By Carmel de Bertaut, Benito Link, September 16, 2019
On September 5, the San Benito County Office of Education hosted Jessie Fuller of Collaborative Learning Solutions for a three-hour workshop on trauma-informed responses in schools. Fuller, a California League of Schools’ Teacher of the Year, spoke to a room of principals, teachers, therapists, and school staff about the causes of stress, ways it can manifest, and solutions to deal with it.
With the message of “hurt people, hurt people,” she explained that children cannot always tell you they suffer from toxic stress, but that they will express it with bad behavior. Toxic stress differs from normal, even healthy stress such as the kind felt when preparing for an exam or a visit to the doctor, Fuller said. Toxic stress is caused by sexual or other physical abuse, hunger, poverty, addictions in family members, incarceration of a parent and other factors.
The factors causing toxic stress are referred to as adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs. The more ACEs a child has, the more likely he or she will have behavioral problems, which can be wide-ranging but include shutting down emotionally, missing school, and verbal and physical altercations.
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