Tagged With "Bay Area"
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2017 Spring Webinar Series: Trauma-Informed Approaches in Minnesota Schools
April 12, noon-1:30: Trauma-Informed Approaches in Minnesota Schools Dr. Mark Sander, Hennepin County; Stacy Bender-Fayette and Sharleen Zeman-Sperle, Peacemaker Resources Many Minnesota schools are trying innovative approaches to promote social emotional learning and to make the classroom a safe learning environment for children who have experienced trauma. This webinar is a chance to hear from three such innovators: Dr. Mark Sander, a psychologist working in the Minneapolis Public Schools...
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5 bright lights in LA County that are helping Latino students achieve [laschoolreport.com]
Despite making up the majority of California’s public school students, Latinos are still facing major challenges to achieving in school and graduating from college, a new report finds. But the report also highlights five bright spots in the LA County area — schools, districts, and programs that are helping Latinos succeed. In Los Angeles County, two school districts, a high school, and an early education center are modeling what needs to be done to close the achievement gap for Latino...
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A Detroit-area kindergarten teacher ensures that children learn empathy in an age of divisiveness (hechingerreport.org)
Our principal and staff are dedicated to creating a positive school culture for our students — and that includes helping them think about how we treat others and how others treat us. It’s critical to set this foundation early, which is why we place a culture of respect and caring as one of the most important things we do at our school. When students are feeling or acting overwhelmed, we send them to our “focus room,” where an adult can help them explore their feelings and understand where...
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Middle school tackles everybody's trauma; result is calmer, happier kids, teachers and big drop in suspensions
6 th grader Cayla White (right) helps lead class meditation with Niroga Institute’s Lauren Banister/ photos by Laurie Udesky During the 2014/2015 school year, things were looking grim at Park Middle School in Antioch, CA. At the time, staff couldn’t corral student disruptions. Teacher morale was plummeting. By the end of February 2015, 192 kids of the 997 students had been suspended -- 19.2 percent of the student population. “I was watching really good people burning out from the [teaching]...
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A New Documentary About Breaking the Cycle of Trauma is Launching This Fall!
We are thrilled to announce the premiere of Wrestling Ghosts , a documentary about breaking the cycle of trauma, at the LA Film festival on Sept. 27th. “Incredible. Haunting and strange and beautiful and incredibly moving.” -Dan Cogan, Founder Impact Partners Wrestling Ghosts follows the epic inner journey of Kim, a young mother who, over two heartbreaking and inspiring years, battles the traumas from her past in order to create a new present and future for her and her family. In this...
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ACEs Champion Julie Kurtz Gives Every Child (and Adult) a Voice
Julie Kurtz hasn’t stopped creating ways to build and promote resilience in herself and others who have experienced trauma since she left her family home for college at age 18. Although she experienced four types of adversity during her childhood, the CEO of the Center for Optimal Brain Integration has traveled a complex journey to mitigate those adversities by recognizing her own internal resilience, building skills to buffer her toxic and traumatic stress, uncovering her voice through...
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ACEs Group Shows its Hand to School Board [parkrapidsenterprise.com]
By Robin D. Fish, Park Rapids Enterprise, August 10, 2019 The Park Rapids Area School Board on Monday heard a presentation by the community’s ACEs Committee about the school’s central role in the drive to make Park Rapids a trauma-informed community. Speaking for ACES MN, a local group started under the auspices of ACTION Park Rapids to address adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), five presenters reviewed the area’s first ACEs Summit, held Feb. 13 at the high school. Lisa Coborn,...
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Advancing Systemic Changes to Promote Healthy School Environments [RWJF.org]
Purpose RWJF seeks to advance systemic changes that embed health in school environments. To help advance these systemic changes, the Foundation will support a collaborative, multipronged strategy with three complementary areas of work related to Research, Policy, and Strategic Action. This Call for Qualifications (CFQ) represents Phase I of a two-phase selection process designed to identify eligible organizations to lead each area of work, which include: Applied Research and Translation (one...
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Aiming for Discipline Instead of Punishment (edutopia.org)
There are many perspectives on the topic of discipline in our classrooms and schools, and I’d like to explore the idea of using brain-aligned discipline with students who have adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Discipline, unlike punishment, is proactive and begins before there are problems. It means seeing conflict as an opportunity to problem solve. Discipline provides guidance, focuses on prevention, enhances communication, models respect, and embraces natural consequences. It teaches...
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An Alternative to Suspension with Trauma-Informed Dynamic Mindfulness: Building Stress Resilience, Emotion Regulation and Empathy
At the November 2019 Northern California Safe and Healthy Schools Conference at UC Berkeley, Niroga Program Managers Sam Weiss and Fatima Ahmed facilitated a session incorporating the theory and practice of Dynamic Mindfulness (DMind) to a standing room only crowd.
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An Initiative to Improve Health in Schools Puts Trauma Front and Center [insidephilanthropy.com]
A recent initiative from America’s Promise Alliance—an organization best known for its efforts to boost high school graduation rates—supports work with communities to improve health in schools. Addressing trauma will be a major focus of that work, which is backed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and reflects growing interest among funders and nonprofits in this area. The organization is working on six community-led projects to make schools more healthy. Communities identified their own...
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An Unusual Idea for Fixing School Segregation [theatlantic.com]
Many proposals for addressing school segregation seem pretty small, especially when compared to the scale and severity of the problem. Without the power of a court-ordered desegregation mandate, progress can feel extremely far off, if not altogether impossible. Some even believe—understandably though mistakenly —that no meaningful steps can be taken to integrate schools unless housing segregation is resolved. But a new theory from Thomas Scott-Railton, a recent graduate of Yale Law School,...
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Area School Districts Turn to Technology to Address Bullying (kimt.com)
SPRING VALLEY, Minn. – A lot of bullying can happen online, but now students can use an online platform to fight it. Kingsland Public Schools, Leroy-Ostrander Public Schools, Grand Meadow, and Glenville-Emmons Public Schools are all trying out the app called STOPit this upcoming school year. On the app, students can anonymously report any bullying, self-harm, or violent concerns. A school administrator on the receiving end can then respond to address the concern. The STOPit app is also...
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Oklahoma City has fair share of homeless students [newsok.com]
A mom walked her child in to school at an Oklahoma City Public School last week and the child candidly shared that they'd slept in their car and that is why he was late. This isn't a made for television movie or something that only happens in other cities ... this really happened and happens quite often in our schools. More than 3,000 Oklahoma City Public Schools students identified as homeless last year. Homelessness causes children to be tardy, absent, hungry and suffering from anxiety and...
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Parenting Students Get Extra Help During Remote Learning (learn4life.org)
Every year, 25,000 teens give birth in California – and 70 percent of teen moms don’t graduate high school. About 1,300 of Learn4Life students are pregnant or parenting, so we are doing everything we can to keep these young mothers engaged in school and learning parenting skills – even during remote learning. Before COVID-19 forced remote learning, parenting teens could bring their babies to school while they studied and took tests. A separate child-friendly area ensured they didn’t disrupt...
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Philadelphia Trauma Training Conference- Call for Proposals
There are a few more days to submit your proposal for a 90-minute workshop to be presented at our 2nd Annual Philadelphia Trauma Training Conference - Preventing Childhood Trauma and its Impact across the Lifespan: An Interprofessional Agenda for Providers, Advocates, Policy Makers, and Community Members The submission deadline is March 1st . If your proposal is accepted you will be granted free admission to the three-day conference . First launched in 2017, the Philadelphia Trauma Training...
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Place Matters
Place matters. It was spring break of 1993 – my senior year of high school – and I was driving back from Virginia Beach with three close friends. We passed signs for the University of Delaware. I asked if we could take a quick detour to see the campus. The one request literally changed the course of my life – forever. University of Delaware in Spring It was late in April and I had been accepted to UD but never set foot in the town of Newark, DE. Little did I know it would be the campus of my...
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Post-Harvey, Houston Teachers Learn to Respond to Trauma [prweb.com]
One year after Hurricane Harvey, Houston-area teachers have a new tool to respond to children who have experienced trauma or distress through a new online professional development program. The program was developed through a collaboration between UNICEF USA , Mental Health America of Greater Houston (MHA of Greater Houston), and health simulation company Kognito . The program, titled Trauma-Informed Practices for K-12 Schools (TPS), is a 30-45-minute online simulation that builds educators’...
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Program offers hundreds of young men, boys safe space to heal from ACEs
Dennis McCollins recounts some of the experiences that caused him to harden against the world as a teenager. “There were times I went to more funerals than birthdays,” says McCollins, who is the clinical director of the School Based Health Center at Greenwood Academy in Richmond, Calif. And it took its toll: “I spent time homeless. I got expelled [from school]. I was so angry and upset and mad,” he says. Dennis McCollins Then a man that he met when he was sent to Job Corps as a teen turned...
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Could Parkland Shooting Be Prevented? Yes, and Runcie Knew How
School safety, negligence documentation, and a need for a school reform My name is Natalia Garceau. For nine years, I’ve been working at a center similar to the one where Nikolas Cruz was sent to after his expulsion from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. You won’t hear anything from the teachers who work at such centers because they are afraid to lose their jobs and to be taken to court. They have families to feed. By contract, we are not allowed to speak with media about anything...
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Developing Community Resilience During the COVID-19 Outbreak
Educators, I know many of you understand the important role strong families and communities play in the lives of your students. Ideas are included below to develop community resilience that, ultimately, support your students in the process. I have been fielding requests about community resilience development and want to share with all of you a document that others are finding helpful. I initially created the document (below and pdf attached) for our host entities to distribute to the cohorts...
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Development and Implementation of Standards for Social and Emotional Learning in the 50 States (selpractices.org)
Development and Implementation of Standards for Social and Emotional Learning in the 50 States · SEL Thrive { "@context" : "http://schema.org", "@type" : "Organization", "name" : "SEL Thrive", "url" : "https://www.selpractices.org/", "logo": "https://www.selpractices.org/apple-touch-icon-180x180.png", "sameAs" : [ "https://www.facebook.com/", "https://twitter.com/" ], // "contactPoint" : [{ // "@type" : "ContactPoint", // "telephone" : "+1-555-555-555", // "contactType" : "customer service"...
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During COVID-19, how does a trauma-informed school pivot to distance learning?
Antioch Middle School seventh-grader Alyssia Garcia was accustomed to scanning the cafeteria during lunch for kids who might need her assistance. “I’d look for kids who looked sad, kids who were sitting alone, kids who looked angry,” says Garcia, a peer advocate at her school. Alyssia Garcia When she’d spot students sitting alone or looking sad, she’d approach them and ease into conversation. “If it’s a sad person, I’ll try to cheer them up or ask them what the problem is,” she says. “If...
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Early childhood educators learn new ways to spot trauma triggers, build resilience in preschoolers
A hug may be comforting to many children, but for a child who has experienced trauma it may not feel safe.
That’s an example used by Julie Kurtz, co-director of trauma informed practices in early childhood education at the WestEd Center for Child & Family Studies (CCFS), as she begins a trauma training session. Her audience, preschool teachers and staff of the San Francisco-based Wu Yee Children’s Services at San Francisco’s Women’s Building, listen attentively.
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Engaging Parents, Developing Leaders
A Self-Assessment and Planning Tool for Nonprofits and Schools By the Annie E. Casey Foundation This publication introduces an assessment and planning tool to help nonprofits evaluate their parent engagement efforts and chart a path toward deeper partnerships with parents and caregivers. The tool spans just eight pages, with accompanying text outlining how to use it, how to assess its results and what real-world strategies and programs are already in play — and working — to boost parent...
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From Trauma Informed To Trauma Transformed: Achieving Post-Traumatic GROWTH for the Youths In Our Most Disenfranchised Public Schools and Communities
Roberto Rivera was a troubled, addicted youth engaged in criminal behavior who discovered his path to transformation in the pit of his traumatic pain. He harnessed the fire of early childhood trauma to change himself from being a problem to being a solution, not just in his own life, but also in the lives of many, many other under-privileged and under-performing young people. The name of his solution is Fulfill The Dream (FTD). FTD is a unique, hip-hop(e) based, Social Emotional Learning...
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“Handle with Care” ~ West Virginia (WV) Center for Children’s Justice & WV State Police
The West Virginia Defending Childhood Initiative, commonly referred to as Handle With Care, is tailored to reflect the needs and issues affecting children in West Virginia. The Initiative, a result of a collaborative effort of key stakeholders and partners, builds upon the success of proven programs throughout the country. The goal of the Initiative is to prevent children's exposure to trauma and violence, mitigate negative affects experienced by children's exposure to trauma, and to...
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Haunted By His Past As A Bully, He Apologized To His Victims — 60 Years Later (wbur.org)
For many, the memories of being bullied as a child — or bullying — linger through adulthood. But how many people take action? It took nearly 60 years, but Chicago-area resident Bruce Smit decided to seek out the two little girls he tormented as a child at Monee Elementary School. And it turned out that the sisters, Lorraine O'Kelly and Kathleen Rys , still live in the area, and were willing to meet with him . The trio — the bully and the bullied — join Here & Now 's Robin Young to talk...
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Homework: Moving Toward Compassionate, Trauma-Informed Schools
It was the little red trauma-informed schoolhouse. Katherine Wickersham-Wade, the Nay’dini’aa Na’ Kayax (Chickaloon Village) clan grandmother who started the Ya Ne Dah Ah School , Alaska’s first Tribally operated school in 1992, might not have used that language. But she did envision a school that would wrap its students in Native ancestral traditions and Ahtna language, instill self-confidence and repair some of the damage inflicted by historical trauma—the disruptions to culture and...
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Houston Schools Closed: What Happens When Schools Restart?
Please plan now for when schools re-open in Houston and surrounding area. It is not enough to just open the doors again.
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How High-Crime Neighborhoods Make It Harder For Kids To Show Up At School (kqed.org)
A new study suggests living in a high-crime area, or simply passing through one on the way to school, can impact how often students show up to class. She and her team looked at how neighborhood crime in Baltimore affects attendance. The vast majority of students there use public transportation (like many urban school systems, Baltimore City Public Schools don't bus students). Researchers mapped the routes high school freshmen took to and from school — what streets they were walking on, when...
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How It Feels & How We Heal: Parenting with ACEs Chat Quotes (You Tube, Database, PDFs, Links)
Parenting with ACEs is sharing inspiration, information, and expertise from our chat series in 3 formats. Parenting with ACEs: How It Feels & How We Heal Quote Collection (pdf version below as well) Quotes Database (pdf version below as well) Links to Chat Transcripts and before and after-the-chat blog posts. Thanks to everyone who showed up, who shared, and who is doing the important work that is our mission (prevent ACEs, heal trauma, build resilience). We know that work happens...
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How Making Time for Mindfulness Helps Students (kqed.org)
A new study suggests that mindfulness education — lessons on techniques to calm the mind and body — can reduce the negative effects of stress and increase students’ ability to stay engaged, helping them stay on track academically and avoid behavior problems. After finding that students who self-reported mindful habits performed better on tests and had higher grades, researchers with the Boston Charter Research Collaborative — a partnership between the Center for Education Policy Research at...
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How More Meetings Might Be The Secret To Fixing High School [npr.org]
The week before winter break, snow is piled up around St. Louis Park High School, a low-slung, rambling brick complex in suburban Minneapolis. And more snow is falling. This is a big, diverse school with proud roots. Alumni include Joel and Ethan Coen, who shot their semiautobiographical 2009 drama, A Serious Man, in this area, once a Jewish enclave, which today has immigrants from all over the world. But in 1998, when Angela Jerabek was a school counselor for freshmen here, she was...
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How Trauma Impairs Brain Function (The Best Possible Brain)
By Debbie Hampton, May 27, 2018, for The Best Brain Possible Trauma can actually alter the function of your brain during the stressful event and result in lasting changes in certain brain regions. These changes can impair cognitive function and memory encoding and recall at the moment and in the future. Recent neuroscientific findings in this area have real implications for the victims of crime and the legal system. The science of epigenetics is even showing that the effects of trauma can be...
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p.p et al V compton Unified or the compton trauma lawsuit
lThanks everyone for the high level of interest in this blog post. I thought I would send a follow up. Public Counsel a law firm filed a class action lawsuit alleging that Compton Unified subjected trauma impacted students to punitive and counter productive measures that pushed these students out of school and into the criminal justice system. Read the details on their website. http://www.publiccounsel.org/stories?id=0172 The plaintiffs were requesting that compton unified provide training...
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Improve Classroom Climate with Dynamic Mindfulness
Improve Classroom Climate with Dynamic Mindfulness January 2020 We know that challenges with toxic stress and trauma amongst our educators and the youth they serve affect learning readiness, school classroom climate, and teacher burnout. What can we do about it? Many educators are struggling with this question and searching for answers. Niroga Institute's Dynamic Mindfulness (DMind) programs should be considered as a comprehensive solution. Dynamic Mindfulness is a combination of movement,...
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Incorporating Trauma Informed Practice and ACEs into Professional Curricula - a Toolkit
The toolkit is designed to aid faculty and teachers in a variety of disciplines, specifically social work, medicine, law, education, and counseling, to develop or integrate critical content on adverse childhood experiences and trauma informed care into new or existing curricula of graduate education programs. This toolkit provides an overview of colleges and universities that have courses in trauma-informed practice and ACEs science. Most of the toolkit comprises content for a course on...
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Schools combine meditation and brain science to help combat discipline problems (chalkbeat.org)
When students and teachers learn together about how their brains influence behavior, one expert says, discipline can become less of a confrontation and more of a partnership. The field of educational neuroscience is at the intersection of cognitive psychology, education and neuroscience, and some of its teachings suggest findings from brain research can be applied to classroom management and discipline techniques. Some trend toward the area of “mindfulness,” such as attempting to sharpen...
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Schools resolve conflicts by getting kids to talk things out (pbs.org)
Schools across the country are moving away from an era of zero-tolerance policies and shifting toward methods that involve restorative justice, encouraging students to resolve their differences by talking to each other rather than resorting to violence. In New York City, five schools that have implemented this system are already seeing results. NewsHour Weekend's Megan Thompson reports. In a 9th grade civics class in Brooklyn, New York, Erica Wright is encouraging students to talk to each...
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Setting the Wheels in Motion - Becoming a Trauma Informed and Trauma Sensitive School
I recently wrote a blog post about how to take the first step in creating a trauma informed care model (TIC) in your school. The first step, Establishing a Baseline, is necessary because it fuels future steps in the process. In the blog post "Is Your School Ready to be Trauma Informed and Trauma Sensitive," I also listed the key components of a TIC model. I am adding them here as well, because I don't want you to have to keep going back to the other blog as you are working on this process.
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Some 350 Florida Leaders Expected to Attend Think Tank with Dr. Vincent Felitti, Co-Principal Investigator of the ACE Study; Expert on ACEs Science
Leaders from across the Sunshine State will take part in a “Think Tank” in Naples, FL, on Monday, August 6, to help create a more trauma-informed Florida. The estimated 350 attendees will include policy makers and community teams made up of school superintendents, law enforcement officers, judges, hospital administrators, mayors, PTA presidents, child welfare experts, mental health and substance abuse treatment providers, philanthropists, university researchers, state agency heads, and...
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Study: Northern Utah schools disproportionately discipline students of color [Standard.net]
A study released in May by Voices for Utah Children found black, Hispanic and American Indian students have been disproportionately disciplined in schools throughout the state. The report looked at the 2013–14 school year and found 6 percent of all students of color received a disciplinary action, compared with 3 percent of their white counterparts. In Northern Utah area school districts, the Weber School District was among those to have higher-than-expected discipline rates for students of...
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Texas Creates Task Force To Address Students’ Post-Harvey Trauma [houstonpublicmedia.org]
When the clouds darken and rain starts pouring down, many Houston-area elementary school students get nervous and start to sob — a sign of the long-lasting effects of watching the water levels rise during and after Hurricane Harvey. For Donna Wotkyns, a licensed social worker in Houston, that reaction shows exactly why ramping up resources for long-term mental health services for Texas students is necessary. “I’m a big believer in … support groups, getting together multiple children or youth...
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Michigan Trauma Informed Education
We are working with PESI, a leader in professional development, to offer a full day training in trauma informed education. This content follows the content of our book on Supporting and Educating Traumatized Students. We will be in Michigan April 19, (Sterling Heights) 20, (LIvonia) and 21 (Ann Arbor) See the attached brochure If this goes well they will continue to offer this next year. Hope to see you there
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Mindful-Based Practices, Therapeutic Activities, & Ways to Relax: For Teachers, Parents, & Children
Yoga is a great activity for children and adults and is easy to do just about anywhere! Children need to have multiple healthy ways to express their feelings and have opportunities for mind and body awareness. Yoga is beneficial because it is... Non-competitive Gender neutral Enhances motor skills and balance Improves listening skills in a fun approach Children can focus on what is happening in the moment A healthy way to express feelings Supports social and emotional learning and...
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Mindfulness practices help students deal with stress, behavior (post-gazette.com)
A focus on breathing is one of the first steps in yoga and mindfulness classes being taught among children and teens and their teachers in schools throughout the Pittsburgh area. “It’s empowering, using your own body and your own breath,” says Yoga in the Schools founder Joanne Spence. Explaining how something so simple can be helpful, she said, “Practice allows us to be present and accountable … in the midst of ups and downs in life.” Indeed, the class aims to help students focus, control...
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New Elementary and Secondary Education Law Includes Specific “Trauma-Informed Practices” Provisions
Legislation to replace the 14 year-old No Child Left Behind law—The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) signed by President Obama on Dec. 10—was widely praised by the administration, legislators of both parties in the House and Senate, and the organizations concerned about education policy from the NEA to the Education Trust. The consensus is that the bill is not perfect but provides a needed recalibration of federal authority over the states in education policy while protecting...
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New Guidance on Trauma Screening in Schools
In partnership with the Defending Childhood State Policy Initiative and the National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice, new guidance has been released on trauma screening in schools. Importantly, this document lays out a series of important considerations when determining whether trauma screening is indicated in each context, and how to go about collecting and utilizing the data generated from the process. Please feel free to share input.
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New Resource Guide for Child Sexual Abuse/Exploitation Prevention
Greetings, ACN Community! I wanted to share this fantastic new resource guide developed by one of the work groups from the Georgia Statewide Human Trafficking Task Force. This guide provides background on best practice, principles of prevention, identifying resources for the classroom, developing a prevention plan, age appropriate teaching suggestions, analysis of specific programs, and guidelines for implementation and evaluation. It is really quite thorough and is full of excellent ideas...