Jennifer Davis Carey, executive director of the Worcester Education Collaborative, discusses how an understanding of trauma’s impact on learning and TLPI’s Flexible Framework is guiding Worcester Public Schools’ response to a high rate of suspensions.
On March 1, 2004, the Boston Globe published a letter to the editor by TLPI on why An Act Relative to Safe and Supportive Schools (H3528) should pass. This law would provide a statewide framework to help schools create the safe and supportive school-wide cultures that are the foundation for a trauma-sensitive school.
Harvard Law Today covered the publication of volume 2 of Helping Traumatized Children Learn: Creating and Advocating for Trauma-Sensitive Schools, …
Susan Cole’s op-ed on the HuffPost responds to the New York Times’ five-part series on childhood homelessness, and argues that trauma-sensitive schools are critical for addressing the learning needs of homeless children.
Excerpt from article by David Bornstein
…Across the country, in Brockton, Mass., just south of Boston, the process and experience have been similar. Six years ago at the Angelo Elementary School, the principal Ryan Powers and the assistant principal Elizabeth Barry connected with the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative (T.L.P.I.), a collaboration of Massachusetts Advocates for Children and Harvard Law School, to learn how they could improve their interactions with students. They encouraged teachers to read T.L.P.I.’s book “Helping Traumatized Children Learn,” which has been downloaded 50,000 times. (The follow-up book, “Creating and Advocating for Trauma-Sensitive Schools,” is being released this week.)
In a Letter to the Editor of the New York Times, TLPI Director Susan Cole thanks columnist David Brooks for drawing attention to the effect trauma can have on children. She highlights the importance of supporting those organizations working to address this effect through the growing “trauma-sensitive schools” movement.
Article by Jane Ellen Stevens
Take a short walk on the dark side of our public education system, and you learn some disturbing lessons about school punishment. First. U.S. schools suspend millions of kids — 3,328,750, to be exact. Since the 1970s, says a National Education Policy Center report published in October 2011, the suspension rate’s nearly doubled for white kids, to nearly 6 percent. It’s more than doubled for Hispanics to 7 percent, and to a stunning 15 percent for blacks. For Native Americans, it’s almost tripled, from 3 percent to 8 percent.
Article by Jane Ellen Stevens
Since at least 2005, a few dozen individual schools across the U.S. have adopted some type of trauma-sensitive approach. But the centers of gravity for most of the action are in Massachusetts and Washington. These two states lead the way in taking a district-wide approach to integrating trauma-informed practices, with an eye to state-wide adoption.
Without a school-wide approach, “it’s very hard to address the role that trauma is playing in learning,” says Susan Cole, director of the Trauma an Learning Policy Initiative, a joint project of Harvard Law School and Massachusetts Advocates for Children.