Lee ~ You hit on a key point. No one should be surprised that we don't "punish" the students. We use a restorative justice model to teach students how their actions/behaviors impact the community as a whole. It's time intensive, but it has helped prevent suspensions and expulsions, which has helped create stability in the lives of our students. While I'd like to believe that everyone was on board with the restorative justice model, I know that for some of the staff who had been in the school system for many years, this process was too slow, and didn't deliver immediate change, as opposed to suspensions, where the staff no had to "deal with that student" for any given number of days.
We have had a series of trainings/conferences/working sessions over the past two years (2012-2013 was the year we started shifting our school culture), including training on brain development, the impact of toxic stress of brain development, harm reduction, restorative justice, ACES, etc. But when it came right down to it, not all staff wanted the changes. I am happy to say that as we have hired, and continue to hire new staff, I believe we are finding team members who understand why we use this model, and they are trained before they start working with students. Hopefully,that will help with the upcoming school year.
As for what we have changed, and what we are doing - there is a lot to share. I started working as the school's director in the 2011-2012 school year. It did not take long to realize that our students were coming to our school as their last chance. And while we were serving some of the students very well, we were not reaching another very large group. They were showing up, often because they were court ordered to attend school, but they were making very little progress, and their behaviors were off the charts. We all recognized that we need to do things differently, but we did not know where to start. And this is where the research started.
We knew -
1) physical environment made a difference - our school had not been well maintained, lights were burned out, the carpet was so old and dirty that we were not sure what color it had been originally, and technology was almost non-existent. The few computers we did have, were very old, and ran at dial up speed (when we were lucky). And overall the school had grown in such a way that it had pieced together adding another 25-20 foot room, or a few more offices, etc. We were (and still are) located in a mall. Students had to walk down the mall hallway to move from one set of classrooms to another.
2) relationships were paramount to a student's success - the students who did well at our school, were the ones who had been able to make positive connections with a staff member, or several staff members. This issue was somewhat controversial because it appeared to be a race issue. 60% of our students were minorities. We had one (yes one) staff member who was not white. And the majority of students who were doing well, were white. Even as I type this, I feel compelled to add that I do not think anyone was making racist decisions in hiring the staff. First, we are in Minnesota, it's pretty white here. Second, if you look at the statistics on race in the education sector, there are far fewer minority teachers than there are white/caucasian teachers.
3) our students' lives were/are incredibly complex and we were a "school." Our job was to educate students using the 7 hours per day, 175 days per year, that we were open. The issues students were facing outside of school were directly impacting their ability to focus or learn during the school day. We were working against a lifetime of violence, poverty, stress, etc., and we had just 14% of their time in any given year to make a difference.
4) we had a lot to learn, and a lot of work ahead of us!
What we did:
1) Changed the physical environment - in the summer between the 2011-2012 school year and the start of the 2012-2013 school year. We completely remodeled the school. We literally gutted it and started over with an empty shell. Our goal was to create a school that was welcoming, calm, beautiful, and most importantly would be a place students would want to spend time. We focused on layout, calming earthy colors, natural light (we could not add windows, so we added 20 solar light tubes to bring in the natural light through the roof.) Fortunately our landlord was willing to do a lot of this work and build the cost (lease hold improvements) into a new 10 year lease. We also bought new computers and furniture. What we kept of the old furniture and computers we re-furbished/cleaned. We also added showers, and a washer and dryer, so that our homeless students could shower and do their laundry before or after school.
2) We focused on training staff about how to build positive relationships with students. And when we posted open positions, we targeted the communities where our students lived, which over the past two years has increased the number of minority staff members to about 40%. Fortunately our student population grew over that same period of time. We didn't move anyone out of positions, we simply added staff members and in doing so, created a more diverse team. Our long term goal is to have the racial demographics of our staff reflect the racial demographics of our students. This will take years to accomplish because we also want to keep the staff we have, they are invested in our students, the whole team is amazing (which is also why it was so hard to see so many leave this year) and again, stability is critical for our population. But over time, we believe we can accomplish this.
3) We flipped over the apple cart in terms of our program.
* We created an emergency assistance program for our homeless students. We work closely with local county and community organizations to assist in finding shelter, long term housing, food, and funds. We use our Title Funds to support a portion of this program, and general operating funds for the rest.
* We added mental health support, including more staff and a plethora of support groups - anger management, sobriety, healthy relationships, boys group, girls group, etc.
* We added programs based on student request - 1) a school store, run by students, who earn credit and work experience, 2) a student council - also student created and student run, 3) student activities - community building activities, these change all the time based on student interest, but we have a few events that are constants now, Prom and Talent shows. The students have also hosted a Valentine dance, movie nights, school spirit weeks, etc.
* We added a free breakfast and lunch program. The school did not have a meal program in the past. It's helped to have something available at school.
* We added a project based education model to give students more control over their education. We still offer "seminars" (shorter, mini classes), but there are fewer of them than we had in the past.
* We implemented a restorative justice model for behavior management issues, and more importantly to give students real-life experience in solving conflict.
There were other changes made too, but those are the big ones. While we can't control what happens outside of school, we can mitigate the trauma of poverty by addressing homelessness and basic food and nutrition. We can also create meaningful opportunities for students to be involved in their education and to some extent, give them tools to address issues without violence. The goal is to create a community where building resilience in our students is the foundation of everything we do.
And while all of the above changes have been significant in our process of change. The most important thing that we have done, is added an intake survey to our student orientation process. Our survey consists of 25 questions, 10 of which are the ACES questions. We use this intake data to start interventions right away, before we see behavior or academic issues. The data is collected and stored in our student data base. We then document any and all new issues and interventions that occur, whenever they occur (at school, at home, in the streets...) This data has allowed us to shape our program based on common trends we are seeing in the students. If we have a high percentage of students who are parents, we start a parenting group. If we have a high number of students who are dealing with legal issues, we bring in lawyers and law enforcement to talk with students (in groups - we never single out the students who have self identified this as an issue) about the legal process, their rights, and how to avoid criminal issues. If we have a high number of students reporting that they have or have had an STD, we add another sexual health seminar and we buy more condoms (I'm serious).
The data gives us a ton of detail, and we do look at the details, but from the broader perspective, we are looking at trends in the data, and not just the intake data, but how it relates to the interventions and outcomes. And while we have only been doing this for two years, and as you read in my post, its been incredibly hard on the staff - the student data already shows significant improvements. Student mobility has decreased by 40%, attendance percentage has increased by over 10%, and we just had our largest graduating class ever. I will be interested in seeing our statewide standardized test results once they are released. But whether they have improved or not, we are please by the improvements.
As for specific trauma informed practices - they are mostly embedded into the program items above. But the single most important component to trauma informed practices is how we, the staff at the school, treat our students. This is where staff development becomes so important. It's not enough to tell people (staff) how to treat someone, or how to respond (vs react), there has to be both a reason to do something differently AND a means in which to do it. One of the best training events we had last year was by Peter Harrell Jr. on Verbal Defense and Influence. It was four full days (fairly long for a staff in-service training) but it provided our entire team with a common language for addressing everyday issues at school, and practice in using the common language. Verbal Defense and Influence has five core platform items on which the training is based - the first one being - everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, which is also the basis for our trauma informed practices.
In addition to the common language, we also follow a few simple rules:
a) ask a student what's wrong, or what happened that has made him/her upset/angry/sad/etc.
b) never blame or shame, always discuss, seek to understand
c) assume the role of listener, ask questions, find the underlying issues
d) be a positive role model
e) follow up - let the student know you remember, you care, and you want to help
Well that is really long "summary!"
I wish I could say that we have perfected everything we are doing (the list above), but we have not. As with any change, there have been issues we did not expect that have caused us to make changes as we go. And we are continually learning. The big "learning" from 2013-2014 school year, is that change is hard and while we have built great relationships within our school community, but we have to find a way to prevent burn-out.
The beauty in the relationships we have with our students, is that we know about their lives. The hardest part about the relationships we have with our students, is that we know about their lives. We are educators who are doing crisis management - every day. One of my research projects for this summer, is to figure out how firefighters, police officers, emergency room doctors, and crisis response teams manage their work load, and their stress. And how do we, as an organization, create systems of support for our staff. Hence, my original post. :-)
