Blog

By Linda Jacobson, Image: Courtesy of Staci Boehlke, The 74, May 16, 2022 O n a rainy Monday before winter break, the hallways at Fruit Valley Elementary School in Vancouver, Washington, were unusually quiet. The pandemic had cut enrollment nearly in half, but that didn’t deter Staci Boehlke, who runs the school’s resource center. She welcomed police officers into the colorful, light-filled space as they dropped off bags of donated toys. She spoke with a parent whose landlord sent a warning...

Staggering numbers of children have been subjected to adverse life experiences, leaving a lasting impact on our youngest members of society. This trauma often presents itself in outward behaviors. As numbers continue to increase, our education system has the ability to utilize early intervention to combat this trauma and build resiliency. TWI, The Wordsmith Initiative, is looking for one rural Virginia or North Carolina school district to pilot a whole-child, trauma-sensitive program . Our...

From San Diego County Office of Education, May 16, 2022 There was a series of horrific mass shootings across our country this weekend that our young people may be talking, wondering, and worrying about. The tragic shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, is sadly the latest in a number of horrifying murders. In this case, the shooter targeted the Black community after posting a racist and antisemitic manifesto. Our students want and need to talk about what they see, remember, and...

PACEs Connection and the Essentials for Childhood (EfC) Initiative, a project of the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) and the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) have developed two new resources, “Community Strategies to Address California’s Digital Divide and Its Impact on Children and Families” Report and the “Digital Divide Brief: Community Strategies to Address California’s Digital Divide and Its Impact on Children and Families”

By Mary Ann Wolf, Photo: Liz Bell/Education NC, EdNC, May 16, 2022 I have had the opportunity to work with hundreds and hundreds of principals over the years, and I am often reminded about the very unique — and often lonely position — that principals have as school leaders. They are the only one in their building with their role, and they are the one who students, teachers, parents, and community members turn to when they’re concerned about what’s going on within a school. Principals are...

By Jennifer Horgan, Photo: Larry Cummins, Irish Examiner, May 13, 2022 I sometimes imagine my classroom as something else — as a neighbourhood square or a small green in the centre of a quadrangle. The classroom walls are terraced houses — each house has a different coloured door. The image jolts me into remembering my students have their own individual stories and histories. It’s obvious, but sometimes the most obvious is the easiest to forget. So, I visualise different houses, different...

By Anna Merod, Photo: Jon Cherry/Getty Images, K-12 Dive, May 5, 2022 In San Antonio, Texas, traumatic experiences involving domestic violence and drive-by shootings are increasingly shaping the lives of students. As a result, the San Antonio Independent School District has turned to a support model, known as Handle With Care, to support children and teens exposed to traumatic events. Since the 2019-20 school year, Handle With Care has helped San Antonio schools quickly connect students to...

Lack of access to sanitary products, menstrual hygiene education, toilets, hand-washing facilities and/or waste management, also known as period poverty, has been an issue for decent number of young females in the past decade, but the situation additionally worsened since the Covid-19 pandemic began leaving almost a quarter of U.S. students struggling to access period products. In the last couple of years, dozens of states tried, but only a few successfully managed to pass bills which will...

Join 16 Strong Project co-founder, Samantha Wettje, and ACEs educator, Dr. Torie Williams, as we lead the fight against the youth mental health crisis. This event will be a fully youth-led peer-to-peer discussion. This is an initiative to talk about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), the biggest public health threat facing our nation’s youth and a major contributor to the stark rise in mental health challenges among young people. When: May 22, 2022, 4-5:30pm EST Where: Zoom - Youth can...

The Attachment & Trauma Network, Inc. (ATN) announces the launching of Team R&R - an online community for educators and other child-serving professionals on the journey of being trauma-informed and resilience-building. The community focuses on R&R...being regulated & relational...as cornerstone qualities in being trauma-informed, healing-focused and resilience-building. The community's two big focuses are on providing exclusive content and peer-led connection and interaction.

If you missed my Education Upended conversation last week with School Crisis Recovery and Renewal (SCRR) Project Director Leora Wolf-Prusan you can watch it here on YouTube! This conversation was on FIRE ! We discussed not only what it means for schools to experience and recover from a crisis but also what it means to go through the process of RENEWAL. How do school communities make meaning of what happened so they can go beyond coping and begin healing? How do school leaders set up systems...

First, a little background on Maslow and Bloom. Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist. His hierachy of needs framework is a popular theory of motivation. In this theory, Maslow states that our actions are motivated by our physiological needs. Most often this is represented by a pyramid, with the most basic needs at the bottom and the more complex needs at the top, as pictured below. Benjamin Bloom, also developed a theory around how children learn, called Bloom's Taxonomy. This...