Tagged With "avoid homelessness"
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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 Program Helps Foster Kids in Orange County Avoid Homelessness when They Age Out of Public Care [ocregister.com]
By Theresa Walker, The Orange County Register, December 20, 2019 For three years after he aged out of foster care, at age 18, Christian was homeless. During that time, he was hit by a car and suffered a traumatic brain injury. He was in a coma for six months and his speech and memory were affected. Over most of the last year he’s lived at The Link, a homeless shelter in Santa Ana. This week, Christian, now 22, moved into his own one-bedroom apartment, in Tustin. That change is the result of...
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A School That Provides The One Constant In Homeless Children's Lives (npr.org)
Positive Tomorrows is a small, privately funded school in the heart of Oklahoma City, designed to meet the needs of homeless children. The future of these students hinges on the one constant in their lives: the school, which addresses both education and basic needs. The educational challenges associated with homelessness are broad and extend to every corner of a child's life. Without consistent access to adequate food, shelter and safety, students are often too hungry, tired and stressed to...
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ACEs Validated My Teaching Experience
When I first heard about the CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study , it felt like a light bulb had actually gone on. Finally, FINALLY, someone was validating what I saw every single day teaching in East Oakland. For eight years, I taught at an elementary school in the most violent part of Oakland , the part that the police called the “Killing Zone.” The kids in my class had seen friends, neighbors, and family members shot or stabbed, and routinely hid in bathrooms and closets when gang fights...
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After the fire, a school district gone [EdSource.org]
Andrew and Ariya Boone got the call from Paradise Elementary at 9:30 a.m. on Nov. 8. Fire was roaring toward the town of Paradise and they had to come immediately to pick up their three boys. Andrew raced to the school as Ariya frantically packed the family’s most treasured belongings and soothed their small daughter while the sky, which had been relatively clear just an hour before, turned so dark that it felt like “10 o’clock at night at 9:30 in the morning.” “It was insane…the fire was...
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An Invitation to Co-Create Change and Shift Your Mindset
We are not born “normal” or “disordered” or with a “disability” we “are born” and “we develop” in many different ways. Along our path of development we will encounter various influences and each individual will respond to those experiences differently. The brain actually continues to develop well into adulthood!
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As Homelessness Soars in Salinas, School Districts Scramble to Help Vulnerable Students [kqed.org]
You can measure Cheryl Camany’s success by how high the stacks of pink paper are piled around her office. Each slip of paper is a residency questionnaire parents fill out for their kids at the beginning of the school year, and each offers a clue to just how many homeless students there are in this Salinas school district. In the last four years, the number of homeless students in California has increased by more than 20 percent. As that rate rises, some school districts are doing a better...
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As Its Homeless Student Population Surges, Perkins K-8 Is Learning to Adapt [voiceofsandiego.org]
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...
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As The Number Of Homeless Students Soars, How Schools Can Serve Them Better (npr.org)
(Image: Chris Kindred for NPR) When Caitlin Cheney was living at a campground in Washington state with her mother and younger sister, she would do homework by the light of the portable toilets, sitting on the concrete. She maintained nearly straight A's even though she had to hitchhike to school, making it there an average of three days a week. "I really liked doing homework," says Cheney, 22, who is now an undergraduate zoology student at Washington State University. "It kept my mind off...
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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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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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Crossroads: The Intersection Between Housing and Education (The Urban Institute)
Resources for Educators concerning children who are homeless or at risk for homelessness. http://datatools.urban.org/features/crossroads-housing-education-policy/
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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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Equal Footing: Oakland Program Keeps Foster Youth on Track to Graduate with Their Peers [chronicleofsocialchange.org]
When Tramischa Cole , a homeless 24-year-old mother of one, stumbled across a Civicorps flier in 2015, she didn’t expect to be accepted into the Bay Area’s only accredited high school and job training program for 18 to 26 year olds. It’s not that Civicorps had a waiting list: Cole was worried her parenting responsibilities and lack of housing would be an issue. “I told them I’m homeless and I don’t have child care,” Cole said. “I thought everything I was telling them would be something to...
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Extending Mental Health Help to Vulnerable Kids (health.usnews.com)
Open-ended discussions with children and teens can uncover traumatic causes of behavioral and emotional problems. "It's not necessarily asking, 'Would you like access to mental health services?'" explains La Toya Mobley, a pediatric clinical social worker at the Harriet Lane Clinic. Rather, it's posing questions like, "What is your experience at home?" to get at the heart of the matter. "Trauma and ADHD mirror each other," Mobley says. "So we're asking more questions about trauma, especially...
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Homeless students, destroyed campuses, ‘invisible injuries’: What California schools learned from recent disasters [edsource.org]
California schools ravaged by fire, floods and mud this year have mostly re-opened and are diving in to a new semester, but district leaders say they’ve learned some crucial lessons about handling natural disasters that all schools could benefit from. “A disaster could happen anywhere at any time in California,” said Steven Herrington, superintendent of the Sonoma County Office of Education, where two public schools were destroyed, nearly a dozen schools were damaged and hundreds of students...
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How 12 teens invented a solar-powered tent for the homeless (mashable.com)
As Daniela Orozco picks off excess plastic bordering a 3D-printed box, she recalls how many homeless people she saw on her way to school when she was a high school freshman. In the San Fernando Valley, homelessness increased 36% to 7,094 people last year, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Agency's annual count. Daniela and her friends wanted to help, but giving money wasn't an option. That was the starting point for their invention: a solar-powered tent that folds up into a...
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How good is your kid's school? A new color-coded system will tell you (ocregister.com)
From 1999 to 2013, California’s Academic Performance Index boiled down everything about the state’s K-12 public schools to a single number between 200 and 1,000. That type of accountability is going away, to be replaced by a more nuanced system that is under construction. In the old model, the desirability of neighborhoods or even whole communities hinged in part on their school’s API score. Careers were made or lost based on how far a school or district was from the magic 800 target number.
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How Teachers, Adults, and Legislators Can Respond to Student Homelessness (americaspromise.org)
What should teachers do if they suspect a student might be homeless? What about non-educators? Better yet, what can governors and legislators do to fight youth homelessness on a broad scale in their states and communities? These are a few questions that a panel of experts tackled at SXSWEDU , where a group of nonprofits announced the Education Leads Home campaign , a first-of-its-kind national campaign that will focus exclusively on addressing the educational needs of the 1.3 million...
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In Oklahoma City, a School Designed for Homeless Children [citylab.com]
How do you incorporate the specific needs of homeless children into the design of a school? That’s the question the Oklahoma City-based nonprofit organization Positive Tomorrows asked itself when it was daydreaming about a new building that could meet the many needs of its students. Positive Tomorrows has been educating homeless kids and providing social services to families since 1989. “There is no model for this type of school,” said Gary Armbruster, principal architect and partner at MA+...
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Interview: Trauma-Informed Care with Transition-Age Youth [psychologytoday.com]
Last month, an article titled “The Tragedy of Baltimore” in the New York Times Magazine described the upsurge in violence in a city long known for its “blight, suburban flight, segregation, drugs , racial inequality, [and] concentrated poverty.” At the center of the storm are transition-age youth, who too often face long odds and challenging futures in the communities where they live. I recently had the opportunity to talk with Patricia Cobb-Richardson , MS. For the past 20 years, she has...
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Schools find one simple answer to attendance problem: washing machines (today.com)
Two school districts have found that the secret to raising attendance rates in schools in low-income areas could be as simple as providing laundry machines. "One of my students had just sort of withdrawn from school completely," Alison Guernsey, a seventh grade English teacher in Fairfield, California, told TODAY Parents. "After we started the program, he was more excited about coming, and he started to be actively engaged in class. He didn't feel like an outsider anymore," she said. At...
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Schools Finding Record Numbers of Homeless Students, Study Says [edweek.org]
States have never found so many homeless students in public schools before. The next challenge will be finding ways to keep those students in school long enough to earn a diploma. Nearly 1.36 million children—more than all the students in New York City—went to school in 2017 without knowing where they would sleep at night, finds a new report by the national campaign Education Leads Home , which looked at new national data as well as graduation rates for homeless students in 26 states. That's...
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Shootings & Suicides Past the Tipping-Point: ACEs Epidemic & Declining Lifespans in US
Re: Building community by facing collective trauma with hope I am writing from Broward county, Florida, the school district in which the MSD school shooting occurred and that gave rise to the March for Our Lives Movement sparked by our students. Mankind has developed solutions to deal with self-perpetuating waves and EPIDEMICS of BEHAVIORALLY TRANSMITTED Neuro-Toxic Stress, CPTSD Trauma & ACEs that cause FIXED-MINDSET reactive black and white Scarcity-based thinking to increase and...
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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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Teachers notice rise in homelessness among kids (calmatters.org)
Nationwide, public schools identified 1.5 million children experiencing homelessness in the 2017-2018 school year, an increase of 11% from the previous school year, according to a report released in January by the National Center for Homeless Education (NCHE). A small portion of those students are living in unsheltered situations, such as cars, parks, streets or bus stations, a segment that more than doubled from the previous school year. Homeless students in emergency shelters or...
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Teaching 6-Year-Olds About Privilege and Power (kqed.org)
On a sunny day in April, I drove to Head-Royce School in the hills of Oakland, California, to join circle time in Bret Turner ’s first-grade classroom. I had asked Turner if I could sit in on some lessons after reading an article he wrote describing how he teaches about some surprising topics -- like race and class -- in an elementary school classroom. I wanted to see what that looked like and what kind of conversations first-graders at this private school would have around such complicated...
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The Complicated Task of Identifying Homeless Students [TheAtlantic.com]
The number of homeless students in the United States has doubled in the past decade. During the 2013-14 school year, more than 1.3 million students were homeless, a 7 percent increase over the previous school year, according to a new report by the advocacy group Civic Enterprises and the polling firm Hart Research Associates. A disproportionate number are students of color or identify as LGBT. As alarming as those numbers are, the fact that figures on homeless students exist at all is a step...
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Navigating the Holidays for Students with ACEs
Over the last few weeks, I have had countless conversations with schools about the uptick of behavioral issues this time of year. Many educators are recognizing that students with ACE’s have a tough time around the holidays, but very few people know what to do about it. While there is no one-size-fits-all answer, below are the top three pieces of advice I have been sharing. Avoid some of the most common holiday traditions: When we have negative experiences, our brain latches on to everything...
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Number of Homeless Students Rises to New High, Report Says [nytimes.com]
By Mihir Zaveri, The New York Times, February 3, 2020 Some children lost a stable home when a parent succumbed to opioid addiction. Others were forced to stay in hotels after hurricanes or fires destroyed their homes. Still others fled abuse or neglect. More than 1.5 million public school students nationwide said they were homeless at some point during the 2017-18 school year, the most recent data available, according to a report from the National Center for Homeless Education released last...
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Behind The Nonprofit That Coaches At-Risk Students And Heals Trauma — One Text At A Time (forbes.com)
Ashley Edwards knew as a teenager that she wanted to make an impact on the world. The 27-year-old started doing social justice work at the age of 14 and was fully steeped in it by the time she reached college. And after Edwards met Alina Liao at Stanford Business School, her passion for helping teens achieve social justice for themselves turned into a business. The women created MindRight , a nonprofit that provides coaching and support for teens via text messaging. It is currently operating...
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Is Your School Ready to be Trauma Informed and Trauma Sensitive?
If you are like many teachers, social workers, or administrators in schools, you've been reading about the need for trauma informed care and trauma sensitive schools. Odds are you didn't need to read the research to know something that you were already seeing in your classrooms, school hallways, and community. Unfortunately reading about it, seeing the need, wanting to make changes, doesn't make the change happen. Five years ago, as the executive director of a school that needed to change, I...
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Let Her Learn: Stopping School Pushout: Overview and Key Findings (National Women's Law Center)
The National Women’s Law Center’s 2017 Let Her Learn Survey2 of 1,003 girls ages 14-18 shows that being called a racial slur is a common experience shared by all girls of color, with one third to more than two in five of them saying they have had this experience (Asian and Pacific Islander girls reported the highest rates), compared to just over one eighth of white girls.3 The Let Her Learn Survey also reveals that more than 1 in 5 girls (21 percent) have been sexually assaulted,4 with LGBTQ...
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Rebecca Lewis-Pankratz: Solving Poverty in Your Local Community (www.betterleadersbetterschools.com) & Commentary
Cissy's note: This is a great podcast for parents, educators, and community organizers and change makers. It is an interview with @Rebecca Lewis-Pankratz interviewed by Danny Bowers "Sunshine" of Better Leaders Better Schools . Rebecca Lewis-Pankratz says things like, " We all need each other. Everyone here is important," and " The community is who we are," but they aren't inclusive-sounding platitudes. She is a tireless optimist but also understands, personally and professionally, how...
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Redding Teens Empowered to Identify Solutions to Problems in City
A group of teenagers who have seen their share of hard times is spending part of summer vacation trying to make a difference in their community. The youths are in a mentoring program and have decided to take on two very adult tasks: finding solutions to the sex trade in Redding and how to help their homeless peers. A dozen high school students were steered to a pilot project hosted by the Catalyst Center on Industrial Street and directed by an alternative education nonprofit named Zedbridge.
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Resource List - Activities & Tools
This is a list of activities and tools for children K-12. If you recommend any others besides those listed here, please leave a comment in this blog post with a link and/or information.
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Rural California school district with high suspension rates under state investigation [edsource.org]
by David Washburn, EdSource, June 11, 2019. Butte County’s Oroville City Elementary School District, which has a suspension rate that is three times the statewide average, is under state investigation for its discipline policies and practices. The investigation, by the California Bureau of Children’s Justice , is focused on the district’s record of suspending and expelling students and its alternatives to those punishments, according to a district statement . The statement also said the...
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Sacramento emergency school sees increase in homeless kids [SacBee.com]
Loaves & Fishes’ school for homeless children has asked Sacramento County to increase the number of emergency shelter beds for families, citing a spike in the number of children sleeping on Sacramento streets. Mustard Seed School Director Casey Knittel said of the 40 families whose children enrolled in the school in September, 19 were camping in a car or tent. With days getting cooler, rainy weather expected this weekend, Knittel said those children need to be inside at night. Burke said...
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San Francisco Considers Public Schools As A Solution For Homelessness [studybreaks.com]
Californian streets lay witness to 25 percent of the country’s total homeless population, with 42 percent of those being chronically homeless — federally defined as a homeless individual with a disabling condition who has been homeless for over a year or having at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years. From 2016 to 2017, the state also saw the largest increase in the number of residents who are homeless — more than 16,000 people. While homelessness in San Francisco is a...
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Re: Navigating the Holidays for Students with ACEs
Thanks for these suggestions, I am the school nurse and have realized for sometimes that the holidays/ festivities will trigger a multitude of emotions for young people. We as adults must be aware, sensitive and understanding when a young person is expressing their emotions, and support them so that can feel safe, and accepted, at this time of the year.
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Re: Crossroads: The Intersection Between Housing and Education (The Urban Institute)
As the district-level administrator wearing multiple hats in two rural districts in Washington State in the past 10 years, I can honestly say that the McKinney-Vento Homeless Act is one of the most important yet also misunderstood tools of compassion available to families, school systems, and administrators. I was fortunate to see a shift in the level of understanding (over time) as a number of systems in our region supported decision-making process(es) in the best interests of the child and...
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Re: How are schools incorporating trauma informed practices, if they are at all?
Hi Lee, Thanks for replying. I work in a school that has implemented trauma-informed practices. But it has been a real struggle. Trauma-informed practices when delivered to one student at a time, via the school counselors, dean of students, social workers, etc., seem to be working for us fairly well. However, at the school wide level, we have not been as successful. We aren't giving up - ever - but I am hoping to hear some ideas how other schools are doing this. The biggest challenge, based...
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Re: How are schools incorporating trauma informed practices, if they are at all?
Lee ~ You hit on a key point. No one should be surprised that we don't "punish" the students. We use a restorative justice model to teach students how their actions/behaviors impact the community as a whole. It's time intensive, but it has helped prevent suspensions and expulsions, which has helped create stability in the lives of our students. While I'd like to believe that everyone was on board with the restorative justice model, I know that for some of the staff who had been in the school...
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Re: How are schools incorporating trauma informed practices, if they are at all?
Hi Dominic, I am happy to share our intake survey. I am attaching two documents. The word document is the one that we have all students fill out. We also have the Risk Assessment Survey questions as a separate document (PDF) in case a student does not feel comfortable answering the questions with their name on document. We have recently converted this document to a "google form" so that students can fill it out electronically. All of our students are assigned a chromebook during orientation.
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To understand early childhood homelessness, we need more consistent federal data collection [childtrends.org]
Homelessness in early childhood is a known risk factor for children’s health and well-being. Because high-quality early care and education (ECE) programs can buffer some of the negative effects of homelessness on a child’s development , federal ECE programs (such as child care subsidy, Head Start, and early intervention) have begun to prioritize these children for care. Unfortunately, ECE providers in the field often have difficulty identifying families eligible for child care slots that are...
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Trauma education and mindfulness help youth living amid gun violence
Armon Hurst, 2nd from left, first row, Teens on Target, courtesy of YouthAlive! Eighteen-year-old Armon Hurst serves as vice president of the student body at Castlemont High School in Oakland, Calif. He has a 4.0 grade point average, is an avid baseball player, and is slated to go to college next year. But until a few years ago, Hurst would find himself waking from nightmares in the middle of the night. It was difficult to concentrate at school, and he wasn’t eating well. Armon Hurst “There...
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Trauma-informed groups rev up to address race, inclusion
Eighteen-year-old Kia Hanson has always enjoyed her time as a youth leader at the East Oakland Youth Development Center (EOYDC). She’s worked mostly with five- and six-year-olds since she began in 2016. Recently, she tapped into new skills, especially if the kids were having a meltdown. Kia Hanson “If they’re off, we ask them, ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘Do you want to talk about anything?’,” she explains. “Basically asking before assuming they’re mad at the world for no reason.” What made the...
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Trauma-informed program in San Diego teaches parents to train other parents
It took two years of weekly meetings between parents and organizers, but now 12 parent leaders at Cherokee Point Elementary School in City Heights, a mostly low-income urban neighborhood with 91,000 residents in San Diego, are teaching people about...
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Understanding how schools serve homeless children in California : a quick guide (edsource.org)
As California’s housing shortage intensifies, the number of homeless children is expected to climb. Since 2014, the number of homeless youth in California has jumped 20 percent, to more than 202,329, and accounts for nearly 4 percent of the overall public school population. Homeless children are enrolled in nearly every district in the state, according to the California Homeless Youth Project . An EdSource special project explored the issue in detail, and includes a map showing the number of...
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Understanding Trauma's Impact on Learning: A pathway to creating a school culture where every child living through adversity can grow alongside peers [my.aasa.org]
Susan Cole, director of the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative at Harvard Law School and Massachusetts Advocates for Children, believes the most effective school settings weave trauma sensitivity into other affairs of the school day. The principal of a small elementary school in central Massachusetts was approached by his staff with a request. They asked about their school becoming more responsive to trauma owing to the number of children in their classrooms who seemed to be facing...