Written By……Teri Barila
Walla Walla County Community Network Coordinator/Children’s Resilience Initiative
In a perfect world, children would enter school ready to learn. With well established social-emotional development already in hand (solid attachment relationships at home and self-regulation skills) they would move through the educational system prepared for academic achievement, getting along with peers, and with a foundational understand of moral behavior and prosocial conduct. Supports would be in place throughout their K-12 experience and their needs would be meet in all domains—family, school, community and individual-- and empathy, competency, resilience and all other identity factors would be in place and operating.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. Many—perhaps even half—of kindergarten children are not ready for school. Many will lag behind their peers in the most basic social-emotional skills and therefore academic mindset, and only fall further behind given the many factors of our not perfect world that affects their development. They will not find the needed support in all the domains of their life.
Unfortunately, some students will drop out of school, end up in jail, or become part of the welfare system. Others will do the best they can with the support system they have to meet the standards and rigors of our educational system, and stay engaged. As a follow-up to Jim Sporleder’s guest editorial on these students who stayed engaged, we offer the following data that supports the track record of these students ready to graduate, except for one issue: a math exam. We constantly hear the response that “you’re letting these kids off the hook” or “you’re trying to dilute the need for standards and rigor” or “they just don’t work hard enough”. Well, we randomly selected 20 students, now Seniors, who had been at Lincoln High School for at least 3 of their 4 years of high school, and we looked at their academic progress while under Jim and his staff’s care. Here is what we found for these 20 students:
- ALL are on track to graduate.
- 45% will NOT graduate if they do not pass the math exam.
- The GPA average is 2.8
- Average GPA rose from 1.5 to 2.9 over the 4 years.
- 55% had an increase in their math test scores (30% decreased by 4 points).
- Collective attendance is 85%.
These data support that students do well when they feel safe and secure and can thus concentrate on learning. Could they have done even better if supports had been in place sooner? More than likely, yes! The brain is very responsive to learning when energy is directed to learning and not when distracted and drained by heavy stress loads which many of these students have been exposed to. Can we do more sooner? The windows of opportunity for learning are never closed completely, but brain development experts tell us that early childhood is the critical period for “wiring” most of our adult patterns. If we are going to avoid the situation Jim and his staff and every other high school principal and staff face, then we have to address the critical early childhood window of opportunity period harder to avoid the issues Jim and his staff face with many of his able, capable and ready for the work force students face at the other spectrum of the educational system.
Contact Teri at www.resilincetrumpsaces.com
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