By Jess Clarke

One teacher provided support for hospice patients. Another taught academics and music to Native American children on a reservation. One staff member had an internship with the Seattle Seahawks football team. And another one is a member of a juvenile crime prevention council.
    
Those are among the rich and rewarding experiences teachers and staff bring to their roles at Wellspring Academy of the Carolinas. They arrive at the campus in Western North Carolina with plenty of insight on working with teens with special challenges. And they find rewards they might not have expected.
    
Wellspring Academies in California and North Carolina offer a renowned approach to weight loss, fitness and a healthy lifestyle for children and young adults.
    
Wellspring-Carolinas academic director Billy Porter, who teaches social studies, went to North Carolina from the St. Stephens Indian School on the Northern Arapaho tribe’s Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. Many of the kids were obese and had diabetes in addition to emotional and behavioral issues. On the reservation and at Wellspring, “Many of these students don’t realize that the power to control their lives is within them already,” Porter says.         
    
“To have them succeed and feel good about what they’re doing is really rewarding because you hope it translates into other parts of their lives,” he says. “To try to make a difference is exciting. I know I can do it.”
    
Katie Busch, who teaches English and health, believes she’s making a difference at Wellspring, too. With Wellspring’s small classes, “I think I’m in a position to make much more of an impact,” says Busch, who worked with at-risk kids in a wilderness therapy setting before her internship with a hospice in Illinois. “When there are five students in a class, you can give so much more attention to the students than they would probably get in a public school,” she says.
    
“You really see the students transform in all different kinds of ways. You see them transform physically. You see kids come out of their shells in a way they probably never have done before… It’s very rewarding. It’s something that probably would be very hard to find elsewhere,” says Busch, whose experience as a cook at a vegetarian restaurant is helpful in teaching Wellspring’s health and nutrition class.
    
For some staff members, their own or a family member’s experience with being overweight has helped prepare them for their Wellspring roles.
    
Theater teacher Lynne Warner was teased about being overweight as a kid. Now, “I can be on the same page with them. I can understand,” says Warner, who serves on a juvenile crime prevention council in Western North Carolina.
    
As a kid, most of her friends got in trouble with the law, so Warner is familiar with behavioral issues. “I was the only one who didn’t get arrested, didn’t go to juvenile detention centers. I saw what was not available for them, what did and didn’t work,” she says.
    
She has seen theater work to help people who struggle with emotional issues.   Warner acted in and directed plays in college. “There was nothing we couldn’t do on stage, nothing we couldn’t talk about. It really opened my eyes to drama therapy,” says Warner, who worked at a Boys & Girls Club in North Carolina.
    
John Taylor, who teaches physical education and runs Wellspring’s fitness center, saw dramas sometimes as a residential assistant at CRC Health Group’s Stone Mountain School. The school, also in Western North Carolina, helps teenage boys with emotional and behavioral issues. “It reminded me of what it’s like to be a teenager again,” he says.
    
At Wellspring and Stone Mountain School, Taylor has learned that “You can teach the tools kids are lacking as far as different ways to cope with things, how to express yourself in different ways than being violent or overeating,” he says.
    
Taylor is motivated to help kids at Wellspring from his family’s experience with obesity. His father, who is obese, had a heart attack a couple of years ago. “I would like to see these kids not get to the point where they have to adjust their lifestyle because their body no longer will do what they want it to do,” says Taylor, who had an internship with the Seattle Seahawks’ athletic training department.
    
At the end of the school year, Taylor puts dumbbells in a backpack to equal the weight students have lost, and kids walk around the dining hall with the pack. “I tell them, ‘This is what you used to carry around.’ They come back kind of winded…It’s really an eye-opener for them.”
    
He shares the success stories from Wellspring with his father. “In some small way, I am part of that, so it makes me feel good,” Taylor says.