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When it comes to children's brains, Rahil Briggs describes them as ... sticky. "Whatever we throw, [it] sticks. That's why they can learn Spanish in six months when it takes us six years," says the New York City based child psychologist, "but also why if they're exposed to community violence, or domestic violence, it really sticks." Briggs works at the Healthy Steps program at the Montefiore Comprehensive Health Care Center in the South Bronx, screening children as young as 6 months for...

A little over two years ago, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed into law “The Safe and Supportive Schools Framework.” This statute creates the conditions for schools to become safe and supportive by establishing a statewide framework that incorporates trauma sensitiv ity . The law , signed August 13, 2014, also established the Safe and Supportive Schools Commission to provide the legislature and the state with recommendations on how best to ensure that all schools have the time and...

I recently wrote a blog post about how to take the first step in creating a trauma informed care model (TIC) in your school. The first step, Establishing a Baseline, is necessary because it fuels future steps in the process. In the blog post "Is Your School Ready to be Trauma Informed and Trauma Sensitive," I also listed the key components of a TIC model. I am adding them here as well, because I don't want you to have to keep going back to the other blog as you are working on this process.

Check out NPR's interactive app exploring mental health in public schools. http://apps.npr.org/mental-health/

Trauma-Informed Instruction: The new foundation for a positive school climate Please join us for a free one-hour webinar next week on Trauma-Informed Instruction for K-12 educators and administrators. We hope you'll consider joining us on Wednesday, September 7th at 2:00pm Eastern. In this webinar, Leora Wolf-Prusan, Ed.D. (School Climate & Student Support Specialist at WestEd) and Lara Kain (Senior Director of Transform Schools at Los Angeles Education Partnership) will discuss: The...

Kansas City Star, Letter to the Editor Keith Martin Overcoming abuse As a pediatric resident physician, I treat kids whose problems extend beyond the diseases I learned about in medical school. Often, helping children and families requires looking into root causes hidden outside of doctors’ offices. One such problem is toxic stress endured by children who have had adverse childhood experiences such as child abuse, neglect or family dysfunction. In the late 1990s, a landmark study of 17,000...

A brilliant idea by Kyle Schwartz , a grade school teacher, was used in class. She started a sentence students could finish. It was "I wish my teacher knew...." It became a Twitter campaign #iwishmyteacherknew and a book by the same name. I'm so glad. The experiences of children, in their own words, are being shared and it's powerful. Here's a snippet below from the New York Times article . The teacher's quote is important as is what the child wrote. As a writer and a mother and an advocate,...

If you are like many teachers, social workers, or administrators in schools, you've been reading about the need for trauma informed care and trauma sensitive schools. Odds are you didn't need to read the research to know something that you were already seeing in your classrooms, school hallways, and community. Unfortunately reading about it, seeing the need, wanting to make changes, doesn't make the change happen. Five years ago, as the executive director of a school that needed to change, I...

Attorney General Kamala D. Harris Issues New Guidelines to Encourage Secure Sharing of Information Between Schools and Child Welfare Agencies to Better Serve Foster Youth Attorney General Kamala D. Harris today announced that the California Department of Justice’s Bureau of Children’s Justice (BCJ), the California Department of Education (CDE), and the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) have jointly developed statewide guidelines for school districts, county offices of...

By Nick McCrea, BDN Staff Posted Sept. 01, 2016, at 5:43 p.m. NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine — A nonprofit that works with youth at risk of not making it through high school has applied to fill the last open charter school slot in the state. New Gloucester-based Wayfinder Schools wants to start Wayfinder Academy, which would begin with about 100 high schoolers, primarily teen parents and other at-risk youth. The group already runs residential and home-based programs for about 80 teens who risked...

Date: September 1, 2016 Source: Elsevier Science Daily The children of traumatized people have long been known to be at increased risk for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and mood and anxiety disorders. However, according to Rachel Yehuda from the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who led a new study in Biological Psychiatry , there are very few opportunities to examine biologic alterations in the context of a watershed...

Futures Without Violence has developed a funding guide for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). They hope the guide will be useful in your efforts to ensure that all students can attend school safe, healthy, and ready to learn. The United States Department of Education will be issuing both regulations and non-regulatory guidance in the weeks and months ahead to provide additional clarity about ESSA. We encourage you to visit the Department’s dedicated website to ESSA, www.ed.gov/essa, for...