Tagged With "South Florida"
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A Haunting Conversation....
I had a conversation with an elementary principal from Florida while I was in WA DC last week that has been haunting me. This amazing principal and her staff came together to become a trauma informed school. Why? Because they saw their students’ pain and wanted to create a nurturing, safe, and loving school culture.... Days before coming to the Trauma Sensitive School Conference, she and her staff were notified by the State of Florida Education Office that the entire staff was going to be...
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A Public School That Not Only Keeps Children Safe, But Heals [nonprofitquarterly.org]
After the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida earlier this year, schools are at the epicenter of national debates on gun violence and mental health. How can teachers and administrators deal with troubled students? And how can they make schools safer for all? It’s not the first time that schools have been asked to address social problems that originate far outside their hallways. In a nation where more than 40 percent of kids are from low-income families, school teachers and...
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An Initiative to Improve Health in Schools Puts Trauma Front and Center [insidephilanthropy.com]
A recent initiative from America’s Promise Alliance—an organization best known for its efforts to boost high school graduation rates—supports work with communities to improve health in schools. Addressing trauma will be a major focus of that work, which is backed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and reflects growing interest among funders and nonprofits in this area. The organization is working on six community-led projects to make schools more healthy. Communities identified their own...
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PRESS RELEASE - U.S. Department of Education Awards More Than $6.5 Million in Grants to Help Schools and Communities Promote Equity in Education [www.ed.gov]
SEPTEMBER 29, 2016 Contact: Press Office, (202) 401-1576, press@ed.gov The U.S. Department of Education is awarding more than $6.5 million in grants to fund four regional Equity Assistance Centers to support schools and communities creating equitable education opportunities for all students. These centers, authorized under Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, will provide technical assistance in the preparation and implementation of plans for the desegregation of public schools...
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Cost of suspensions is high for students who drop out after discipline, report finds [EdSource.org]
Putting a cold financial price tag on the impact of school discipline practices, researchers have calculated that a 10th-grade California student who drops out because of suspension could end up costing the public $755,000 in lost tax revenue and increased health care and criminal justice expenses over the life of the student, according to a report released Thursday by the UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies. The researchers amalgamated decades of studies to produce what they said was the...
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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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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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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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How Teachers And Schools Can Help When Bad Stuff Happens (npr.org)
Lately, there's been a surfeit of scary news: Charlottesville, Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and now Las Vegas. At NPR Ed we've covered many of the ways that teachers can be helpers, whether the disaster of the day is affecting your students directly or not: trauma-informed education, mindfulness, and yoga to name a few. While the young brain is impressionable to trauma, it can also be resilient , says Pamela Cantor, the founder of a nonprofit called Turnaround for Children. Trauma-informed...
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How to Design a School That Prioritizes Kindness and Caring (kqed.org)
Countless schools across the nation strive to make character a feature of education. Whether through classes on social-emotional learning , mindfulness exercises or reminders about the virtues of gratitude, thousands of students are exposed to messages that deplore cheating and bullying and celebrate kindness and consideration. In spite of the lecturing, however, 51 percent of high school kids owned up to cheating on exams, according to the Josephson Institute. Another 62 percent believe...
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Improving Teaching Effectiveness: Final Report [rand.org]
The Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative, designed and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was a multiyear effort to dramatically improve student outcomes by increasing students' access to effective teaching. Participating sites adopted measures of teaching effectiveness (TE) that included both a teacher's contribution to growth in student achievement and his or her teaching practices assessed with a structured observation rubric. The TE measures were to be...
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School Walkout: An Adult Ally Guide (youthempowerment.com)
Amplify their voice, not yours. Broadcast your willingness to be a "helper". Assume competence in youth leadership. Don't assume anything else. The moment news spread that the students of Parkland, Florida were using their voices to speak out against school violence, Rep. Shawn Harrison staffer claimed that the students were paid actors. This reaction isn’t uncommon. Some adults in positions of power are hesitant to include youth voice in the public sphere, and some will use any means...
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Shootings & Suicides Past the Tipping-Point: ACEs Epidemic & Declining Lifespans in US
Re: Building community by facing collective trauma with hope I am writing from Broward county, Florida, the school district in which the MSD school shooting occurred and that gave rise to the March for Our Lives Movement sparked by our students. Mankind has developed solutions to deal with self-perpetuating waves and EPIDEMICS of BEHAVIORALLY TRANSMITTED Neuro-Toxic Stress, CPTSD Trauma & ACEs that cause FIXED-MINDSET reactive black and white Scarcity-based thinking to increase and...
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Some 350 Florida Leaders Expected to Attend Think Tank with Dr. Vincent Felitti, Co-Principal Investigator of the ACE Study; Expert on ACEs Science
Leaders from across the Sunshine State will take part in a “Think Tank” in Naples, FL, on Monday, August 6, to help create a more trauma-informed Florida. The estimated 350 attendees will include policy makers and community teams made up of school superintendents, law enforcement officers, judges, hospital administrators, mayors, PTA presidents, child welfare experts, mental health and substance abuse treatment providers, philanthropists, university researchers, state agency heads, and...
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Student’s Nonprofit Helps Promote Peace (hechingerreport.org)
Two years ago, when Jackie Brenner was 16, she was struggling to recover from a difficult knee surgery and to deal with her mother’s fight with breast cancer. Her life was full of stress. She started researching meditation, yoga and nutrition, and she incorporated what she found into her daily routine. Soon, she started spreading her enlightenment to other students. Through Piece of Peace , Ms. Brenner’s nonprofit, she teaches others how to live healthy lives. The effort is most established...
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Taking ACEs to School: Trauma-Informed Approaches in Higher Education
“What happened to you?” isn’t just a question for therapists to ask their troubled clients. It’s a question that should inform the work of physicians, nurses, lawyers, educators, social workers and public health advocates from the time they are learning their professions to each real-world encounter. That’s the hope of the Philadelphia ACE Task Force (PATF) , whose workforce development group released a toolkit to help faculty across a range of disciplines weave content on adverse childhood...
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New Resource Guide for Child Sexual Abuse/Exploitation Prevention
Greetings, ACN Community! I wanted to share this fantastic new resource guide developed by one of the work groups from the Georgia Statewide Human Trafficking Task Force. This guide provides background on best practice, principles of prevention, identifying resources for the classroom, developing a prevention plan, age appropriate teaching suggestions, analysis of specific programs, and guidelines for implementation and evaluation. It is really quite thorough and is full of excellent ideas...
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Nine Ways to Help Students Discuss Guns and Violence [greatergood.berkeley.edu]
In the weeks since the mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, educators have been asking tough questions: How do I help my students reflect on the violence in Parkland, and on violence in their own communities that perhaps hasn’t garnered as much attention? With student activism making headlines, should I talk about protests and walkouts in class? Do I dare address controversial topics like gun control and the Second Amendment? And what is my role when...
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Bill introduced in Maine to prohibit corporal punishment in schools
Maine is one of 22 states in the U.S. where corporal punishment is allowed in schools. That would change if LD 527, an act to prohibit corporal punishment , is enacted. Fifteen of the 22 states expressly permit corporal punishment—the other seven (including Maine) do not prohibit it. There are 28 states and the District of Columbia that expressly prohibit corporal punishment. Some of the 110,000 students subjected to corporal punishment are in states where it is prohibited. The Maine bill...
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Measuring the impact: Schools struggle from multiple angles with incarceration (educationdive.com)
Whether it's a parent or the student who have served time, schools see challenges. Beyond helping children of incarcerated parents pay for college, a growing body of research supports helping these children throughout the K-12 system, limiting harsh discipline policies that disproportionately impact them, training teachers to recognize the underlying causes of certain behaviors and targeting the intergenerational nature of the school-to-prison pipeline. When Jason Nance started travelling...
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The Relentless School Nurse: The Text Message No Parent Wants to Get - An Active Shooter is at School
Many blog readers know that my niece Carly is a survivor of the Parkland shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. You may know that my father also survived a mass murder, and like Carly, hid in a closet until the police arrived. Almost 70 years separated the two tragedies. Our guest blogger this week is my sister Merri, Carly's mom. Merri shares her first-hand account of what happened the afternoon of February 14, 2018, when Carly sent this text, “Mom don’t freak out but we are on...
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Rural Oregon County Integrates ACEs Screening in School-Based Trauma-Informed Health Centers
For the last two years, nearly all students referred for mental health services in seven school-based health centers in Deschutes County, OR, have taken the 10-question adverse childhood experiences (ACE) survey.
It didn’t take long to realize why this was good idea.
“The average ACE score for a student being seen by a Deschutes County clinician was 5 out of 10,” says Elizabeth Fitzgerald, supervisor of school-based health centers at Deschutes County Health Services.
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Trauma-Responsive Schools Must Be The New Gold Standard In Education
The Relentless School Nurse: Speaking Truth to Power in a Collaborative Op-Ed The power of social media cannot be underestimated! A few short months ago, I connected with Sunny Hallowell, PhD, RN, a Nurse Faculty from Villanova University on Twitter. Sunny had just returned from Florida where she was presenting Nursing Rounds at a Miami hospital the day of the Parkland shootings. When she returned home, her 5-year-old son shared his experience during his school’s active shooter drill. Sunny...
Blog Post
Trauma-Responsive Schools Must Be The New Gold Standard In Education
The Relentless School Nurse: Speaking Truth to Power in a Collaborative Op-Ed The power of social media cannot be underestimated! A few short months ago, I connected with Sunny Hallowell, PhD, RN, a Nurse Faculty from Villanova University on Twitter. Sunny had just returned from Florida where she was presenting Nursing Rounds at a Miami hospital the day of the Parkland shootings. When she returned home, her 5-year-old son shared his experience during his school’s active shooter drill. Sunny...
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Vegan School Lunches Expand Despite Opposition From Meat Industry (pewtrusts.org)
PORTLAND, Maine — Cafeteria worker Alison Mason held out the options on a typical Friday at East End Community School, an airy elementary school on a hilltop in this coastal city: in one hand, a plate of traditional cheese pizza, in the other, a vegan option with milk-free flatbread, hummus, and sliced raw carrots, cucumber and olives. Portland, Maine, is among the 14% of school districts across the country that provided vegan lunches for kids in at least one school in 2017, up from 11.5% in...
Ask the Community
How Can We Make South Florida Schools Trauma Informed?
Let's Make South Florida Schools Trauma Informed by Endorsing TIS Leaders! This is Natalia Garceau from Broward County, FL. Last February, in Washington, DC, l met so many wonderful, caring educators from all over the United States and abroad at the first ATN Conference for Creating Trauma-Sensitive Schools. Sadly, I was the only person from South Florida, and I was not sent to DC by my school district. I came there on my own to learn newest strategies of how to help traumatized children...
Ask the Community
PPT for High School Students explaining ACEs
I teach at a 90-day residential drug and alcohol treatment facility for ages 13-18 in Pensacola, Florida. I wish to teach my students about ACEs (possibly conduct the survey) and was wondering if anyone has a PowerPoint presentation already made and would like to share. I'm looking for an overview of the evidence and the MRI scans of the brains (shown in Paper Tigers) if available. I recall that part of the movie was VERY eye-opening so I want to share it. Thanks in advance and my personal...
Comment
Re: A Haunting Conversation....
The specific school in Florida was in the early stages of looking at becoming a trauma informed school. You bring up some very good questions and observations with becoming or claiming to be a trauma informed school. From my perspective, if there is a lowering of expectations for students, there is a disconnect with truly understanding what it means to be a trauma informed school. If we aren’t holding students accountable, I believe we are failing them. I think it depends on how a school...
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Re: A Haunting Conversation....
That’s really sad. Jim, I have written to the FLDOE and BCPS leaders asking about trauma informed schools and research conducted in Florida and Broward County, but haven’t heard back from anyone. Was this the only trauma- informed school in our state?? I wish all Florida TIS advocates could get together and figure out how to create change!
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Re: A Haunting Conversation....
Natalia, I wished I knew more specifics about the school. I was fielding a lot of questions, and was stunned with the information she shared with me, but didn't have the opportunity to do more follow up. I like your idea of getting a coalition of trauma informed advocates together to seek out greater understanding as to what is going on in Florida. I've only been to Florida once, and it was to work with the community partners around collective impact and community response to ACEs. Thanks...
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Re: Could Parkland Shooting Be Prevented? Yes, and Runcie Knew How
Kimberly, It was such a pleasure to be around like-minded individuals! Will be looking forward to meeting you in person next year! Hopefully, there will be more people from Broward, and we'll have some good news to report. Sometimes it takes a crisis to learn our lessons. I was amazed by what other states and districts do. Florida needs to catch up. Although we do have trauma-informed and trained mental health counselors and social workers, somehow trauma knowledge could not penetrate the...
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Re: Could Parkland Shooting Be Prevented? Yes, and Runcie Knew How
You are spot on, Natalia! I've seen it coming for years and I speak of all our vulnerabilities often. Unfortunately, it usually falls on deaf ears. That won't stop me! I wish I could devote my life to trauma awareness, but I'm a one-income household so I share, and then I share some more whenever I can. For the last three years, I have been teaching at a drug and alcohol treatment facility for students ages 13-18. It's a 90-day residential program and I get the honor of spending 4 1/2 hours...
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Re: Could Parkland Shooting Be Prevented? Yes, and Runcie Knew How
Re: Could Parkland Shooting Be Prevented? Yes, and Runcie Knew How
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Re: PPT for High School Students explaining ACEs
Thanks so much for your replies, ladies! I have been told it is appropriate and that it is not appropriate to discuss ACEs with teens. As I stated, I am working with kids in a residential treatment program for drugs and alcohol as a teacher, not a counselor. These poor kids do not always choose this destiny as it is bestowed upon them. With their brains functioning differently, I feel it is important for them to know why and work to find ways to deal with their individual strengths and...
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Mental health symptoms in school-aged children in four communities (cdc.gov)
A CDC study examined mental health symptoms in four different U.S. school districts during 2014–2018. Based on teacher and parent reports, about 1 in 6 students had enough behavioral or emotional symptoms and impairment to be diagnosed with a childhood mental disorder ; rates varied among the different sites. Schools, communities, and healthcare providers can use this information to plan for the healthcare and school service needs of children and adolescents with mental disorders. Screening,...
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What the Research Says About the Academic Power of Friendship [kqed.org]
Gail Cornwall Nov 18 For years, education research focused on time-on-task as a measure of effective instruction, says Scott Gest , a professor at the University of Virginia. Through that lens, friends in elementary school appeared to be a negative, an impediment to focus and a catalyst for disruption. Even when the value of strong social ties gained recognition, friendships stood to the side conceptually, as developmentally important but not germane to academics. Yet recent research has...
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