For the past three years, Karen Bacigalupo, as assistant principal at Fall-Hamilton Elementary, part of the Metro Nashville Public Schools, worked with former principal Mathew Portell to integrate PACEs into their school. Bacigalupo took over as principal last March when Portell joined PACEs Connection as director of communities.
Although she had heard about the science of positive and adverse childhood experiences through social media and in her research over the past six years, it was only when Portell started “taking off with it, that I read things he recommended. That’s how I came to know of it,” she says.
“To me, it all made sense,” she says, “both for things falling together in my personal life, where I was able to do some of my own personal work so that I could then apply that to my practice.”
Bacigalupo (pronounced Bass- ee- galupo) emphasizes that the most important aspect of her “eye opening” encounter with PACEs was that “it gave some language to things that I had been noticing and experiencing but lacked the language for.”
Her family has lived in Tennessee for several generations. Her great-grandmother was a Cherokee whose family was forced out of her native land during the 1830 expulsion of 125,000 Native Americans, known as the “Trail of Tears”. She eventually returned to the Nashville area and became a sharecropper, according to the family’s oral history. Learning about her family’s unwritten and traumatic past helped the educator learn more about herself as well.
With her family’s emphasis on education, she worked her way through a B.A., M.Ed., and Ed.D degrees, the latter at Lipscomb University in 2014. Bacigalupo has served as an adjunct education professor at Vanderbilt University since 2015. She began teaching ESL while earning her doctorate and in 2005 was Teacher of the Year for Tusculum Elementary. An instilled passion for literacy education—her grandparents and great-grandparents were limited in literacy—she’s also served as Celebrate Literacy Chairperson for the Middle Tennessee Reading Association. This event showcased young authors who drafted and published their own books.
Tapping into Students’ Social-Emotional Learning
Thanks to the teamwork of Portell and Bacigalupo, Fall-Hamilton Elementary became a district and state pilot school for trauma-informed practices in 2020-2021. The school is open to students in the city and county, with a population that is 68 percent black, 21 percent Hispanic, and 10 percent white. Because the city is a haven for immigrants, many of those classified as White are refugees from the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
With trauma-informed training for all staff in place instituted under Portell’s administration, Bacigalupo says she’s been lucky to follow the PACEs Connection community organizer’s vision. “We talked often,” she says. “And yes, we were trauma-informed, but we always asked, ‘What’s next?’”
What’s next, says the new principal, is the BeWell in School Program. “We want to give our students language as to what’s happening in their bodies and what to do next. We want to empower them, show them how to recognize things in their body and take care of their own needs, through breathing exercises and other strategies. It's a movement to deliver hope and empowerment.”
The program, which is the brainchild of Riki Rattner, was adopted in Fall-Hamilton in the 2019-2020 school year. The mission of BeWell in School is to teach “mindfulness and movement as a proactive behavior management system. BeWell provides an alternative approach to traditional discipline by teaching effective strategies for self-regulation so as to provide students with the tools they need to be successful in the classroom, and beyond.” The BeWell Program trains school staff, including a dedicated wellness teacher and the BeWell teacher, and sets up a curated classroom, the BeWell Room, which is dedicated to whole group classes, small group sessions, and individualized supports for students.
Using a federal COVID relief grant, ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund), the school was able to purchase sensory tools to support self-regulation practices. The BeWell room is a haven for students, teachers, and staff. “I go there myself,” says Bacigalupo. “We know that adults who recognize and seek to regulate using these wellness strategies are essential to the moving work forward.”
“We were able to pick up trends with the data collected, which showed a schoolwide reduction in behavior referrals. In addition, we use restorative practices to address and reduce conflicts led by our therapeutic social worker,” the principal reports.
What’s Next for PACEs Integration
This year, BeWell in School has enabled Fall-Hamilton to go deeper with the work by training BeWell Ambassadors. School staff that include teachers and administrators will be trained as BeWell Ambassadors to build their capacity for coaching and training to weave mindfulness practices throughout the school building and daily routines.
Another aspect of the BeWell Program is outreach to parents and the community. The school hosts a BeWell night to teach families about mindfulness and breath and provides regular opportunities for families to engage with the program and space through community events and classes.
Partnering with parents and caregivers is huge component of what Fall-Hamilton does. The school hosts parent events, from circles where “we talk about our hopes and dreams,” to virtual meetings, and drive-through events. This offers a variety of entry points for all parents to participate in the school community.
The school has a large social-emotional learning team (Portell prefers calling it "social and emotional health"), including a therapeutic social worker who is a restorative practitioner, a BeWell Teacher, a school counselor, and an on-site therapist.
This year, select members of the school staff will receive neuroscience education to build the capacity and sustainability of this new educational movement of connecting brain science to understanding the body and behavior.
As for Portell, the former principal who is now director of communities for PACEs Connection, his successor, Karen Bacigalupo, says he “has opened up a whole new world.”
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