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For Philadelphia students and families having trouble coping with the loss of months of in-person school amid the trauma of a pandemic and a changing world, help is on the way. On Monday, the Philadelphia School District and Uplift, the Center for Grieving Children, will launch the Philly HopeLine, a hotline that will connect district children and families to grief support services, Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. said at a news conference Thursday. The resource comes in response to a...

By Sonali Kohli, Los Angeles Times, May 7, 2020 Four-year-olds have playdates through closed windows, sliding their toy cars in unison on either side of the glass. A high school student worries about his mother going to work in a food-packing warehouse, at risk for contracting COVID-19. Another teen says “there is nothing to look forward to,” as he tries to avoid sliding into depression. Worried parents are calling school district hotlines seeking help for their troubled children. Experts...

By Antoinette Frearson, Tes, May 8, 2020 Teaching assistants offer vital support in school, but school closures don’t have to mean a pause to the daily support and encouragement they usually provide. Here are eight ways that teaching assistants can continue to provide their effective and crucial support to students, parents, colleagues and each other while working remotely: Coronavirus: 8 ways teaching assistants can provide support... [ Please click here to read more .]

More than half of all children in Appalachian Ohio receive free or reduced-price lunch , as reported by the Ohio PTA in 2013. At some elementary schools, the participation rate is almost 75% . In many cases, food distributed to Appalachian children at school feeds a family; thanks to programs such as Blessings in a Backpack, some children go home for the weekends with backpacks of shelf-stable food like canned tuna and peanut butter, designed to help out the whole household. School bus...

Pre-pandemic, educators said we were facing challenges not experienced by older generations. This pandemic makes that notion truer than ever. This pandemic is a rapidly emerging collective stress that is reshaping the structure and fabric of experience in most every facet of life, but especially in education. It pushes us to adapt creatively and to think outside our typical “box.” And yet, in every crisis opportunity lurks. Three nationally recognized trauma-informed consultants have...

By Stacy Steinberg, The New York Times, May 7, 2020 Children may be processing the disruptions in their lives right now in ways the adults around them do not expect: acting out, regressing, retreating or even seeming surprisingly content. Parents need to know that all of this is normal, experts say, and there are some things we can do to help. “Our natural response to scary things is biologically to release stress hormones,” said Dr. Nadine Burke Harris , a pediatrician and surgeon general...

Many students have had difficulties in life and have struggled to keep up in traditional high school. They have endured challenges such as homelessness, foster care, hunger, abuse, bullying, illness and even human trafficking. Eighty percent are low-income, many are pregnant or parenting teens, and most enroll with us after dropping out, more than a year behind in credits, and reading at lower than a fifth grade level. All school leaders can educate teachers on a trauma-informed approach to...

By Reema Amin, Chalkbeat New York, April 30, 2020 After years of searching in vain for the right school for her son, Erendira Matamoros was hopeful she found a good fit. David, a 14-year-old who is autistic and primarily speaks Spanish, is legally entitled to a small special education classroom led by a bilingual teacher, but that’s hard to come by in New York City. Only about a third of the roughly 5,500 students who required small bilingual special education classrooms this fall were...

Joel Heller Thursday, May 7, 2020 Education Upended, continued. Please join us for the ongoing discussion of "A Better Normal — Education Upended". We are going to bring our focus back to the future. Using our breakout session format, we will identify the strategies and lessons learned from the past three weeks on regulation, relationships, and family connections that we want to bring into the future of school and ways in which we might do that. Our current capacity is 100 participants, so...

Antioch Middle School seventh-grader Alyssia Garcia was accustomed to scanning the cafeteria during lunch for kids who might need her assistance. “I’d look for kids who looked sad, kids who were sitting alone, kids who looked angry,” says Garcia, a peer advocate at her school. Alyssia Garcia When she’d spot students sitting alone or looking sad, she’d approach them and ease into conversation. “If it’s a sad person, I’ll try to cheer them up or ask them what the problem is,” she says. “If...

"The parents of millions of American schoolchildren are not fluent in English, presenting an extra challenge to learning at home." [newyorktimes.com]

By Sarah D. Sparks, Education Week, May 4, 2020 As educators and leaders juggle remote learning schedules, food distribution, and how to get kindergartners to sit still on Zoom meetings, there's one particularly vulnerable group of students in danger of falling off the education radar: students in the juventile justice system. Coronavirus is spreading rapidly in pre- and post-trial correctional facilities across the United States, and the challenges of social distancing for students in...