Getting children the support they need to overcome damaging stress will help turn Benton Harbor schools around, Superintendent Shelly Walker told almost 100 school staff and community members Monday.
“This is not a phenomenon only in Benton Harbor,” she said. “We have communities all over the nation that are ill-equipped to address the multiple needs of our students in our school systems.”
Walker said professionals from Lakeland Health have spoken recently about how constant childhood trauma negatively affects brain development.
“Those adverse childhood effects – the abuse the neglect, the household dysfunction, those urban variables – what they have found in the research ... has health outcomes that are behavioral and physical,” Walker said. “When people, especially young people, are under this level of stress ... over periods and periods of time, they develop what researchers call toxic stress.”
[For more of this story, written by Louise Wrege, go to http://www.heraldpalladium.com...d6-d77433985192.html]
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