In high-poverty Los Angeles public schools, school-based therapy has been suggested for dealing with toxic stress and trauma-- but there isn't enough money for the counseling services needed.
At Benjamin Franklin High School in Highland Park, ninth-grader Noemi Potenciano and her friends sit at a table in the quad after school, listening to R&B music.
They are like a lot of kids in the Los Angeles Unified School District: The girls pull their hair back in bandanas - like wartime assembly line workers - and wear bright red lipstick. They are more likely to hit you back on Instagram than return a call. And every one of them knows someone who died from a gunshot.
Potenciano was in third grade, skidding across the blacktop at Monte Vista Elementary in a game of handball when Los Angeles police officers showed up. They put her in the back of the patrol car and took her home where she’d learn brother had been shot and killed outside the family house on Monte Vista Street.
The world was suddenly a very dark and very scary place.
“The school? They didn’t care,” said Potenciano, now 14.
Los Angeles public schools might look like fertile ground to try new approaches to helping kids with trauma and stress that researchers say can hold them back. It's the second largest school district in the nation and 80 percent of its students qualify for free and reduced lunch.
But while one Los Angeles charter school is showing success through increased student counseling - services at traditional L.A. Unified public schools are severely limited.
The district currently employs about 300 psychiatric social workers to serve roughly 800 schools — a ratio of about 2,200 students to one counselor.
A solution
As researchers work to solve one of the most persistent problems in public education – why kids in poor neighborhoods fail so much more often than their upper-income peers – more and more they’re pointing the finger at what happens outside the classroom.
Shootings. Food insecurity. Sirens and fights in the night. Experts are finding that those stressors build up, creating emotional problems and changes in the brain that can undermine even the clearest lessons.
In a recent study at high-poverty schools, L.A. Unified officials found that eight in 10 kids had suffered three or more traumatic events in the preceding year alone.
One solution cropping up at a smattering of schools across the country: school-based therapy.
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