What began as a presentation by ACEs Connection's Donielle Prince about ACEs science for members of the Berkeley Healthy Schools Collaborative morphed into a lively discussion about how the 11 members who attended the meeting were involved in shepherding trauma-informed practices into their organizations and schools.

Prince, who is ACEs Connection’s San Francisco Bay Area community facilitator, talked about the evolution of ACEs Connection into a network of more than 22,000 members in communities across the country who are implementing trauma-informed and resilience-building practices based on research stemming from the original CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Study.

Prince explained that the many communities on ACEs Connection are geographic or interest-based — and mentioned the ACEs in Education community as an example of the latter.

In her role as a community facilitator, she explained that she assists in the development and growth of communities in the Bay Area, and cited her work with the newly-emerging Resilient Berkeley as an example.

Prince asked participants about activities around trauma-informed practices that were occurring in their sectors.

Fawn Downs, the program supervisor for Berkeley Mental Health Family, Youth, and Children's Services, explained that her entire staff has been trained in trauma-informed systems of care. Her organization had also partnered with the City of Berkeley’s 2020 Vision committee a couple of years ago to develop strategies to tackle adversity and inequities experienced by students. Jointly, they applied and received an innovation grant and implemented the first phase of trauma-informed practices in three schools last year through training with Trauma Transformed, a project of the East Bay Agency for Children.

The three schools include Willard Middle School, Berkeley Arts Magnet at Whittier and Franklin Preschool. Next, they intend to train staff and implement trauma-informed practices at five Head Start programs.

“We want to shift the question from ‘What’s wrong with you?' to 'What happened to you?’” said Downs.  

As part of the training, they have staff take the ACE survey, she said. And they’re also providing staff with monthly learning circles. “We broke it down into small groups. Each group was facilitated by a clinician, who is a trauma-informed trainer.”

The learning circles, said Downs, were a place for staff to share what was working, what wasn’t working, what support they needed and whether the training was helping them change their approach to interacting with students.

 “I think the bottom line that we learned from this process is that in addition to our students, our staff are very traumatized and they never had a forum to really talk about it," said Downs. "And they acknowledged that being aware of their own trauma allowed them to shift their focus.”

Downs said that when they assess the trauma informed practices implementation in the schools, some of the overall questions they will ask include: “Would it reduce the number of suspensions from school? Would it reduce the frequency of students, especially students of color, from being pathologized around their mental health because of behavior that stems from trauma?”

They’re currently looking into additional funding to expand the program for three more years and into other schools in Berkeley Unified School District, explained Downs.

Prince segued into a description of a school that had transformed its school culture by looking at student behaviors through a trauma lens, She described the example of Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, which cut its suspension rate by 85 percent after one year.

Prince asked if any of the other participants agencies had been involved in trauma-informed training.

Kevin Williams, with Berkeley Youth Alternatives, said that his organization has a clinician on staff who has received trauma-informed training through the City of Berkeley and through First 5 of Alameda County.

Asked about cross-sector collaboration, Jocelyn Foreman said she received trauma-informed training through the California Federation of Teachers. Foreman is now the site coordinator for family engagement and equity at John Muir and Malcolm X schools in Berkeley, and a vice president of the Berkeley Council of  Classified Employees, Local 6192. 

“I was introduced to ACEs at a training in Costa Mesa, and it changed my mind. I ran group homes for many years, and I knew that the kids that I was serving also were in the school district," said Foreman. “I moved into family engagement at the school district, and just having a name for it [ACEs] made me love my work more.”