Tagged With "Cherokee Point"
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A boy told his teacher she can't understand him because she's white. Her response is on point. (upworthy.com)
Fifth grade teacher Emily E. Smith is not your average teacher. She founded The Hive Society — a classroom that's all about inspiring children to learn more about their world ... and themselves — by interacting with literature and current events. Students watch TED talks, read Rolling Stone , and analyze infographics. She even has a long-distance running club to encourage students to take care of their minds and bodies. It had always been her dream to work with children in urban areas, so...
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A Conversation with Nadine Burke Harris: How Should Pediatricians Address Childhood Adversity?
Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris is a masterful storyteller. I learned in a conversation with her at Wheelock College before her presentation for the Brookline, MA organization Steps to Success , that before she decided to become doctor, Dr. Burke Harris wanted to be an author. Only after the smashing success of her TED talk: How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime , when she was approached by a literary agent, did she find her way to writing. Her newly released book The...
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A Primary-School Classroom for a New Public-School Majority [TheAtlantic.com]
AS OF 2014, U.S. PUBLIC SCHOOLS REACHED A MAJOR MILESTONE: More than half (51%) of public school students were children of color and/or came from low-income families (qualify for a reduced or free school lunch). That shift represented a clear turning point toward greater diversity in America’s public schools and the need for a corresponding diversity of approaches in the nation’s classrooms. What is at stake if that need is left unmet? For one, resources: Students of color are more likely to...
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ACEs and trauma-informed teaching in the Netherlands
Over the past twenty years several studies have shown that ACEs are common and that there is a strong relationship of these experiences with various health factors. Although these studies have all been very important in helping to establish the frequency of adverse childhood experiences, very little has actually been asked of children themselves. In addition, never before has a direct link been made with what a large, representative group of children (N = 664) say they have experienced in...
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ACEs Science in Education: The Next Big Challenge is Systems Change #ACEsCon2018
One of the first sessions of the 2018 ACEs Conference: Action to Access discussed the barriers and opportunities for increasing access in the field of education. The main question was: "How can one achieve systematic changes within the field of education?" The session was moderated by Michelle Flowers, a passionate advocate, and the principal of Kinney High in Rancho Cordova, CA, which is part of the Folsom Cordova Unified School District. It included a dynamic and diverse panel of education...
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Articles about trauma-informed schools
Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, tries new approach to school discipline—suspensions drop 85% 2012 http://acestoohigh.com/2012/04...-expulsions-drop-85/ Massachusetts, Washington lead U.S. trauma-sensitive school movement 2012...
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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States: For Young People (medium.com)
An Indigenous Peoples’ History offers a needed, yet often unheard perspective on United States history. An Indigenous Peoples’ History consistently poses questions that counteract misinformation about Native communities, specifically stories that are usually taught in elementary school. This lends itself to fantastic conversations on whose history is taught in school, and offers students a chance to recognize whose curriculum they’re expected to learn for standardized tests. And unlike many...
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As Its Homeless Student Population Surges, Perkins K-8 Is Learning to Adapt [voiceofsandiego.org]
At one point last school year, homeless students made up a third of the Barrio Logan school’s total enrollment. Fernando Hernandez, the principal at Perkins K-8, makes sure his middle school teachers don’t put too much weight on homework. Hernandez caps the percentage of grades drawn from homework at 15 percent, which he says is lower than many middle schools. Though many schools and parents across the country have argued in recent years that schools should de-emphasize homework, Hernandez...
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Oregon State educators visit Cherokee Point Elementary in San Diego
Cherokee Point Elementary in City Heights (San Diego Unified School District) hosted 12 educators from Oregon on Friday, March 11th. The superintendents, principals and teachers spent the day with Principal Godwin Higa and Resource Specialist Patty Wallach to talk about the school becoming trauma informed, and how it functions. They visited classrooms and had lunch with the students, then met with Dr. Audrey Hokoda, Child, Development Department, San Diego State University and Dana Brown to...
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Osborn School District Board Writes Resolution Supporting Trauma Informed Practices
“It’s my hope that the resolution garners attention, partnerships and funding so that our students can get the best education in Osborn. As a district, we are dedicated to trauma-informed practices and teaching resilience in a manner that is supported by science. At this point, we need our state and national leaders to catch up to the classroom.” says Katie Paetz, Osborn Governing Board President.
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Osborn School District Board Writes Resolution Supporting Trauma Informed Practices
As a district, we are dedicated to trauma-informed practices and teaching resilience in a manner that is supported by science. At this point, we need our state and national leaders to catch up to the classroom.” says Katie Paetz, Osborn Governing Board President.
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Osborn School District Board Writes Resolution Supporting Trauma Informed Practices
As a district, we are dedicated to trauma-informed practices and teaching resilience in a manner that is supported by science. At this point, we need our state and national leaders to catch up to the classroom.” says Katie Paetz, Osborn Governing Board President.
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Our opinion: District and city must unite to ward off trauma’s effects [thenotebook.org]
This is the third print edition that the Notebook has dedicated to discussing trauma and its impact on children, their learning, their schools, and their teachers. It comes as the Notebook is in the second year of funding for beat reporting dedicated to stories about education and behavioral health, thanks to the van Ameringen Foundation. At this point, we have written dozens of stories, interviewed at least 100 people, and even produced a video and article series on a school that has...
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Parent Handouts: Understanding ACEs, Parenting to Prevent & Heal ACEs (English)
Please see the main post for these parent handouts in the ACEs Connection Resources Center. These two flyers ( Understanding ACEs and Parenting to Prevent & Heal ACEs ) can be downloaded, distributed, and used freely. One is brand new and the other is a revision. Both flyers were made with generous support from Family Hui, a Program of Lead for Tomorrow. Translations of these flyers are in progress and will be shared by Family Hui and updated on ACEs Connection when available.
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Parents’ Adverse Childhood Experiences and Their Children’s Behavioral Health Problems
Pediatrics, August 2018, VOLUME 142 / ISSUE 2 by Adam Schickedanz, Neal Halfon, Narayan Sastry, Paul J. Chung BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) include stressful and potentially traumatic events associated with higher risk of long-term behavioral problems and chronic illnesses. Whether parents’ ACE counts (an index of standard ACEs) confer intergenerational risk to their children’s behavioral health is unknown. In this study, we estimate the risk of child...
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Peek Inside a Classroom: Jasmine
© Elliot Gilfix/Flickr . What happened to Jasmine? . Photo © Jinx!/Flickr When you look inside a...
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Peek Inside a Classroom: Jose
Photo credit Max Klingensmith at flickr . Jose was one of the calmest, quietest, most peaceful boys in the classroom. The kind of boy everybody loves. ...
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Controlled Burn: A Story of Growth (ascd.org)
My nephew Max (a pseudonym) started skipping school when he was a high school freshman. He did enough to get by, coming home with C 's and D 's on his report cards, but he continued to skip school no matter what anyone did to try to get him to be a "better" student. He not only skipped classes on a regular basis, he skipped studying. He certainly didn't do his homework. His teachers pushed and prodded, his family begged and scolded. If you ask him now, Max says that to him, school seemed...
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Could Parkland Shooting Be Prevented? Yes, and Runcie Knew How
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...
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Dear Teacher
Dear Teacher I remember you and I would imagine you remember me well. I am your student. We have shared space for many years yet have never come to know one another. Although I have known you over twenty years and spent more time with you than even my closest friends and family, our relationship has remained transactional, tense, contentious and at times violent. We have cursed, threatened and insulted each other, I have thrown chairs and spat at you and you have restrained me multiple...
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Defending Childhood
Common Sense Millions of injured children whose pleas are not being heard are waiting at the intersection of the “Defending Childhood” Report from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Congress’s rewrite...
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Dena Simmons: Without Context, Social-Emotional Learning Can Backfire [edsurge.com]
A few years ago, I had the great fortune to meet Bronx native Dena Simmons on a fellowship trip and hear about her life’s work and experience. She’s an educator, a TED speaker , and currently, the assistant director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence —not to mention a keynote speaker at the EdSurge Fusion conference later this year. What I didn’t realize at the time was just how much of a confluence there would be between her work and the current trendiness of one particular...
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Developing Students’ Ability to Give and Take Effective Feedback [kqed.org]
When Emerie Lukas was hired to develop and teach a STEM Foundations course to middle school students at the Dayton Regional STEM School , she was starting from scratch. The stated goal of the course was to prepare students for more rigorous work in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) classes in high school, but Lukas knew that meant far more than academic preparation. She needed to teach her students how to give and take effective feedback, how to solve conflicts, how to...
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Development and Implementation of Standards for Social and Emotional Learning in the 50 States (selpractices.org)
Development and Implementation of Standards for Social and Emotional Learning in the 50 States · SEL Thrive { "@context" : "http://schema.org", "@type" : "Organization", "name" : "SEL Thrive", "url" : "https://www.selpractices.org/", "logo": "https://www.selpractices.org/apple-touch-icon-180x180.png", "sameAs" : [ "https://www.facebook.com/", "https://twitter.com/" ], // "contactPoint" : [{ // "@type" : "ContactPoint", // "telephone" : "+1-555-555-555", // "contactType" : "customer service"...
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Do Conversations About Race Belong in the Classroom? [TheAtlantic.com]
In 1997, Beverly Daniel Tatum, one of the country’s foremost authorities on the psychology of racism, answered a recurring question that surfaced in her work with teachers, administrators, and parent groups: Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? The result was a critically acclaimed book of the same name that gave readers—numbering in the hundreds of thousands—a starting point to demystify conversations about race, better understand the concept of racial identity, and...
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Do’s and Don’ts of a Trauma-Informed Compassionate Classroom
The summer break is upon us and right now parents and teachers are taking a much-deserved deep breath before jumping into the new school year. One of the programs Echo provides each summer is the salary point Trauma-Informed Compassionate Classrooms training to help educators meet their professional development requirements and to give them the space to think about the classroom environment they would optimally like to create while not yet inundated with the day-to- day demands of the school...
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Education Summit
The Attachment & Trauma Network’s 2017 Educating Traumatized Children Summit will feature 18 audio interviews (available as mp3 recordings) exploring the Trauma-Sensitive Schools movement and the latest in understanding the impact of trauma on learning. Teachers, therapists, administrators and parents will all find this series helpful in working with children of trauma. Topics include: Re-Thinking Children’s Behavior...the Seismic Shift
The Importance of Top Administrators’...
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Emotions 101: Why Hawaii Schools Are Focusing On Feelings [civilbeat.org]
Editor’s note: This story was produced in conjunction with On Campus , a Civil Beat podcast series that tracks the first year of a new school in Hawaii and examines big education issues in America. Thanks to ACEs Connection member, Godwin Higa, who retired this year as principal of Cherokee Point Elementary School in San Diego, CA, for being a champion in this article. Nothing about the classroom looked abnormal. Seventh-grade teacher Allison Harkey stood at the front of her Wheeler Middle...
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Engaging Parents, Developing Leaders
A Self-Assessment and Planning Tool for Nonprofits and Schools By the Annie E. Casey Foundation This publication introduces an assessment and planning tool to help nonprofits evaluate their parent engagement efforts and chart a path toward deeper partnerships with parents and caregivers. The tool spans just eight pages, with accompanying text outlining how to use it, how to assess its results and what real-world strategies and programs are already in play — and working — to boost parent...
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Essentials for an ACEs, trauma-informed, resilience-building school system
About 120 educators from in and around Sacramento County met on Saturday, Oct. 17, for day two of Beyond Trauma: Building a Resilient Sacramento , which was held at the gorgeous campus of Meristem in Fair Oaks. The workshop was co-sponsored by...
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For those that ordered... the trauma-informed curriculum for churches is headed out the door this week!
It's been a labor of love more than a year in the making, and it is exciting to see the curriculum come together and head out to those that will give this first version a "test drive" this spring and (hopefully) give me some great feedback so I can make improvements over the summer and make the curriculum better! It is called "Bruised Reeds and Smoldering Wicks: a six week study of trauma-informed ministry and compassionate care for children from hard places and situations." The study is...
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Former student starts up makeshift food bank at Abbott Loop Elementary (KTUU)
By Samie Solina, Oct 18, 2019, for KTUU ANCHORAGE (KTUU) - A make-shift food bank lives in the office of Abbott Loop Elementary in Anchorage inside of the school’s family services coordinators office. Abbott Loop Elementary is a Title I school, which means it has high numbers or high percentages of children from low-income families. These schools receive financial assistance to help their students meet goals. Melinda Jarvis, a former student and now parent volunteer, knows what it’s like to...
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From Trauma Informed To Trauma Transformed: Achieving Post-Traumatic GROWTH for the Youths In Our Most Disenfranchised Public Schools and Communities
Roberto Rivera was a troubled, addicted youth engaged in criminal behavior who discovered his path to transformation in the pit of his traumatic pain. He harnessed the fire of early childhood trauma to change himself from being a problem to being a solution, not just in his own life, but also in the lives of many, many other under-privileged and under-performing young people. The name of his solution is Fulfill The Dream (FTD). FTD is a unique, hip-hop(e) based, Social Emotional Learning...
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Gathering in Topeka, Kansas for the Educators’ Art of Facilitation Chapter IV
According to Alice Miller author of The Drama of the Gifted Child, an Enlightened Witness is “an understanding person who helps a victim of abuse recognize the injustice they suffered and gives vent to their feelings about what happened to them”. Brene Brown author of Daring Greatly states, "empathy is feeling with or alongside someone, while sympathy is feeling sorry for." https://youtu.be/1Evwgu369Jw In Topeka we unpacked and explored the message of the Enlightened Witnesses in our lives.
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Gov. Kate Brown is doing plenty to boost graduation rates [OregonLive.com]
...in a matter of days, House Bill 4002, will be signed into law here in Oregon. The bill resulted from 18 months of conferences, study and research with over 500 participants. National experts from the University of Chicago and Washington State University provided important input to the process. This bill represents action-oriented legislation on absenteeism — community-driven, evidence-based and forward thinking. ...HB4002 sets an action-based approach in motion. It asks school districts...
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Graduation and dropout rates: Look up California districts and high schools [EdSource.org]
California education officials last week bragged about the seventh consecutive year of improvement in the statewide high school graduation rate, which reached 83.2 percent for the class of 2016. That was 0.9 percentage point above the previous year. However, behind that omnibus number is a world of variety, both among ethnic groups, school districts and individual high schools. EdSource has created a database that families and educators can use to look up how well their districts and schools...
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Guide - Creating Trauma-Informed Policies: A Practice Guide for School and Mental Health Leadership
Author, Leora Wolf-Prusan, EdD, School Mental Health lead for SAMHSA's Mental Health Technology Center Pacific Southwest http://mhttcnetwork.org/mhttc/mhttc-psw.html Creating compassionate policies is a cornerstone strategy of educational leadership. This guide provides a deep dive into developing, implementing, and evaluating trauma-informed and compassionate school policies. It highlights four "choice points" for education and mental health leadership: Choice Point 1: Names &...
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Head Start Prevents Foster Care? To Be Decided [chronicleofsocialchange.org]
The jury is decidedly out on the academic track record of Head Start, the education-oriented pre-school program for low-income families invented in the 1960s and federally proliferated in the early 1980s. Critics will point to large impact studies that show early academic gains fade by third grade. Proponents will say that those gains would stick if the students ended up in better public schools. But Youth Services Insider had never seen Head Start mentioned as a possible preventer of foster...
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Here's How To Prevent The Next School Shooting, Experts Say (npr.org)
On the Friday after the deadly shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, Matthew Mayer, a professor at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education, got an email during a faculty meeting. The email was from Shane Jimerson, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Both specialize in the study of school violence. That email led to nearly two weeks of long days, Mayer says, for some of the leading experts in the field. On conference calls and in Google docs...
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Homework: Moving Toward Compassionate, Trauma-Informed Schools
It was the little red trauma-informed schoolhouse. Katherine Wickersham-Wade, the Nay’dini’aa Na’ Kayax (Chickaloon Village) clan grandmother who started the Ya Ne Dah Ah School , Alaska’s first Tribally operated school in 1992, might not have used that language. But she did envision a school that would wrap its students in Native ancestral traditions and Ahtna language, instill self-confidence and repair some of the damage inflicted by historical trauma—the disruptions to culture and...
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How 12 teens invented a solar-powered tent for the homeless (mashable.com)
As Daniela Orozco picks off excess plastic bordering a 3D-printed box, she recalls how many homeless people she saw on her way to school when she was a high school freshman. In the San Fernando Valley, homelessness increased 36% to 7,094 people last year, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Agency's annual count. Daniela and her friends wanted to help, but giving money wasn't an option. That was the starting point for their invention: a solar-powered tent that folds up into a...
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How a School Ditched Awards and Assemblies to Refocus on Kids and Learning (www2.kqed.org)
Together with the staff, they decided that handing out awards neither aligned with their beliefs nor brought out the best in their students—even for the sliver of kids who received awards. “Winners” got the message that product rather than process is what matters in education, Wejr said. “Learning should be the reward,” he added. And the far more plentiful “losers” heard that they weren’t good enough to be spotlighted on stage, or that their unique combination of attributes didn’t truly...
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How a School Stopped Relying on Restraining and Isolating Students — and What Others Can Learn From It
Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune, and Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica Illinois April 13, 6 a.m. EDT This story is a collaboration between ProPublica Illinois and the Chicago Tribune. Some Illinois schools say they need to keep using dangerous forms of physical restraint and student isolation. Here’s how one school system in Virginia successfully shifted its entire approach to safety — from face-down holds to bubble baths. WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA — When the student burst out of the school and...
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How do these pediatricians do ACEs screening? Early adopters tell all.
Last week, three pediatricians — with a combined experience of 15 years integrating ACEs science into their practices — reflected on the urgency they felt several years ago that prompted them to begin screening patients for childhood adversity and resilience when there was practically no guidance at all. Along their journey , they accumulated a list of lessons learned for other pediatricians and family clinics to use. The three pediatricians participated in the ACEs Connection webinar,...
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How Facial Expressions of Adults Affect Children
Karen Murphy, who is principal at Free Orchards Elementary School where I work, is a champion of trauma awareness and is working hard to lead our school in the direction of trauma sensitive practices -and away from the policies & procedures that have historically made well-intentioned school districts part of the "pipeline to prison". One of her sayings is "fix yer face", which means simply to put a warm expression on your face, consciously and regularly.
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How It Feels & How We Heal: Parenting with ACEs Chat Quotes (You Tube, Database, PDFs, Links)
Parenting with ACEs is sharing inspiration, information, and expertise from our chat series in 3 formats. Parenting with ACEs: How It Feels & How We Heal Quote Collection (pdf version below as well) Quotes Database (pdf version below as well) Links to Chat Transcripts and before and after-the-chat blog posts. Thanks to everyone who showed up, who shared, and who is doing the important work that is our mission (prevent ACEs, heal trauma, build resilience). We know that work happens...
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How Not To Get A Stressed Out Teen Ready For High School: Tell Them They Need To Be Ready [huffingtonpost.com]
Apparently the 8th grade teacher thought that by crumpling the student’s essay and then tossing it into the trash, he was effectively making the point that the student needed to be “better prepared for high school.” At least this is what he told the student as he made the histrionic gesture, and later the parent when she questioned his methods. “He is ready, he’s here,” replied the parent. That the child had suffered a deeply traumatic event earlier in his life was not unknown to the teacher...
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How Teachers Learn to Discuss Racism (theatlantic.com)
With a profession that’s characteristically white, female , and middle class—and with students of color and children in poverty rapidly making up the majority of the public-school population—teachers equipped and willing to talk about race and racism has become a necessity. The mere mention of these topics can be awkward and difficult, yet various research findings point to the need to confront the discomfort to improve student learning . Increasingly, that duty has fallen to urban-education...
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"I feel invisible": Native Students Languish in Public Schools (nytimes.com)
Often ignored in the national conversation about the public school achievement gap, these students post some of the worst academic outcomes of any demographic group, which has been exacerbated by decades of discrimination, according to federal reports . The population is also among the most at risk: Underachievement and limited emotional support at school can contribute to a number of negative outcomes for Native youths — even suicide. Among people 18 to 24, Native Americans have the highest...
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Improving California school environments focus of pilot program (edsource.org)
This week the departments of education in Orange and Butte counties, along with UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools, announced a pilot program to develop a training curriculum based on multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS), an approach to learning and behavioral problems in which students progress through a range of interventions depending on their need levels. The program, which is funded by a $15-million grant that was part of the budget deal struck by Gov. Jerry Brown and the...