Don't talk to Dale G. Caldwell about childhood trauma. He sees its collateral damage way too often.
As the head of school of the Village Charter School in Trenton, Caldwell knows that many of the students who fill his classrooms live with the realities of neighborhood gun violence, of a drug deal gone sour down the street, of a father's fist, a mother's rage.
And he knows that unrelenting exposure to such horrors can lead to a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, making it harder for youngsters to learn in school and leaving them ripe for lifelong problems.
"Many programs treat post-traumatic stress disorder in war veterans," Caldwell wrote in a guest opinion column in The Times in September. "Unfortunately, there are not enough programs to effectively treat this ailment suffered by public school students and their parents."
A project initiated by the Trenton Health Team is taking steps to remedy that.
[For more of this story, written by Ed Murray, go to http://www.nj.com/opinion/inde...n_health_team_1.html]
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