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, and administrators for the past five years.
Today, Simmons is helping to usher in a new approach to behavioral health training at Oakland Unified. The district’s trauma-informed practices initiative is a tiered strategy that aims to create safe and supportive environments for students, teachers and administrators. Adopting such practices will allow the school district to both keep trauma-impacted students in school and provide targeted training and support to keep fatigued teachers in the classroom.
With restorative justice practices and other behavioral approaches already at the majority of schools in the district, Oakland Unified is now in the process of rolling out a new set of trauma-informed practices in six of its most trauma-impacted high schools.
This initiative was made possible through a five-year, $2.9 million Project Prevent Grant from the United States Department of Education, and is focused not only on keeping kids in school, but also on providing targeted support and training for those individuals on the front lines of managing childhood trauma: educators.
To continue reading this article by Shane Downing, go to: https://chronicleofsocialchang...klands-schools/14975
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