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Eanes ISD in Austin, TX, where I am a behavior support teacher, is committed to preparing and inspiring all students for life-long success. We focus on the whole student, including social-emotional learning, collaboration, communication, problem-solving, stress-management and leadership, to name a few. Teaching these skills creates successful students and successful people. Research shows that when we experience stress, our brain’s ability to think logically goes “off line” because our...

[Webinar] Using Trauma-informed care to identify and support at-risk students May 3, 2018 12:00 - 1:00 PM PDT Save my seat Join Dr. Sampson-Jackson - a leader in Trauma-Informed Care - to learn how school leaders and support staff can proactively identify and support student needs. Our focus will be on proactive, actionable and collaborative strategies you can start using right away. We will take a case study approach to ground the strategies in situations you see on your campus. Case...

School safety, negligence documentation, and a need for a school reform My name is Natalia Garceau. For nine years, I’ve been working at a center similar to the one where Nikolas Cruz was sent to after his expulsion from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. You won’t hear anything from the teachers who work at such centers because they are afraid to lose their jobs and to be taken to court. They have families to feed. By contract, we are not allowed to speak with media about anything...

For the nomadic community of Narikuravars in Tamil Nadu, the only mode of livelihood comes from selling beads on streets or worse, begging. Amidst the various ostracised communities in the state, Narikuravars are a marginalised group who continue to be shunned from mainstream society and have no access to primary opportunities like that of education and employment. One amongst five children, Sakthi Ramesh, had also been a victim of similar treatment in various government schools that he had...

Lucas Johnson’s résumé is characteristic of any high-achieving high school senior. There’s the raft of Advanced Placement classes, a dozen during his four years at Monticello High School in Virginia’s Albemarle County. There are the extracurriculars — tutoring and Model United Nations and student council and cross-country. During his junior year, there was the stress that accompanied all of it — stress that, at times, made him ask: “What is the point of all of this?” The 18-year-old...

Photo: Verkeorg/ creativecommons ______________________________________________________________ "This study examines relationships between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and adolescent health indicators among a sample of 8th, 9th, and 11th graders participating in the 2016 Minnesota Student Survey." Read more about this study in the journal Global Pediatric Health .

During the stressful teen years, most adolescents experience emotional highs and lows, but for more than 20 percent of teenagers, their worries and sad feelings turn into something more serious, like anxiety or depression. Studies show that 13 percent to 18 percent of distressed teens physically injure themselves via cutting, burning or other forms of self-harm as a way to cope with their pain. Recent research and clinical psychologists now suggest that some adolescents are engaging in a...

Most American kids don’t spend large chunks of their day catching salamanders and poking sticks into piles of fox poop. In a nation moving toward greater standardization of its public-education system , programs centered around getting kids outside to explore aren’t normal. But that’s precisely what students do at the Nature Preschool at Irvine Nature Center in Owings Mills, Maryland. There, every day, dozens of children ages 3 to 5 come to have adventures on Irvine’s more than 200 acres of...

Californian streets lay witness to 25 percent of the country’s total homeless population, with 42 percent of those being chronically homeless — federally defined as a homeless individual with a disabling condition who has been homeless for over a year or having at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years. From 2016 to 2017, the state also saw the largest increase in the number of residents who are homeless — more than 16,000 people. While homelessness in San Francisco is a...

Thanks to an explosion in scientific research now possible with imaging technologies, such as fMRI and SPECT, experts can actually see how the brain develops. This helps explain why exposure to adverse childhood experiences can so deeply influence and change a child's brain and thus their physical and emotional health and quality of life across their lifetime. The above time-lapse study was conducted over 10 years. The darker colors represent brain maturity (brain development). I have added...

How do we know whether we are becoming a trauma-sensitive school? In previous blog posts we explored elements of the inquiry based process including importance of establishing a steering committee, identifying urgencies, designing actions that address the urgencies in a trauma-sensitive way and creating the action plan. We now turn our attention to thinking about measures of success that can help schools answer the question “how do we know we are becoming a trauma-sensitive school?” The...

Being a proponent of trauma-informed care and incorporating ACEs science, I was so excited to learn today that there is an assembly bill in California (AB-2691) addressing both of these! "This bill would establish within the State Department of Education the Trauma-Informed Schools Initiative to address the impact of adverse childhood experiences on the educational outcomes of California pupils. The bill would require the department to take specified actions, on or before December 31, 2019,...