Susan Craig - Trauma-Sensitive Schools: Learning Communities Transforming Childrens Lives, K–5

A sea change is coursing slowly but resolutely through this nations education system. Tens of thousands of schools have discardedor are discardinga highly punitive approach to school discipline in favor of schools that are supportive and compassionate.

The formula is simple, really: Instead of waiting for kids to behave badly and then punishing them, schools are creating environments in which kids can succeed. The secret to success doesnt involve the kids so much as it does the adults: Focus on changing how teachers and administrators interact with children and, almost like magic, the kids stop fighting, acting out, or withdrawing in class. Theyre more interested in school, theyre happier, and they feel safer.

It was in 1995 that our education system lost its way. Just one year after the U.S. Congress passed the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994, the adoption of broad zero-tolerance policies spread like a prairie fire to schools across the United States. Once zero tolerance was locked in, teachers and principals warped it, some say, by the pressure to perform well on tests. Kick the troublemakers out, and theres less disruption and interruption in class. With those underperforming kids gone, test scores look better.

Suspensions and expulsions soared to ridiculous levels. By 2007, a stunning one-quarter of all public high school students had been suspended at least once during their school careers, according to a National Center for Education Statistics 2011 report. The numbers were worse for boys of color. One-third of Hispanic boys and 57% of black boys had been kicked out of school at least once (NCES, 2011).

Heres the absurd part: Only 5% of these suspensions or expulsions were for weapons or drugs. The other 95%? Disruptive behavior and other. This includes cell phone use, violation of dress code, talking back to a teacher, bringing scissors to class for an art project, giving Midol to a classmate, and, in at least one case, farting.

But punishment doesnt change behavior; it just drops hundreds of thousands of kids into a school-to-prison pipeline. The cost to taxpayers is $292,000 per dropout over her or his lifetime due to costs for more police, courts, and prisons, plus loss of income and taxes (Dropout Nation, 2012). The shift from a punitive to a supportive approach has come from two different sources: (1) From educators who were teaching children with behavior disorders, or who were creating programs to help kids deal with violence (particularly shootings) in and around their schools. (2) From those who were adapting restorative justice practices developed for the criminal justice system. All methods focused on the social and emotional lives of children, such as teaching children respect, empathy, and coping skills. Equipped with their own conflict resolution skills, teachers could defuse most situations in their classrooms instead of sending disruptive kids to the principals office.

The methods now have names such as PBIS (Positive Behavioral Intervention and Support), Safe & Civil Schools, CBITS (Cognitive Behavioral Intervention for Trauma in Schools), and restorative justice.

But a perfect storm of research shows that those methods dont go far enough. This new researchwhich is also beginning to revolutionize practices in the areas of mental health, substance abuse, social services, youth services, pediatrics, and juvenile justice systemshas been called the unified science, or theory of everything, of human development. It combines the CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (see http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy/ ), the neurobiology of toxic stress, the long-term biomedical and epigenetic consequences of toxic stress, and resilience research (Nakazawa, 2015).

In a nutshell, this research shows that the toxic stress of trauma can damage childrens brains, making it impossible for them to learn; punitive school discipline policies just further traumatize them. The research also pokes big, ragged holes in the long-held belief that if a child whos failing just works harder, she or he will achieve success.

Susan Craigs book, Trauma-Sensitive Schools, couldnt have come at a better time. In the book, she points out that this research is essential knowledge if educators want to create a school system where all children can feel safe enough to learn and succeed academically.

As Craig writes: Until schools acknowledge the seriousness of this problem and commit to resolving it, the failure of other educational reform initiatives will continue. Trauma is not just a mental health problem. It is an educational problem that, left unaddressed, derails the academic achievement of thousands of children.

In trauma-sensitive schools, however, resilience-building practices can soothe those kids and turn them back into the happy learning engines that they are in their healthy and natural states. In trauma-sensitive schools, teachers are happier, less stressed, and better at their jobs.

The trauma-sensitivealso called trauma-informedschools movement is less than a decade old. As with any good idea whose time has come, its beginnings occurred in many parts of the country, including Washington State, Massachusetts, California, and New York City.

What makes trauma-sensitive schools so important is that they dont just address the kids who are acting out. The teachers and administrators in these schools understand that the basic reaction to trauma is not just fight, but is also flight or fright (i.e., freeze). So they make sure that theyre also helping the kids who tune out, who fall asleep in class, or who isolate themselves in the classroom, in the cafeteria, or on the playground. These are the kids who arent at risk of being kicked out of schoolthese are the kids who drop out of education altogether.