Before Hurricane Katrina I knew a perpetually sad-faced third-grader at Lawrence D. Crocker Elementary School. There was no apparent neglect. His clothes were always clean. He was always perfectly groomed. And even if you gave him a book many years above his grade level, he could handle every word flawlessly. Some may have considered him the ideal student.
But he never, ever smiled.
His teacher wondered if the school's social worker might investigate why a child so young never expressed happiness, but she was told that other students had problems that were big, obvious and urgent. She didn't have time to open a case on a well mannered, straight-A student.
No matter how sad he looked.
Monday afternoon I sat in an office at Lawrence D. Crocker College Prep with Ben Kleban, CEO of the New Orleans College Prep Network, and Amanda Aiken, Crocker's principal. We talked about the awful things so many of their students have seen and the school network's commitment to providing trauma-informed care. Such care is based on the understanding that disruptive students may be expressing their pain and that better behaved students may be suppressing it.
"I've been sad since I was 3," Aiken remembers one of her older students telling her. When the principal did the math, she realized that her student was 3 when Hurricane Katrina displaced him and his family from New Orleans. Returning to New Orleans hadn't brought his happiness back.
[For more of this story, written by Jarvis DeBerry, go to http://www.nola.com/education/...ot_bad_campaign.html]
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