Tagged With "Black students"
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Over 100 pastoral education students trained in trauma at regional meeting in Baltimore
The theme of trauma was selected for this year’s annual summer Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) Day because “clergy responses to trauma an have a significant impact on our own healing and in healing our communities,” as described in the planning committee welcome letter. Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore hosted the gathering of over 100 pastoral students from the Maryland, Washington, DC, and Northern Virginia region. Planning Committee Chair Ty Crowe, director of the Hospital’s Spiritual...
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Parent, Educator, and Student Resources - FREE
We have started, and are adding to daily, a free resource page for teachers, educators, parents, and students. It is filled with activities, educational & behavioral resources, and more. These are gathered from around the internet and my own stuff as well. We are offering daily tips, tools, and projects through our FB page linked here . The big message is all about Collective Resilience - Together We Rise. Be sure to like our FB pageso you can get notified when we put new stuff up!
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Parkland and Santa Fe Schools Disclose Devastating After-Effects of Shootings [politico.com]
By Nicole Gaudiano, Politico, October 10, 2019 Substance abuse and mental health problems surged following last year’s deadly mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., while test scores tanked. More kids are said to be anxious, depressed and cutting school. In Santa Fe, Texas, where eight students and two teachers were killed in May of last year, it’s a similar story, according to documents obtained by POLITICO. A growing number of students need support from...
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Peace Rooms and Mindfulness: New School Discipline Philosophy One Year Later [peoriapublicradio.org]
School districts had a year to implement a state law that banned zero-tolerance policies and emphasized restorative justice practices. We check back in with five districts we visited in the summer of 2016 to see how school discipline has changed. On the second day of the school year, Amber Owens got the kind of jolt every parent dreads. She was called to the nurse’s office at Champaign’s Bottenfield Elementary, where she found her 7-year-old son, Simon, sobbing uncontrollably and bleeding...
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Peek Inside a Classroom: Jasmine
© Elliot Gilfix/Flickr . What happened to Jasmine? . Photo © Jinx!/Flickr When you look inside a...
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Peek Inside a Classroom: Jose
Photo credit Max Klingensmith at flickr . Jose was one of the calmest, quietest, most peaceful boys in the classroom. The kind of boy everybody loves. ...
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Philly Kindergartners Will No Longer Be Suspended [PhillyMag.com]
Philly’s youngest students will no longer be suspended from school for misbehavior. The School Reform Commission announced today that it has approved revisions to the Student Code of Conduct that will remove suspensions as punishment for Kindergarten students. “We remain focused on academic achievement, children reading on grade level, and college and career readiness. The early years are the most important, and we need students in school,” said Superintendent William Hite in a statement .
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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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Poetry in Motion: Drama Lit Team Preps for Spring Slams By Elisa Knoell Learn4Life Student
Imagine the power of putting a handful of kids together in a class to tell their stories in their own words—and earn credits in the process. This school year, Learn4Life’s Innovation High School (IHS) San Diego – Lakeside is offering a spoken word poetry course titled “Dramatic Literature”. The course engages youth in classic works of literature and empowers teens to take charge of their own futures and unearth their potential. Annabelle Reyes, a Drama Lit student, told how beneficial the...
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Potential impact of Trauma on special education eligibility
This is a follow up to my previous email concerning the PP v Compton class action lawsuit concerning adverse events and eligibility under the Americans with Disability act. I did a presentation at the Legal Issues in Special Education conference on April 24th. The participants consisted of special education directors, compliance officers and parent advocates The big surprise was that there was huge interest in this issue. It was standing room only in the room. Secondly even though this...
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Poverty seen as factor in dropout rate (Wilkesboro, NC) [JournalPatriot.com]
Local school officials say worsening economic problems in the last decade are adversely impacting student success and likely played a role in last year’s 63.5 percent increase in the Wilkes County high school dropout rate. The dropout rate rose from 1.71 in the 2013-14 school year to 2.68 in 2014-15. Last year’s rate was the highest since 3.50 in 2009-10 and the first increase since 2008-09. “The economic problems that families are facing (in Wilkes) are huge,” said April Marr, director of...
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Pre-parenting curriculum for teens
If you are working with teens to plan bright futures, we would like to offer you a Sample Lesson Plan from our Healthy Foundations for Future Families curriculum. For the past 10 years, our organization Educate Tomorrow’s Parents (ETP), has been working upstream to prevent Adverse Childhood Experiences by educating teens before they form families. Our science-based curriculum meets essential standards for secondary school health education. There are several components, including a student...
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PRESS RELEASE - U.S. Department of Education Awards More Than $6.5 Million in Grants to Help Schools and Communities Promote Equity in Education [www.ed.gov]
SEPTEMBER 29, 2016 Contact: Press Office, (202) 401-1576, press@ed.gov The U.S. Department of Education is awarding more than $6.5 million in grants to fund four regional Equity Assistance Centers to support schools and communities creating equitable education opportunities for all students. These centers, authorized under Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, will provide technical assistance in the preparation and implementation of plans for the desegregation of public schools...
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Program gives Spokane schools resources to help students rise above adversity
By Jim Allen , Thu., Oct. 24, 2019 Think of it as a well-school checkup. On Tuesday morning at Bemiss Elementary School, educators and health professionals spoke enthusiastically about something called Resilience in School Environments, or RISE. A collaboration between Kaiser Permanente and the Spokane and West Valley school districts, the RISE program is expected to lift up teachers and administrators and give them tools to cope with all the challenges of the modern student. The challenges...
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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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Program shows teachers how to see signs of childhood trauma [TheET.com]
When a child is acting out or not paying attention in school, it might not be because he or she is misbehaving. It might be because a parent was arrested the previous night. Teachers don't always know about the traumatic events a child experiences at home, but a new program being organized in Mercer County could give teachers notice when one of their students need to be handled with care. Andrea Darr, director of the West Virginia Center for Children's Justice spoke May 6 at Mercer County...
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Puppy love on campus helping kids cope with daily stress [CabinetReport.com]
Students stressed out over impending college acceptance and rejection letters drop by a teacher’s class to spend time brushing the therapy dog in her class just to calm their nerves. At another campus, a first grader practices reading aloud while absentmindedly playing with the ears of a therapy dog that visits his class once a week. Man’s best friend is playing an increasingly important role in maintaining student mental health as more becomes required of students to succeed academically.
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‘Push Back’: Unified Schools Crowd Faces Down Divisive Fears (timesofsandiego.com)
Kevin Beiser acknowledged what brought hundreds of parents, teachers and students Wednesday evening to a dusty ball field in Old Town — the fear of “what it would be like in Nazi Germany.” But school board member Beiser promised the San Diego Unified School District would “push back” against enablers of hate. Trustee Richard Barrera noted a 950-word school board resolution approved last week “reaffirming values of peace, tolerance and respect for multiple perspectives.” (see attached)...
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Community Schools: An Evidence-Based Strategy for Equitable School Improvement [LearningPolicyInstitute.org]
This brief examines the research on community schools, with two primary emphases. First, it explores whether the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) opens the possibility of investing in well-designed community schools to meet the educational needs of low-achieving students in high-poverty schools. And second, it provides support to school, district, and state leaders as they consider, propose, or implement a community school intervention in schools targeted for comprehensive support. [For...
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Compassion-Based Strategies for Managing Classroom Behavior (kqed.org)
When Grace Dearborn started her career teaching high school students, she felt confident about how to teach but unprepared for managing behavior in her classroom. During more challenging disciplinary moments with students, she used her angry voice with them, thinking that would work. Instead, on one occasion, an escalated situation led to a student following her around the classroom for 15 minutes while she was teaching until security could come to escort the student out of the class .
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Connecting with Challenging Students
Connect with challenging youth by Dr. Larry Brendtro I have been very fortunate to have connected with some excellent mentors over the years and Dr. Brendtro is one of my all time favorites. If you work with kids that are challenging you need to know the work of Dr. Brendtro!! Although he is no longer affiliated with Reclaiming Youth International... do check out the work : by Brendtro, Brokenleg, Van Bockern., Reclaiming Youth At Risk; Our Hope for the future. Here is a sample of some of...
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CONNECTING WITH KIDS IN PAIN
Kids in pain cannot learn!!! Often your most difficult students are young people living in environments with Toxic Levels of Stress. These environments change the brain! The next time you are involved with a student that is escalating and beginning to loss control try some of the following ideas . 1. BE A THERMOSTAT- NOT A THERMOMETER Develop with-in your head a pause button. Slow down. Everything in your body will be telling you to speed up... remember emotions are very contagious.
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Controlled Burn: A Story of Growth (ascd.org)
My nephew Max (a pseudonym) started skipping school when he was a high school freshman. He did enough to get by, coming home with C 's and D 's on his report cards, but he continued to skip school no matter what anyone did to try to get him to be a "better" student. He not only skipped classes on a regular basis, he skipped studying. He certainly didn't do his homework. His teachers pushed and prodded, his family begged and scolded. If you ask him now, Max says that to him, school seemed...
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ConVal High School's Story: Becoming Trauma-Informed for Substance Abuse Prevention
As a student assistance counselor, I regularly receive flashy emails from various organizations promoting materials for drug-free schools. Secretly I roll my eyes and strike the trash icon. “Drug free schools - ha, right?!” It may sound cynical or jaded that I don’t believe in drug-free high schools. It’s not that. The truth is I don’t believe a drug-free high school exists. This isn’t from a lack of effort or concern. As a product of the “Just Say No” era, schools have worked for decades to...
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CORE Districts Announce Social-Emotional Assessment Design Challenge [COREDistricts.org]
By Julie White The CORE Districts today announced a design challenge for new, state-of-the-art assessments of social-emotional skills. The goal is to identify next generation assessments that support effective instruction and positive student development. CASEL’s Practical Social-Emotional Competence Assessments Work Group (AWG) is leading this Assessment Design Challenge. The group seeks a broad range of assessments that measure students’ social-emotional competencies based on performance...
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Coronavirus becomes unprecedented test for teacher-student relationships [hechingerreport.org]
By Liz Willen, The Hechinger Report, April 20, 2020 Social studies teacher Karen Rose stepped out of New Rochelle High School last month for what will likely be the last time. And while that makes her sad, it’s not what bothers her most after 34 years in the classroom. “My biggest worry is the kids I’ve gotten no response from,” said Rose, who is retiring in June and never expected to end her career struggling with online teaching. “I’m calling and emailing them constantly. Maybe their...
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Corporal punishment in schools.
Ali 10, a student of Grade V in a public school, forgot his mathematics’ notebook at home and his teacher severely punished him with a stick. Now, he is afraid of going to school. “In our school, physical punishment is a routine matter and almost every teacher punishes students in different ways,” Ali told to his father. He wants to quit the school and tells his parents for admission in a private school but they cannot afford the fee. Nearly 22.5 million Pakistani children are out of school...
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Cost of suspensions is high for students who drop out after discipline, report finds [EdSource.org]
Putting a cold financial price tag on the impact of school discipline practices, researchers have calculated that a 10th-grade California student who drops out because of suspension could end up costing the public $755,000 in lost tax revenue and increased health care and criminal justice expenses over the life of the student, according to a report released Thursday by the UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies. The researchers amalgamated decades of studies to produce what they said was the...
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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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Creating Connections with Every Student (inservice.ascd.org)
Educators are typically very familiar with the research that describes the effectiveness of having strong relationships with students. As an elementary school staff, we have discussed the importance of building relationships and personal connections with our students. We have shared ideas as to how some teachers build these relationships. Our teachers greet our students at the door each morning and personally greet them as they load the buses to go home. However, we wondered if every student...
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Creating School Level Resiliency Teams
RESILIENCY TEAM TRAINING Cape May & Atlantic County School Districts- Southern NJ Applied Educational Neuroscience, the Brain and Adversity- “Stressed Brains Do Not Learn” Purpose: To provide training for school level teams on the latest research and strategies concerning Educational Neuroscience, the Brain, Stress and Adversity. To create school level “turnkey” teams focusing on the skills and organizational components necessary to create trauma sensitive AND trauma responsive...
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Cuomo Announces $ 1.5 Million to Farm-to-School Programs (wibx950.com)
Governor Andrew Cuomo is announcing a record $1.5 million in funding to support Farm-to-School programs across New York. Oneida Herkimer Madison BOCES will get $100,000. The funding has been awarded to 18 projects and educational organizations that serve students in Kindergarten through Grade 12 and will benefit over 420,000 students. Funding for the Farm-to-School program was doubled in the State's 2018-19 Budget and is a key component of the Governor's No Student Goes Hungry initiative. To...
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D.C. City Council Considers Keeping Suspended Students In School (npr.org)
NPR's Scott Simon talks to Washington, D.C., city council member David Grosso about his proposal to ban out-of-school suspensions in the District's public and charter schools. GROSSO: Well, studies have shown us that over the past number of years, as people have looked at suspensions - that once you've been suspended once, you're more likely to be suspended again and again and again and again. There have been schools now in D.C. that have chosen to not do suspensions at all already, and...
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Dear Teacher
Dear Teacher I remember you and I would imagine you remember me well. I am your student. We have shared space for many years yet have never come to know one another. Although I have known you over twenty years and spent more time with you than even my closest friends and family, our relationship has remained transactional, tense, contentious and at times violent. We have cursed, threatened and insulted each other, I have thrown chairs and spat at you and you have restrained me multiple...
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Defending Childhood
Common Sense Millions of injured children whose pleas are not being heard are waiting at the intersection of the “Defending Childhood” Report from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Congress’s rewrite...
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Derelict school becomes national leader by making a surprising subject compulsory [ideapod.com]
“We were in special measures. We had low staff morale, parents not happy with the school, results were poor and nobody wanted to come here, we had budget issues. It’s a downward spiral when you’re there.” This is what Feversham headteacher, Naveed Idrees, told The Guardian . He continued: “We could have gone down the route where we said we need to get results up, we’re going to do more English, more maths, more booster classes, but we didn’t. You might hit the results but your staff morale...
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Designing Their Own Black Future (tolerance.org)
Just a few weeks after River Ridge High School approved the new black student union (BSU) as an official club, a few members came into a meeting with something to share: a flier advertising a white student union at the school. The club for white students would turn out to be a prank, but it was precisely the type of rhetoric that had inspired them to start the BSU in the first place. Several months earlier, students had approached art teacher Christie Tran with fear and anxiety in the wake...
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Desperation And Broken Trust When Schools Restrain Students Or Lock Them In Rooms [npr.org]
By Jenny Abamu and Rob Manning, NPR, June 5, 2019. Every time Jennifer Tidd's son was secluded or restrained at school, she received a letter from his teachers. Her son has autism and behavioral issues, and over three years — from 2013 to 2016 — Tidd got 437 of those letters. "I see this pile of documents that's 5 inches tall that represents hundreds of hours of being locked into a room, and I feel, you know, horrible," Tidd says. She's sitting in her living room in Northern Virginia, her...
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Despite Prevalent Trauma, From School Shootings to the Opioid Epidemic, Few States Have Policies to Fully Address Student Needs, Study Finds (the74million.org)
Despite the pervasive effect of stressful experiences — from mass school shootings to the opioid epidemic — on student performance, only 11 states encourage or require staff training on the effects of trauma. Half of states have policies on suicide prevention. And just one state, Vermont, requires a school nurse to be available daily at every school campus. Those are among the key findings of a report released Thursday by the nonprofit Child Trends, which found that most states have failed...
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Destigmatizing mental health starts in schools (districtadministration.com)
After the city of Fishers, an Indianapolis suburb of about 90,000, had 13 suicides in 2016, city officials launched a campaign to destigmatize mental health issues - including in the school system. District Mental Health Coordinator Brooke Lawson and Assistant Superintendent of Staff and Student Services Michael Beresford discuss the challenges of addressing mental health issues, and how a student-launched club is helping to remove the stigma attached to mental illness. Tell us about Stigma...
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Developing Mindful Trauma-Informed Schools, Families and Communities.
We’re pleased to announce that B.K. Bose of Niroga Institute has been selected to present at The Institute for Educational Leadership’s 2019 National Family and Community Engagement Conference in Reno, NV! This convening is a wonderful professional development and networking opportunity for state leaders, school and district leaders, administrators, educators, community-based organizations, researchers and families to come together and focus on solutions that enhance and expand engagement...
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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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Disparities Continue to Plague U.S. Schools, Federal Data Show [EdWeek.org]
New federal data show a continuing deep gulf between the educational experiences of traditionally disadvantaged student groups and their peers on a broad range of indicators, findings that follow years of efforts by government and advocacy groups to level the playing field in U.S. public schools. Black and Latino students are still more likely to be suspended, more likely to attend schools with high concentrations of inexperienced teachers, and less likely to have access to rigorous and...
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Diverting the School to Prison Pipeline Through School Connectedness
What if the we could stifle the School to Prison Pipeline by simply creating a culture of belonging and inclusion in elementary school? The need for caring classrooms that promote a sense of connectedness and belonging is essential and must begin the day a child begins their educational experience. In many, not all, underserved communities, minority students are being taught by less experienced teachers who have emanated from culturally and economically incongruent backgrounds. Furthermore,...
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Do Suspensions Affect Student Outcomes? [mathematica-mpr.com]
Almost seven years ago, the School District of Philadelphia revised its student discipline policy, instructing schools not to suspend students for certain types of nonviolent behavior such as failing to follow classroom rules or making obscene gestures. To examine what happened after the policy changed, Mathematica’s Johanna Lacoe teamed up with Matthew Steinberg, an education researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. What they found provides the strongest evidence to date that when...
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Do you live in Arizona, Hawaii, California, Nevada or the US Pacific Islands? Come to our no-cost mental and school mental health Winter Institute!
Do you live in Arizona, Hawaii, California, Nevada or the US Pacific Islands?If so...Check it out! 👇 NO COST. MENTAL HEALTH & SCHOOL MENTAL HEALTH WORKFORCE. AMAZING FACULTY. JANUARY 14, 15, & 16th! LONG BEACH, CA. JOIN US. 🤝 👏 Learn more here: http://bit.ly/mhttc-winterinstitute-flyer Register here: http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?oeidk=a07egq2f9gaebafa6bd&llr=8wdk4ubab
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Don’t walk that line! Why schools need to create, and measure positive climates [HechingerReport.org]
A positive school climate boosts student achievement. It includes a system of supportive and caring teachers, a safe learning environment, student connectedness and parental involvement. Since conditions like these support the interests of a school’s major stakeholders, it is very important for them to know if they’re in a positive climate. That’s why educators need to measure school climate, according to “Research Synthesis of the Associations Between Socioeconomic Background, Inequality,...
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Dovetail Learning's TOOLBOX a resource for schools seeking to be Trauma-Informed
Bryan Clement, Dovetail Learning, gave a compelling presentation to the ACEs Connection community coalition in late January. He began with a video showing how kids are putting social and emotional skills into action in their school settings: TOOLBOX clearly offers great tools for strengthening relationships between folks of all ages. It also provides the language and framework creating a strong relationship-based foundation for schools seeking to become Trauma Informed. Bryan shared the...
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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...