Blog Posts -- Solution stories

Gerson Garcia had been fighting. It happened during second-grade recess, and had to do with a ball on the playground. He was too angry to talk about it. One of his friends had seen him getting upset and alerted a teacher, who whisked him down the hallway at Enrico Fermi School 17, the skinny 8-year-old squirming in protest all the way. He ended up in the office of school sentry Miguel Rivera and — still not speaking — made a beeline for the trampoline. When Rivera started working in the...

by Katherine Cabaniss, Cypress Creek Mirror August 23, 2016 Students have returned to school. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are on their minds. Teachers, parents, administrators, and all who care about kids are focused first on academic achievement. In the Greater Houston area, one program focuses on students’ minds in a different way. Mental Health America of the Greater Houston Area (“MHA”) concentrates on kids’ mental health. MHA’s goals further not only student success, but also...

Effective education 'reform' is student-centered

Two school districts have found that the secret to raising attendance rates in schools in low-income areas could be as simple as providing laundry machines. "One of my students had just sort of withdrawn from school completely," Alison Guernsey, a seventh grade English teacher in Fairfield, California, told TODAY Parents. "After we started the program, he was more excited about coming, and he started to be actively engaged in class. He didn't feel like an outsider anymore," she said. At...

(Image: Students meditating at Phillip and Sala Burton Academic High School in San Francisco.) Closing the so-called achievement gap between poor inner-city children and their more affluent suburban counterparts is among the biggest challenges for education reformers. The success of some schools’ efforts suggests that meditation might significantly improve children’s school performance – and help close that gap. A major factor preventing underserved children from learning is the stress they...

In New York’s Hudson Valley, farm-to-table food is no longer limited to upscale restaurants like Blue Hill Stone Barns. Because of mom Sandy McKelvey, fresh food grown on local farms is now bettering the fare in school cafeterias. The Farm-to-School movement took off in this rural, scenic region north of New York City in 2009, shortly after McKelvey and her family moved to Cold Spring Harbor. At her daughter’s new elementary school, she volunteered to introduce a new curriculum centered on a...

When students and teachers learn together about how their brains influence behavior, one expert says, discipline can become less of a confrontation and more of a partnership. The field of educational neuroscience is at the intersection of cognitive psychology, education and neuroscience, and some of its teachings suggest findings from brain research can be applied to classroom management and discipline techniques. Some trend toward the area of “mindfulness,” such as attempting to sharpen...

Youth Voice leaders (left to right) Katherine, Lizette, Jessica, Adrian, Tatiana, Sienna and Angel Seven youth leaders traveled to San Diego State University last week to explain the science of adverse childhood experiences and the impact of complex trauma, as well as their journey of resilience and transformation to thirty seniors in the university's Counseling and Psychology Department. Youth Voice has created a sanctuary for youth, ages 11 to 20, to share, learn and create messages of...

In the first two parts of this series ( part one , part two ), we talk about the implications of trauma and student behavior and how to create a trauma informed school. The success of creating a trauma informed school weighs heavily on the school and community embracing the holistic approach. At Los Angeles Education Partnership, we achieve this through our Community School model. As former teachers, we are aware that the more we pile on our teachers, the less effective the approach becomes.

Did a parent often push, grab, slap or throw something at you? Did a person five years older than you touch you in a sexual way? Those are just two questions from the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) quiz given to students at Seattle's alternative high school, the Interagency Academy. Students at "Last-Chance High" are traumatized, reporting an average of 7 adverse experiences in their background. Principal Kaaren Andrews says early childhood trauma is a public health crisis leading to...

“Ch-ch-tsss. Ch-ch-tsss.” On a chilly Wednesday morning, Baja Poindexter sounded out the steps of the rumba to a classroom of fifth-graders at West Athens Elementary School, located in one of Los Angeles’s most violent neighborhoods . She encouraged her class of mostly Latino students to do the same. They tenuously clasped each other’s hands in ballroom dance “frame,” or body position, and swayed to the music at “Miss Baja’s” command.

Last New Year’s Day, when 13-year-old Lee Weathersby III was shot and died in Oakland, Calif., nearly 200 of his middle school peers and teachers received therapy. In the Oakland Unified School District, Sandra Simmons’ job is to help coordinate that therapy on school campuses. As a Behavioral Health Program Manager for the district, Simmons oversees crisis response across the district. She has organized behavioral health training and counseling for students, teachers, staff,...