed, and they, a lot of them, weren’t exposed to the tools that we expose our kids to as well. So we work with them to make sure that they receive those tools, so that they know how to model them in front of the students.
How does MOVE work with parents and teachers to help their students, children?
For teachers, teaching is a stressful job, with 30 different personalities within a 40-minute to an hour long span. So our goal is to first let them know that there are tools to deal with your stress, and we introduce them the same exact way – different forms of physical fitness. We talk amongst ourselves as a group, but then we also provide professional development on empathy, on identifying triggers, culture and having them understand where these are coming from, so that you don’t look at everything as “this is something that they are doing personally to me.” A lot of things are learned behaviors, and we have to have kids understand where these behaviors are coming from, so that they can stop them. Not necessarily just provide consequences when we see them.
As far as the parents, we know that all of our parents, especially in low-income areas, culturally, they’re doing the best they can. So they’re using the coping mechanisms that were passed down, that they saw their parents use, that probably weren’t as effective, that probably have not been very successful, but they’re using those. And when we bring them in, we expose them to different coping mechanisms, different strength management tools, because we want them to be able to model that in the home. And like I said, a lot of times, the parents just have not been exposed to that, and they don’t know how to teach that to the students. So they go through, they learn different forms of physical fitness.
We sit down and we let them know different trends that are causing our students to not be successful, and we show them different ways that they can reinforce things that are that help kids be successful. And they also go through the group counseling portion as well, because a lot of times we go into these low-income communities and we just talk to parents, we talk at them, instead of having a conversation, allowing them to be a part and share their experiences, sharing what they actually want to talk about, or what they feel their students need. And so we give them that opportunity to share their voice and advocate for their own children, and then we empower them to do that outside of our group as well.
Your website says this helps the school-to-prison pipeline. Can you talk about that and why it’s important to you to work with students and the youth?
As a counselor, I remember during that four-year mark was when everything started to change. Because I wasn’t actually in the classrooms, because I wasn’t actually doing one-on-one counseling, I started to see an increase in behavior infractions, and that eventually led to quite a few students going to alternative school. And when our students would go to alternative school, I want to say they had about 45 days that they would spend at alternative school. But when they would come back, they weren’t different students, right? Sometimes when they came back, they were worse than they started. And there were kids that I saw do repeat time at the alternative school. …
I remember seeing my friends who had things going on at home, who were repeatedly suspended, who were sent to alternative schools, and their faces were on the news often, right? So one of the biggest ones was seeing one of my classmates kill another classmate who he was dating. And it was I remember this kid being very frustrated at school. I remember this kid having issues, and teachers kind of being like, “Okay, one day he’s here, the next day he’s suspended. One day he’s going to our school. The next day he’s in an alternative school.”
And there were so many different cases, not as extreme, but so many cases where a lot of them ended up in jail or passing away prematurely. And so I wanted to create something that didn’t lead to that, where we stopped all of these issues and addressed them, and learned how to teach them how to address these issues, so that they didn’t go down that pipeline. Because just being completely honest, the alternative schools are not rehabbing our students. We’re putting a lot of kids into one space where all these kids have poor behaviors, and we’re not actually figuring out what the root cause of the behaviors are. … I remember why a certain friend acted out. Their mom was going through some things at home. They were witnessing domestic violence. They had seen things in their neighborhood that kids shouldn’t be exposed to, and they just didn’t know how to verbally say, “This is what’s going on.” And it’s frustrating to come to school and try to learn when I have all of these things going on in my mind.
So I felt like we were punishing our kids for not being able to express themselves, and just kind of labeling them as “bad kids,” and then we’re not actually solving the reason that they are behaving this way. And I think that’s why the school-to-prison pipeline exists, because we have all of these consequences that happen when a kid exhibits a certain behavior, but we don’t have a lot of preventative measures. What should we do the moment we see a kid exhibit a certain behavior? What red alarm should go off? What should we start thinking about? And so that’s what we try to identify why a kid is behaving in a certain way so that we can prevent them from dealing with the consequences, and we can get them to start expressing themselves in a way that doesn’t involve consequences.
What advice would you give parents and teachers to help their students move forward?
I would say giving them the safe space to have those conversations, letting them know that we do care about academics and we want you to do well in school, but letting them know that they have a place where they can have a conversation about whatever is going on. As a counselor, I’ve always just come straight out and asked the kid, “Is there something else that’s going on that is frustrating you besides my class, besides math?” And a lot of times when the kid is asked that question, they will say whatever it is, and then they now feel safe. They now feel like somebody else cares about what’s going on. …
When they come in in the morning, checking in, asking them how they’re doing, asking them how their night was, because a lot of times that’s when things happen. And then kids, throughout the day, those emotions come up, and they don’t know how to deal with them. They don’t even realize that these are emotions that are coming from something that happened last night.
If someone wants to know more about MOVE or get involved, how can they go about doing that?
We have a website, movehtx.org, but to actually see most of what we’re doing, look on our Instagram … If there’s a community center that could use us, if there’s a school that would like our services — sharing those names with us. My email address is megan@movehtx.org, so reaching out to me and sharing if there is a place that needs our types of services would be the best way.
Angelica Perez is a general assignment reporter for the Landing’s education team. Find her @byangelicaperez on Instagram and X, or reach her directly at angelica@houstonlanding.org.
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