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“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...

Education Transformations is a company that works with districts, schools, teachers, and other organizations to improve Social/Emotional Intelligence (EQ), and what we call Relational Competency. We are San Diego, CA based, but can travel.

Staff members at Northside Elementary School want to do more to support students suffering from trauma. The La Crosse Public Education Foundation has awarded a $4,000 grant in support of the trauma-informed school project, in which staff would be trained in techniques to help children who are experiencing adverse childhood experiences, such as abuse, neglect or mental illness, or are living in a home with violence or substance abuse. The school is asking for an additional $4,000 in donations...

NEA President Lily Eskelsen García and Robert Hull, member of the Maryland NEA delegation Delegations to the National Education Association (NEA) Repres entative Assembly s ummer meeting from California and Maryland combined forces to secure approval last week of a new business item on educating traumatized students. Approximately 7,000 delegates participated in the Boston meeting. Robert Hull from Maryland and a group from California put the new business item forward for consideration.

This is an excerpt from Breakaway Learners appearing in Evolllution ,and it deals with ACEs. I think the chapter in particular and the book more generally will be of interest to you all. Comments and thoughts are welcome as always. https://evolllution.com/attracting-students/todays_learner/who-are-our-students-now-and-into-the-future/

Gerson Garcia had been fighting. It happened during second-grade recess, and had to do with a ball on the playground. He was too angry to talk about it. One of his friends had seen him getting upset and alerted a teacher, who whisked him down the hallway at Enrico Fermi School 17, the skinny 8-year-old squirming in protest all the way. He ended up in the office of school sentry Miguel Rivera and — still not speaking — made a beeline for the trampoline. When Rivera started working in the...

There is nothing more motivating for teachers and school support staff than identifying ways they can reach students. That is happening statewide as the Illinois Education Association, with 135,000 union members, addresses the impact of trauma and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on the ability of students to learn. New brain research proves ACEs, recurring experiences that create such trauma that the brain literally changes, lead to behaviors such as fighting, fleeing or shutting down.

When bullied children stay home to avoid hurtful relationships, schools lose tens of millions of dollars each year, a new study says. And the numbers are significant: California schools alone lost $276 million in funding when students stayed home out of fear, the authors estimate. That's because those absences can lower average daily attendance rates, which are used by many states to allocate significant amounts of school funding, says the study, published this week in School Psychology...

The city of Springfield, Massachusetts, has had a serendipitous sequence of events supercharge its preschool-expansion efforts. Federal money came in just as local support for early-childhood education crested, and the closure of an early-childhood center created an opening for the school district to buy an existing facility. The federal money, offered to Springfield and four other Massachusetts communities through the Preschool Expansion Grant program, enabled 195 new seats to go to...

Districts and schools all over the country are working hard to make social-emotional learning ( SEL ) a part of the “DNA” of the educational process, meaning they’re going beyond just the adoption of an SEL curricula and are incorporating SEL into school climate, discipline policies, teacher professional development, and the like. But for educational leaders who are new to SEL or who are trying to figure out where to start, this process can seem overwhelming. [For more of this story, written...

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...

This brief examines the research on community schools, with two primary emphases. First, it explores whether the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) opens the possibility of investing in well-designed community schools to meet the educational needs of low-achieving students in high-poverty schools. And second, it provides support to school, district, and state leaders as they consider, propose, or implement a community school intervention in schools targeted for comprehensive support. [For...