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In our second installment of advice for new principals, Education Week talked to Melissa Hensley, who just finished her seventh year as principal of Central High School in Woodstock, Va. Hensley was the Virginia state principal of the year in 2016 and a finalist for the 2017 National Principal of the Year, an award given by the National Association of Secondary School Principals. EW: What words of wisdom do you have for a first-year principal? HENSLEY : One thing that really comes to...

By Josephine Gurch, Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, June 20, 2019. Every year, the Hogg Foundation gives the Frances Fowler Wallace Memorial Award for Mental Health Dissertation Research to eligible doctoral candidates at institutions of higher education in Texas. Awardees receive a $1,500 scholarship to help cover research-related expenses. Angela M. Powell is a 2018 recipient. While pursuing a degree in Counselor Education at Sam Houston State University, Powell formulated a study that...

By Corey Mitchell, Education Week, June 18, 2019. The Government Accountability Office, the congressional watchdog agency, is urging the U.S. Department of Education to take "immediate action" to address the underreporting of restraint and seclusion in the nation's schools. In a report released Tuesday, the GAO asserts that the Education Department has repeatedly and knowingly published the inaccurate data in its civil rights data collection. According to the GAO report, 70 percent of school...

“In this bright future you can't forget your past.” -Bob Marley What if the roots of public education in this country provided us with a vision for creating trauma-responsive environments for all students? Lately I have been reflecting on why the principles and practices of creating trauma-informed/trauma-responsive environments in school settings connected with me deep down in my bones. It was a visceral feeling, a sense of validation and resonance in both my head and my heart. The science...

Sex education is about so much more than just sex. A 4-year-old can learn that he has the right to control who touches him. A 6-year-old can learn the correct names of her body parts, so she is able to more accurately report abuse . We can teach 9-year-olds to understand that they can like a toy regardless of whether it's a "girl's" or "boy's" color. At Advocates for Youth , where I lead creative programs to educate and mobilize youth, we believe sex ed should start early in a child's life...

By the time wildfires tore through his home county of Sonoma, California, Park Guthrie was already convinced that the clock on the climate catastrophe was running out. In 2015, Guthrie, a sixth-grade teacher and father of three, had approached the superintendent of the school district where he worked, hopeful she would sign a resolution endorsing action on climate change. He says he got nowhere. But after attending an advocacy event in Washington two years later, and hearing that the U.S.

The Syracuse City School District is not allowed to send leftovers home with students, due to state law. But for several years, the district has adopted a small-scale but creative, scalable approach to minimizing waste: sharing tables. This is how it works: Every student gets a lunch. If he or she doesn’t want a part of the lunch, such as milk, the student can drop off the milk on a designated table in the lunchroom. Another student who wants a second milk, for example, can then pick up the...

For nearly a century, a massive mural by painter Victor Arnautoff titled “The Life of Washington” has lined the hallways of San Francisco’s George Washington High School . The mural “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, white supremacy [and] oppression.” So said Washington High School’s Reflection and Action Group , an ad-hoc committee formed late last year and made up of Native Americans from the community, students, school employees, local artists and historians.

With graduation season upon us, I have been thinking a lot about one of my favorite graduation speeches. It’s the speech that Shonda Rhimes, creator of Grey’s Anatomy, gave in 2014 at Dartmouth College. She references the typical expected advice from a graduation speech: “Follow your dreams. Listen to your spirit. Change the world. Make your mark. Find your inner voice and make it sing. Embrace failure. Dream. Dream and dream big." And then she says, "I think that's crap."

by David Washburn, EdSource, June 11, 2019. Butte County’s Oroville City Elementary School District, which has a suspension rate that is three times the statewide average, is under state investigation for its discipline policies and practices. The investigation, by the California Bureau of Children’s Justice , is focused on the district’s record of suspending and expelling students and its alternatives to those punishments, according to a district statement . The statement also said the...

By Dan Levin, The New York Times, June 12, 2019. Inside an elementary school classroom decorated with colorful floor mats, art supplies and building blocks, a little boy named Riley talked quietly with a teacher about how he had watched his mother take “knockout pills” and had seen his father shoot up “a thousand times.” Riley, who is 9 years old, described how he had often been left alone to care for his baby brother while his parents were somewhere else getting high. Beginning when he was...

There are many ways to become Trauma Informed, but the most efficient and effective way is to do your own self exploration and then understand your students.