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TEACHER VOICE: Helping a community near Ferguson, Missouri, heal after Michael Brown’s death [thehechingerreport.org]

 

By Lanesha McPherson, The Hechinger Report, January 27, 2020.

Educators today hear a lot about attending to students’ social-emotional needs and implementing “trauma-informed” practices. For some, I’m sure this sounds like jargon, but that’s not the case in the University City school district in Missouri, where I teach.

Here, we have embraced the goal of “humanizing” school and returning joy to our classrooms. Our district is located just six miles from Ferguson, where Michael Brown was fatally shot on August 9, 2014. That incident ignited racial tension and brought national attention to the problems of inequity and discrimination in and around St. Louis. In our district of over 2,500 students, the tensions were palpable both within and beyond our classrooms.

Then in 2016, Missouri launched a trauma-informed schools initiative to realize, recognize, respond to and resist the impacts of trauma. Trauma-informed practices have simple goals but are complex to achieve. But the hard work is paying off. Our district has seen the total number of student suspension days reduced by half since we started this important work. In my own classroom, I see much less off-task behavior, and I notice students taking a moment to breathe deeply when they need to refocus.

[To read more, please click here.]

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