Susan E. Craig - Trauma-Sensitive Schools for the Adolescent Years: Promoting Resiliency and Healing, Grades 6–12

Jim Sporleder

Public schools are at a critical crossroads. They face challenges on all sides: legislative mandates and educational policy written by legislators who have never been in a classroom; negative public opinion ratings; a growing number of students with behavior problems who are unprepared for and disconnected from the learning environment; and despite great effort, only minor improvements in student performance. As a result, the stress level is high for adults working in schools. Some of our best teachers leave the profession because they are unable to cope with their own burnout and sense of hopelessness.

As a principal of the first public high school in the country to adopt a trauma-informed and resiliency-building approach, I know it is possible to change our approach and make a difference. At the Lincoln Alternative High School in Walla Walla, WA, when we embraced a trauma-informed approach in 2011, miracles began to happen. As teachers learned to appreciate the effects of toxic stress on learning rather than to simply react to students behavior, the school suspension rate decreased by 85%. Not long after, Lincoln High School started getting the results staff thought were out of our reach only months before: higher attendance, higher grade point averages, higher graduation rates, and fewer discipline problems. Trauma-Sensitive Schools for the Adolescent Years: Promoting Resiliency and Healing, Grades 612 provides schools with the guidance they need to have the kind of turn around we saw in Walla Walla, and embark on the path of implementing trauma sensitive schools.

Dr. Susan Craig lays out a sequential plan for implementation of the trauma-sensitive school. She clearly provides the neuroscience on how trauma has a direct correlation with a childs brain development, and how this impacts her or his behavior. As Heather T. Forbes, LCSW, and author of Help for Billy shares, we dont have a behavior issue, we have a brain issue. The students that have been impacted by toxic home environments (as well as additional toxicity from their larger community) develop a brain for survival. The survival brain is not a bad brain, but it is a brain that is always on alert, due to the unpredictability and harm caused by environments in which adolescents have very little or no agency. As you will learn from this book, it is the caregivers of these children that are responsible for their brain development, and we know that the brain drives the students behavior. If we take a moment to reflect, we will see how the author connects the dots for us and explains why we are seeing more and more students coming to us unprepared, and why we are dealing with such challenging behavior. When we look at how pervasive these traumatic experiences are, and how they pile up, we gain a deeper understanding as to the significant effect of trauma on students in our middle and secondary schools.

There is compelling evidence-based research to support a trauma-informed approach to student discipline. Susan Craigs book provides the scientific evidence and the reasons why it is so critical that schools take this new path in serving our students. The trauma-sensitive school approach is best practice for all students, and it will bring about the changes we want to see for everyone. Why? Because we know that a trauma-informed approach is the pathway to providing a safe haven where our struggling students acquire the resilience they need in a safe school environment; an environment where the adults intentionally develop caring adult relationships with all of their students. Morally, this is what every one of our students deserves: a pathway to becoming the person they were meant to be, not how they are defined by their negative toxic environment. You can choose the path to becoming a trauma-sensitive school with confidence. The neuroscience is clear: healthy caring adult relationships teach resilience, which leads to changing students negative belief systems, which then opens the door to hope, healing, and optimism for their future.

I believe that it is paramount for us to use this evidence-based research to guide us in this most rewarding journey. Hurting kids can grow up to become hurting adults who hurt others. A school that employees a trauma-sensitive lens to care for their students has the powerful opportunity to help a hurting student become a resilient and confident adult capable of breaking through the barriers of trauma. Students then have the resilience to use their experiences as stepping-stones for personal growth and to become contributing members of our society. As educators, this is the most priceless gift we have to offer our students impacted by trauma. We cant reach 100% of our students, but we can love them 100%.

I think you will find this book a valuable guide on your journey to becoming a trauma-sensitive school. And you will find that as you work to transform your students, they will transform you. A trauma-sensitive school isnt what you do, it becomes who you are as a school culture, and your motivation to create the one caring adult relationship that can influence your students paths in becoming the people that each of them is meant to be.

Jim Sporleder, retired principal
Lincoln Alternative High School, Walla Walla, WA,
profiled in the documentary film Paper Tigers and
coauthor, with Heather T. Forbes, The Trauma-Informed School:
A Step-by-Step Implementation Guide for Administrators and School Personnel

My interest in understanding the relationships between violence and childrens cognitive development began in the early 1980s when I was working as a reading teacher. I wanted to know why so many young, aggressive children, who did not meet the criteria for learning disabilities or mental retardation, were unable to read. The question led me to doctoral studies at the University of New Hampshires Family Research Lab, where I completed a dissertation on the effects of violence on childrens cognitive development. The results showed a relationship between exposure to family violence and deficits in childrens language development, memory, attention, and locus of control. Concerns about the causal direction of the relationships tempered the power of these findings.