What happens when schools meet trauma with compassion and understanding, not punishment

Alexa Erickson
Collective Evolution
Tue, 06 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC

Disciplining children is a controversial subject matter, and there are a lot of opinions that pit people against one another. One of the biggest issues is, not all children are created equal, and therefore one way of learning, and one way of discipling, may not work for another. So how do programs designed with one student in mind work for all students?

This is a question that New Orleans' privately run charters have had to face.

Hurricane Katrina wiped out the public schools, with many turning into privately run charters. Many of those schools took part in the no excuses discipline model, designed to hone in on and stop even the slightest misbehaviour in order to prevent bigger issues from occurring.

The elementary school Crocker College Prep in New Orleans took part in this model, requiring students to sit up straight at their desks and ensure their eyes remained on the speaker at all times. When walking the halls, they had to do so in silence. Any breaking of the rules, or acting out in any way, resulted in punishment.

But what if kids are acting out because of trauma?

This is an important question because New Orleans faces high rates of exposure to trauma, and so, while some students may benefit from strict rules, such discipline policies don't take into account the social, emotional, and behavioural needs of all students, and how they live outside of school.

According to the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies, kids in New Orleans screen positive for post-traumatic stress disorder at more than three times the national rate, and up to half of all kids have dealt with a homicide in some way. The institute also found that 20% have actually witnessed a murder.

The city also has a high poverty rate, with about 40% of kids living below the poverty line. Another issue is the state's high incarceration rate, which has left many children with a parent behind bars.

With this information, Crocker College Prep, and four other New Orleans charter schools, are working to become more trauma-informed.

"Generally there just was really not an understanding of how trauma impacts a child," explained Paulette Carter, president and CEO of the Children's Bureau of New Orleans, a mental health agency for kids and families. "Teachers and school staff really look at children through the lens of, 'What's wrong with that child?' Versus, 'What happened to that child?' "

Though there are so many children with different issues, the reasons behind them are being neglected. According to Carter, mental health workers, including herself, have worked to learn more about how trauma changes the brain.

"A kid who's been exposed to trauma ... that fight or flight response is much more developed and stronger," Carter said. "If I'm walking down the hallway and somebody bumps into me, and I don't have a significant trauma history, I'm gonna say 'Oh, sorry, excuse me,' " she continued. "Whereas a kid who's been exposed to trauma on an ongoing basis, if somebody bumps into them that might be a threat." This is when the survival brain sparks, and reasoning and logic shut off.

For Crocker, finding ways to help students dealing with such issues has become essential. Now, the school has two full-time social workers holding one-on-one sessions with students who need to talk to someone.

When students become disruptive, teachers send them to a room called a wellness center for a meditative time-out, as opposed to punishment. And when students fight, rather than being reprimanded right away, they are asked to work it out through a group discussion.

Kids acting up or shutting down don't suddenly get in trouble, because there is likely a reason for why they are doing so. This is why they get extra support as opposed to detention or suspension, which used to be the chosen route for the school to ensure kids learned their lesson and didn't act up again.

"A lot of times teachers want students punished because they say you've wronged me as a teacher," explained Crocker College Prep and Principal Nicole Boykins. "But remove yourself from the situation and think about what that student needs. Even the students who give teachers the most grief want to be here."

If kids can find solace in school, perhaps their life troubles will not go back home with them. It's a win-win for teacher and student.

Comment: Just imagine what a difference it would make to children's long-term health and mental well-being if more school systems replaced their 'resource officers' with social workers?

Reader Comments

gdpetti · 2017-06-08T01:04:17Z

Shocking, truly shocking that this is allowed here in Amerika.... this school should be and most likely will be shut down for these brazenly disturbing actions to help children cope with their problems... they should have called the cops to arrest and beat them up... that is the New Amerikan Way!

danse la vie · 2017-06-08T11:25:04Z

Apart from the fact that school teachers are not educated to diagnose their own dissociation states, hence are generally far from sensing the dissociation when it occurs to their pupils, their is another big problem that makes shools now a more and more unbalanced place to live for children. It is obvious in France, but the same trend might exist in other countries in the western world :

The school teachers are less and less paid, so that the job cannot make a living for a father to raise a family. Even if some men would love dealing with school children, they choose another, better paid position to afford a family.

This has two consequences : the men choose less and less this career and many women who choose this career do so less out of love, and more often because this bad paid job allowing free time adds money to the income of the couple.

Before high school nowadays, you find rarely male teachers. While they were still present thirty years ago, n ow most schools have exclusively female staffs .

This unbalanced school environment is very damaging for the development of the children, mostly for those children of the poorer class who have single mothers. And nobody rings the alarm.

Moreover, I have seen repeatedly another big problem : this female world tends to feminise the boys by forbidding them to fight, as if fighting were always wrong .

But how can these women expect the groun up boys to become men who are able to fight to protect the women if the boys are never allowed to fight and build themselves as men ? This slope is very unhealthy.

Levi · 2017-06-08T17:59:56Z

I am under 30 and am a male language teacher at high school in France. I am vert angry at all these scientists and experts that know everything but do nothing. All this is pure hypocrisy. It is not all black and white. There are many factors that bring to such a negative situation, and there is no single simple solution. What I ses is a hardly reversible generational degradation. Dumb parents bring up dumber kids.

While this article is not wrong, the issue is oversimplified and does not offer any solid advice that can also be implemented.

Divide By Zero · 2017-06-08T18:20:53Z

Levi The deep down issue is that despite these small fixes the education itself is messed up. When they try to force more and more standardized tests on these kids, the teachers too feel the stress of meeting unreasonable requirements. Kids and teachers who are forced into this competition with each other end up giving up or burning themselves out.

And then, this system is designed to make worker robots for corporations and the stupid upside down economy, taught to be an obedient servant

lsjarvi · 2017-06-11T19:31:55Z

I'm wishing more people were beginning to understand this. We live in a culture of controlling and punitive systems, and we're paying a high price. Unfortunately, instead of learning that 'structure' and 'control' are not synonyms, and that control only causes psychological trauma to become more entrenched, thus preventing healing, people go the easy/stupid route, which is to blame the victim for their problems. It'll be a while before this appreciably changes, but articles like this do help.