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Public School 48, where I’m on staff as a social worker, sits on a block between a juvenile detention center and a strip club. The school serves around 900 mostly Hispanic and African American children in prekindergarten through fifth grade, with a large percentage of those kids living in shelter apartments. Of course, PS 48 has an educational mission, not a clinical one, but I’m part of a service staff that includes speech, occupational, and physical therapists. I’ve been a school social...

Childhood trauma comes in many forms. Whether it’s the shock of a friend’s sudden death or violence in school, we’ve heard far too many stories about students having to recover from traumatic events. But trauma can also rear its head in more subtle ways. It’s easy to write off a misbehaving student as “troubled.” But often, this behavior is a direct result of continued trauma at home. Abuse, neglect, struggles with poverty are all part of a particular type of trauma called Adverse Childhood...

When talking about trauma sensitive school trainings, school administrators will sometimes say, “I don’t want my teachers to be therapists, I need them to be teachers.” As trauma sensitive school (TSS) trainers, we couldn’t agree more. That’s why TSS training doesn’t teach treatment skills; it gives you as educators the tools to recognize trauma in a student, understand it, and help the student adapt accordingly.

“Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time.” So opens “A Talk to Teachers,” which James Baldwin delivered to a group of educators in October, 1963. (He published it in the Saturday Review the following December.) That year, Medgar Evers, a leading civil-rights figure and N.A.A.C.P. state field director, was murdered in his driveway by a white supremacist in Jackson, Mississippi. That year, four young girls—Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and...

A quiet, unsmiling little girl with big brown eyes crawls inside a carpeted cubicle, hugs a stuffed teddy bear tight, and turns her head away from the noisy classroom. The safe spaces, quiet times and breathing exercises for her and the other preschoolers at the Verner Center for Early Learning are designed to help kids cope with intense stress so they can learn. But experts hope there's an even bigger benefit — protecting young bodies and brains from stress so persistent that it becomes...

At one point last school year, homeless students made up a third of the Barrio Logan school’s total enrollment. Fernando Hernandez, the principal at Perkins K-8, makes sure his middle school teachers don’t put too much weight on homework. Hernandez caps the percentage of grades drawn from homework at 15 percent, which he says is lower than many middle schools. Though many schools and parents across the country have argued in recent years that schools should de-emphasize homework, Hernandez...

Of the 74.5 million children in the United States, an estimated 17.1 million have or have had a mental health disorder — more than the number of children with cancer, diabetes and AIDS combined. Half of all mental illness occurs before the age of 14, and 75 percent by the age of 24. In spite of the magnitude of the problem, lack of awareness and entrenched stigma keep the majority of these young people from getting help. Children and adolescents struggling with these disorders are at risk...

Vincent “Vinnie” Pompei is director of the Youth Well-Being Project of the Human Rights Campaign, a national civil rights organization, and the chair of Time to Thrive, an annual national conference about LGBT student inclusion. He spent more than 10 years as a middle school teacher and high school counselor in the Paramount and Val Verde unified school districts in Southern California. Pompei is also a past president of the California Association of School Counselors. On Oct. 5 at the...

Connecticut has been at the forefront of the national movement to reduce suspensions and expulsions of young children in recent years. School suspensions and expulsions can be harmful for children, particularly in the earliest grades. When a young child’s challenging behavior is met with exclusionary discipline rather than behavioral health support they are at greater risk for negative outcomes in the areas of social-emotional development, behavior, health, and education. In 2015,...

We have a few trainings going on. Here are the links in case anyone is interested. We are doing the one day trauma sensitive schools training in Wisconsin the first week in October. Here is the link https://www.pesi.com/events/detail/56985/trauma-sensitive-schools-improving-educational-and . We are very excited about our 8 session webinar series on creating a trauma informed school. Here is the link for that...

"Native American students make up 1.4 percent of the students in Washington state public schools. And they have the lowest graduation rate of any ethnic group, with just 56.4 percent earning a high school diploma in four years. “I was that young person, I dropped out of school. I was one of those statistics of Native women dropouts,” says Dawn Hardison-Stevens, who is a member of the Steilacoom Tribal Council. Hardison-Stevens, who at the time was a young mother with a 3-year-old and a...

Compassion takes on a whole new level of meaning when something momentously destructive and painful happens in your life, and you have to find a pathway forward. Scarlett Lewis' six year-old son, Jesse, was murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting. She had to dig unbelievably deeply into her well of compassion to be able to move forward with her life. Scarlett says she knew she had a choice - to be a victim for the rest of her life, or to chart a new way forward. She chose love.