USE YOUR MOMENTS WISELY. THEY BUILD SOMETHING THAT you can’t even imagine.

School Psychologist

How grew up in southern Minnesota and did her undergraduate degree in psychology at Bemidji State University. After graduating, she married Mark How and the couple lived in the FM area. Mark trained in graphic design and started his own business, How 2 Creative Services. How received her graduate degree in school psychology at MSUM and when the West Fargo Public School offered her a job as a school psychologist she took it. She has been there ever since.

“I help teachers to teach and students to learn,” How said. “I work with a team and we identify various difficulties and disabilities. When students are struggling, we ask, ‘What are the strengths and the barriers? Are the barriers in the instruction, the environment, or with the child?’ I help connect the dots for students, teachers, families, and agencies. I do short-term mental health interventions, designed for school settings, with the intention of supporting students so they can get back to the business of learning.”

How has worked with children as young as three and up to age 21. Currently, she serves Eastwood Elementary and Westside Elementary schools in West Fargo. “I love my job,” How said. “I like connecting people. I have a beautiful flexibility in my job to meet the needs that come up and to do preventative interventions. Because I am located within the school setting, educators can tap into my expertise in children’s learning and mental health. We collaborate and problem solve in the moment.”

A Family

With all of How’s professional training, education, and years on the job, she said another layer of learning was added when she and Mark had children of their own. “Mark and I often talked about adoption,” How said. “We believe that every child should have a home. We went through several years of infertility before our son Justin was born. Then we had a miscarriage and it was a struggle. We were pretty broken for a while.” They had a daughter, Lydia, in 2005, but weren’t convinced their family was finished. “Around Christmas, Kalob and Chloe appeared in the first ND Heart Gallery,” How said. “It was a photographic look at special needs, older children who were able to be adopted. I remember looking at their pictures and thinking, ‘Could we do this?’ We’d never considered a sibling group. Kalob was eleven years old. Chloe was six.”

In March of 2009, Kalob and Chloe were placed into the How family as an adoptive placement. “I’m a school psychologist,” How said. “I deal with behavioral problems. I thought I could navigate these two foster kids. I think maybe God laughed at my thoughts. I really had no idea how to do this. Both Kalob and Chloe came from severe trauma. You don’t ever erase that trauma. People said to me, ‘All they need is love,’ but that was foolish and unrealistic. You have to have a plan, a strategy, and a support system.”

“Foster care and adoptive parents can get secondary trauma because of their children’s trauma. Kalob and Chloe had significant mental health issues and after they came into our home, we not only watched them regress we also saw our birth children impacted by all the stress. After several months, people said we should stop trying and get out. I felt so defeated and alone. I thought we’d been called to do this, but at the same time all I could see was we were failing. It felt like we were harming our birth kids and not helping our adopted kids. We were in a mess. One thing that did help was tapping into the local PATH for respite care and into The Partnerships Programs. I’d used these programs as a psychologist, but not on a personal level. It was a Godsend for us to have a break and a breather.”

NHA Training

At about that time, Mari Bell, director of special education in West Fargo, came across a methodology called the Nurtured Heart Approach® created by Howard Glasser. The Nurtured Heart Approach (NHA) had been achieving international acclaim as a set of strategies that transformed the most intense children in inspiring ways – without the use of medication. Bell wanted to train several staff in NHA to become parent-coaches to support families in the school setting. She asked How to go to the training.

“I went to the NHA training feeling really heavy with guilt,” How said. “Mark and I had talked to our kids’ social worker and told her our adoptive placement wasn’t working and that we were done. We couldn’t adopt the kids. My whole life had been about children and making them successful and now I had two children who'd been in foster care for years and been placed in multiple homes, and we were going to tell them we couldn’t keep them. I didn’t know how to keep going in this profession and not feel complete shame and failure.”

How went to the NHA training feeling like a hypocrite. She thought, “If they knew I was quitting on my kids, they wouldn’t want me.” As she listened to the training she thought, This is different. We haven’t tried this angle. “We’d been doing traditional, positive parenting with rewards and consequences. But punitive consequences don’t work well with kids who come from trauma because they’ve lost so much. When you take something away from them it only confirms their feelings of unworthiness. It sets them up for thinking they are never good enough.”

How related a story she’d heard: “If a dollar bill gets crumpled up, or stomped on, or rubbed in dirt, would you still want it? Yes, it still has value. I needed to look at my kids that way. I was learning that their messiness did not define their value.” How sat through multiple days of NHA training. “We’d lost hope,” she said. “We’d lost the ability to see there was still light. It was such a dark time for us as a family.” How walked away from the training with a plan. “It wasn’t a perfect plan,” she said, “but it was enough to begin.”