The founding Monument Academy teachers and staff knew that running a 24-hour school for children who’ve survived trauma and violence would be difficult.
They just didn’t know how difficult.
“It was chaotic,” said Emily Bloomfield, the school’s founder and CEO, recalling the first few weeks of class last summer. “There was a lot of fighting ... a lot of cursing, a lot of running around.”
The 40 fifth-graders who started in August at this unusual new charter school in northeast Washington include children in foster care or at risk of entering the foster-care system. Some live in homeless shelters. Some have seen or experienced domestic violence or abuse. Some have grieved painful losses. And some have changed schools or been suspended or expelled so many times that they’re significantly behind their peers, both academically and emotionally.
[For more of this story, written by Erin Einhorn, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...ding-schools/421704/]
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