Addressing childhood trauma in Laconia schools

Over the last few years, the Laconia School District has been actively working to understand what childhood trauma is, how it impacts our students, and what we, as an educational institution can do to mitigate the effects of this. We have also learned about secondary, or vicarious, trauma. This type of trauma is experienced by our staff as a result of supporting our students who are living with ongoing and pervasive trauma. Our teachers and support staff are serving in pseudo social worker or caregiver roles for many students, which falls outside of the typical academic instruction.

We have learned that many children experience a traumatic or adverse event, such as living through a natural disaster or serious car accident. Other children experience trauma that is considered ongoing, pervasive and sustained over time. That includes things such as living in a home with domestic violence, experiencing homelessness, or living with a parent or family member who is struggling with drug addiction or mental illness. Children are vulnerable to traumatic or adverse experiences and researchers have spent decades working to better understand the fallout of childhood trauma on brain development and their physical and mental health.

In the 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente conducted the first study to determine the long-term physical and mental health affects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Examples of ACEs are physical and sexual abuse, parental neglect, violence within the home, parental separation, divorce or incarceration and the death of a parent. They found that many adult physical health conditions – including alcoholism, drug use, heart disease, obesity, and other serious illnesses – are directly related to the adversity experienced during childhood and that there is a higher rate of ACEs for individuals living in poverty. They also found that an adult’s quality of life, including levels of risk taking and psychological issues, are directly correlated to their level of ACEs. Essentially, trauma impedes students’ ability to learn and express positive social and emotional behaviors in school.

As we have come to understand the lifelong affects of ACEs, we realized that we needed to increase our schools’ abilities to provide protective factors for our students. Protective factors are things like positive school culture and climate, positive relationships between students and staff, environments that feel safe, individual ability to self-regulate and individual understanding of how our brain develops and works. We learned that there are things we can be doing as educators to support our students in their ability to adapt to changes more easily, to develop hope for their futures when their current home lives may feel hopeless, and to better get our students brains in the right space to allow for academic learning to take place.

As a result, the Laconia School District’s Office of School Wellness applied to be a part of the state’s first coordinated effort to develop Trauma Sensitive Schools (TSS). Project GROW (Generating Resilience, Outcomes, and Wellness) is a partnership project with the state Department of Education’s Bureau of Student Wellness, the Center for Behavioral Health Innovation at Antioch University and five other school districts in the state. We are currently in year two of this work, with a leadership committee comprised of representatives from every Laconia school guiding our work. While each building is at a different phase of implementation, all staff have received TSS professional development, and some schools have received targeted training, consultation and undergone an evaluation of their current practices.

As with all new changes in public education, nothing happens overnight. True and sustainable change takes time, commitment and systems overhaul. For these reasons we are being slow and methodical about this work to ensure that it lives on into the future. We will be working over the next few years to (1) continue to look at our policies, practices and procedures to ensure they are trauma-informed, (2) promote positive social, emotional and behavioral outcomes for our students, (3) increase our staff’s ability to approach students through a trauma-informed lens, (4) increase our students and staff’s sense of safety and, (5) increase positive relationships among students, staff, and families. We believe that positively impacting these domains of wellness for our students and staff will increase the academic and long-term successes for our students.