Every student should have the opportunity to learn and succeed. But adverse childhood experiences — or ACEs — get in the way of this goal.
As our readers know, there are ten ACEs that include physical and emotional neglect; physical, emotional and sexual abuse; and living in households where adults misuse substances, have mental health challenges, are violent to partners, parents are separated, or a family member is incarcerated.
ACEs can impact students’ capacity to learn, leading to poor academic achievement and high rates of drop out.
In some classrooms, as many as half to two thirds of our students endure three or more ACEs. Instead of thinking about math, many of our students live with trauma. They worry about what may happen in their home as their family members struggle to create a safe household.
NEW YEAR=NEW STRATEGIES
It’s time for new strategies that will lead to real solutions. We can and must end ACEs to ensure healthy families, successful students and trauma-free communities.
To accomplish this, we propose using a data-driven and cross-sector prevention strategy focused on increasing the services shown to strengthen families and reduce abuse and neglect. Our hypothesis is simple: If families have access to ten vital services that support surviving and thriving, we can reduce ACEs and cases of maltreatment seen by child welfare.
ESTABLISHING A COUNTY BASE FOR PREVENTION
Each county requires a mechanism (government-based, campus-based or non-profit-based organization) to coordinate prevention and treatment activities and work in alignment with city government, county government and school boards. Using technology, each county can create a network of providers who communicate regularly on plans and progress.
We propose five inter-related strategies as the key to preventing ACEs.
Strategy 1: Promote local awareness of ACEs and the costly impact of trauma on children, families, schools and the workforce. This requires ongoing education with our mayors, city managers, city council members, county commissioners and school board members and superintendents. Dialogue with local child welfare and state lawmakers will also be required and very helpful.
Strategy 2: Promote public and private partnerships, creating incubators that use "entrepreneurial thinking" to strengthen local systems of trauma-informed care and all the services families need to succeed. This means that we work so that all families will gain easy access to five "survival services": behavioral health care, medical care, food programs, stable housing, and transport to vital services.
Strategy 3: Support school districts, colleges and universities in developing the resources, programs and policies to address the needs of students who may struggle with learning due to trauma. This will require school and campus-based trauma-informed behavioral health care serving students and their family members.
Strategy 4: Promote health equity, ensure all our cities, towns and communities are places where every child can thrive. This means working so that families can access the five "services for thriving": early childhood learning programs, home visitation programs, youth mentors, family-focused schools with behavioral health care, and job training programs.
Strategy 5: Train all community agency leaders in the four-step framework of continuous quality improvement (CQI)—assessment, planning, action and evaluation—to help organizations use data to identify the challenges families confront, implement evidence-based solutions, and focus on achieving measurable and meaningful results.
CLEAR GOALS AND BOLD VISION
With data-driven ACEs prevention we can strengthen community systems and lifelong learning to create:
- Safe Childhoods
- Successful Students
- Resilient and Trauma-Free Families
- Healthy Community Systems of Care
- Economically Thriving Local Economies
Cities like Las Cruces, New Mexico and Owensboro, Kentucky are demonstrating how to achieve success with data-driven ACEs prevention. You are invited to learn from them and share your success stories as the national network of result-focused ACEs prevention projects grows.
Onward and upward to 2020--the year every county in the nation has a robust ACEs prevention project working to ensure safe childhoods.
For more information on data-driven ACEs prevention you can explore the book Anna, Age Eight: The data-driven prevention of childhood trauma and maltreatment by Katherine Ortega Courtney, PhD and Dominic Cappello. You can download the book free-of-charge here: www.AnnaAgeEight.org.
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