Building Trauma-Sensitive Schools

Your Guide to Creating Safe, Supportive Learning Environments for All Students

Jen Alexander, Carol Hinrichs

• Publisher: Brookes Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781681253275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation et orientation

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In the United States, at least one in four youth experiences trauma severe enough to negatively affect their school success.* Give hope and help to these students with this reader-friendly how-to guide, your springboard for building responsive, trauma-sensitive preK–12 schools.

Drawing on her extensive experience as a school counselor, trainer, and mother, trauma expert Jen Alexander delivers a comprehensive framework for building a safe, supportive school environment that helps all students learn and thrive. You'll start with an evidence-based introduction to the profound impact of trauma on a child's development, attachment, and behavior. Then you'll get an effective multi-tier system of support (MTSS) for developing a trauma-sensitive learning environment, including both universal strategies (Tier 1) and more intensive interventions (Tier 2 and Tier 3) for students who need more support. Compelling anecdotes and sample scripts illuminate challenges and solutions, and the included forms and worksheets are valuable tools for helping educators build the mindset and skills necessary for becoming trauma-sensitive. With this engaging, highly practical guide to what works and why, your school team will gain insights and develop action plans that make a real difference in the lives of all kids, including our most vulnerable youth.

DISCOVER HOW TO:

• make five key shifts in the way you view and approach students , so that you're better equipped to support them
• work together to prioritize resilience by actively putting relationships first in your school
• implement universal instructional strategies that foster safety, connection, regulation, and learning for all students
• use special supports, supplemental instruction , and coaching when universal strategies aren't enough
• collaborate effectively with families and colleagues to meet each student's needs
• incorporate restorative discipline practices that focus on restitution, not retribution
• create a personalized self-care plan to promote wellness and reduce the effects of job-related stress

PRACTICAL MATERIALS: Creative activities for teachers, powerful case stories, sample dialogues and scripts for educators and counselors, reflection and brainstorming worksheets, downloadable forms, and templates and handouts for use with students.

Build resilience by helping all students

• Feel safe
• Be connected
• Get regulated
• Learn

Discover the NEW ebook from Jen Alexander: Supporting Students and Staff After COVID-19 * National Child Traumatic Stress Network Schools Committee, 2008

1

Trauma and Its Effects

“Thank you for being my ambulance driver, but I don’t think I need one now. My doll isn’t going to get hurt anymore.”

—My daughter, age 6

Let’s imagine that I read the following about Pepper before meeting her. Perhaps I was preparing for a new school year as a school counselor when an email from my principal came in.

A foster parent dropped off the court documents for one of our new students. The child’s name is Pepper. The paperwork states that biological parents may only see the child when supervised. The documents indicate a history of substance abuse, domestic violence, child abuse, and neglect. It sounds like this little girl had behavior problems in her previous school and has gone through more changes in her life since then. The current foster placement is her first since being removed from the biological home. We will likely need a team meeting to come up with a functional behavior assessment and behavior intervention plan. Let’s see how she starts out, and we can go from there.

Pepper’s first few days in first grade were uneventful. She presented as a delightful little girl with a great big smile. She was obviously bright, energetic, and friendly. Although she displayed academic, speech, and social skill delays and at times behaved impulsively, Pepper enjoyed playing with classmates and liked to connect with adults.

By early September, however, we started to see another side of Pepper. She had a strong desire for control and would become oppositional when she did not get her way or especially when she perceived that someone was upset with her. Changes to the daily schedule were also difficult. Pepper would scream and throw things when told “no,” curl up in a corner of the classroom or under a table when frustrated with schoolwork, strike other children whom she perceived to reject her, and become physically aggressive when adults tried to stop her from engaging in dangerous behaviors such as running from the playground into a busy street. Pepper would also take food from other children and sneak it into her backpack or desk. When asked if she had taken the food, she would always deny it, even if an adult had directly observed the behavior.

Pepper was traumatized. She had experienced neglect and abuse in her biological family’s home in her earliest years. She had also experienced domestic violence. With her foster parents, Pepper talked about what it was like when her parents would get upset and suddenly leave the home. Multiple times, she had tried to follow her parents and said, “I couldn’t walk fast enough to keep up and would get lost.”

Professionals confirmed multiple reports of child abuse related to neglect, substance abuse, domestic violence, and physical abuse that caused substantial injury, including broken bones, before removing Pepper and her infant brother from the biological home. Both children were placed in foster care, and parental rights were eventually terminated.

As educators, we desperately wanted to help Pepper. Although we had faced challenges in meeting students’ academic and behavioral needs before, it was clear that we needed a better understanding of traumatized students in order to make a genuine, lasting difference in her life. In fact, we needed to build a trauma-sensitive school environment, not just for Pepper but for all students in our care. Like most educators, however, we did not realize this in the beginning. Little did we know how much one little girl would teach us in the upcoming school year as well as in the years to come.

WHAT IS TRAUMA?

To build trauma-sensitive schools, it is necessary to realize what trauma is and recognize how its widespread effects have an impact on youth as well as families (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency [SAMHSA], 2015). When considering the idea of trauma, what may come to mind for many readers is that trauma is what happens when youth are in a disaster zone, directly experience an act of terrorism, or survive a serious car accident. If that was your first thought, you are right. Events like these can certainly be traumatic, but each individual’s response to the same incident will be vastly different. This is based on a variety of biopsychosocial and cultural factors that influence how one experiences and perceives an event (SAMHSA, 2014). When we conceptualize trauma around unusual, one-time events, however, we risk missing the countless students in every single school who have experienced trauma repeatedly. Unfortunately, trauma is not rare, and it is often not a one-time, well-publicized incident. For many children and teens, like Pepper, trauma happens repeatedly and in their own homes. Although some youth survive and even thrive despite what they have experienced, others are negatively affected in significant ways, and those effects may be temporary or prolonged (National Child Traumatic Stress Network Schools Committee, 2008; Perry, 2007, 2009; Perry, Pollard, Blakely, Baker, & Vigilante, 1995; SAMHSA, 2014; van der Kolk, 2014).

TRAUMA DEFINED

To get started, this section takes a closer look at the definition of trauma. Dr. Bruce Perry (2002), a physician, researcher, leading expert on childhood trauma, and founder of the Child Trauma Academy, defined trauma as a psychologically distressing event that is outside the range of usual human experience. Depending on individual experiences, examples of trauma could include but are not limited to war, acts of terrorism, life-threatening disasters, severe accidents, domestic violence, or child abuse. He explained that traumatic experiences often involve a sense of intense fear, terror, and helplessness.

Perry’s phrase, “outside the range of usual human experience,” deserves reflection. For too many youth, trauma is what is usual for them. This, of course, does not make its effects any potentially less devastating. Although trauma may be usual for an individual child or adolescent, it is not usual or typical for humans by design because traumatic experiences exceed an individual’s ability to cope in adaptive, or healthy, ways. Sometimes, youth who exhibit significant trauma-related symptoms in their day-to-day functioning may say, “I don’t like it when that happens [referring to an ongoing traumatic event], but I’m used to it.” Humans are not built to endure or get used to traumatic events. Although resiliency is important to foster, we must be careful not to mistake an unemotional response as a sign of resiliency. Sometimes, youth attempt to cope with trauma by shutting down their physical and psychological reactions in unhealthy ways. They may communicate that what they are experiencing is not that bad in an attempt to endure without becoming overwhelmed or hopeless. Deep down, however, the trauma may be causing lasting negative effects (Lillas & Turnbull, 2009; National Child Traumatic Stress Network Schools Committee, 2008; Perry, 2009; Perry et al., 1995; SAMHSA, 2014).

For this reason, this book conceptualizes trauma as a distressing experience or set of experiences that threatens a person’s actual safety or perceived sense of felt safety (Hughes, 2009; Lillas & Turnbull, 2009; Ogden, Minton, & Pain, 2006) to such a degree that it exceeds an individual’s capacity to cope in healthy ways (Bloom & Farragher, 2013; Craig, 2016; Lillas & Turnbull, 2009; Ogden, Minton, & Pain, 2006; van der Kolk, 2014, 2017). Trauma has a negative impact on one’s life functioning, whether those effects are immediate, ongoing, or delayed (SAMHSA, 2014; Siegel, 2012b; van der Kolk, 2014, 2017).

Trauma is a distressing experience or set of experiences that threatens a person’s actual safety or perceived sense of felt safety to such a degree that it exceeds an individual’s capacity to cope in healthy ways.

Many children, for instance, experience neighborhood gun violence or domestic violence in the home that places them in real physical danger, which could be traumatic. A different child may not be in actual physical danger, but she may not feel safe if her relationships with caregivers do not feel stable as a result of a number of different issues, such as a highly conflicted divorce or the loss of a parent; these circumstances can be traumatic as well.

This working definition of trauma is in line with SAMHSA’s (2014) description of trauma as something that results

From an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being. (page I-1)

Similarly, Bessel van der Kolk (2014, 2017), founder of the Trauma Center at the Restorative Justice Institute, has defined trauma in his video “When is It Trauma? Bessel van der Kolk Explains” as an event that overwhelms a person’s central nervous system and changes the way a person remembers and reacts to things that remind him or her of that event. Trauma leaves the individual incapable of integrating the experience, which, in turn, creates difficulty with life functioning. In short, he explained that trauma impacts the brain, mind, and body in lasting, negative ways.

Although this book’s focus is on how trauma affects students, we must realize that trauma affects people of all ages in every race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, psychosocial background, and geographic region. Individuals and families can be traumatized, but groups, communities, specific cultures, and ...