Back to school Issues

Back to School Issue Transitions - you know that the beginning and end of the school year are tough times when you're raising a child with a trauma history. Whether or not your child can verbalize it appropriately, she's probably experiencing fear and anxiety. You may be experiencing your own anxiety, and you may need to educate new teachers and staff about your child's conditions and needs. This edition of our newsletter is dedicated to providing resources to help you, your child, and everyone on your child's team understand. Please register for our upcoming webinar, Children of Trauma: What Educators Need to Know, scheduled for 7 pm central on Wednesday, September 5. This will be an updated version of last year's webinar. Educating the Child with a History of Trauma Children of Trauma: What Educators Need to Know (article) by Kathleen Benckendorf. Article suitable for distributing to the educational team. Adoption Awareness in School Assignments by Christine Mitchell. Alternatives to assignments like Family Tree, Bring a Baby Picture, heritage assignments, and more. Helping Traumatized Children Learn published by Massachusetts Advocates for Children. Fabulous, and comprehensive guide from a trauma informed perspective. Lengthy, but worth the effort to read it. Children of Trauma: What Educators Need to Know Recorded webinar, approx. an hour, by Kathleen Benckendorf of Attachment and Integration Methods. The Colorado Post Adoption Resource Center has a great publication called Family Diversity in Education: Foster Care, Kinship Care, Adoption and Schools It is filled with great information about behaviors, trauma, brain development, FASD beyond diversity. Also, whereas many other publications talk about students who continue to live in circumstances that may be chaotic or violent, this publication addresses the perspective of the adoptive, foster, or kinship parents who were not party to the original trauma. The Heart of Learning and Teaching Compassion, Resiliency and Academic Success Written for teachers, from a trauma informed perspective. Calmer Classrooms: A Guide to Working with Traumatized Children Australian publication that provides a good intro to the way early trauma affects attachment and leads to later maladaptive behaviors. Child Trauma Toolkit for Educators Basic information aimed at highlighting the prevalence of trauma in the lives of children, and school behaviors that may indicate the student has experienced trauma. Creating Sanctuary in the School From the Journal for a Just and Caring Education, this article focuses on the creation of school environments that create a feeling of safety for students with a history of trauma. An environment that feels safe is necessary for both learning and healing. Childhood Trauma and Dissociation – FAQs for Teachers - Students on the dissociation continuum may fly under the radar while students who act out garner the lion's share of the attention. This publication shows how to identify students who internalize more and dissociate, and provides recommendations for handling such situations. Creating Trauma Sensitive Schools: Reducing the Impact of Trauma as a Barrier to Learning by Jenny Caldwell Curtin, Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Short introduction. Shift Your Perspective: Trauma Informed Care (a PowerPoint presentation) Good information on trauma, its potential effects on school performance and other life domains, physiological and developmental effects of stress and trauma, and how to create more trauma-sensitive schools and classrooms. Kindness, Kith, Kin, Compassion, and Community: A Response Model Connecting Human Services and Education to Address Trauma Provides good background on stress and trauma and how they can affect school performance and behaviors, and a school model to promote resiliency in students. Mental Health Fact Sheets for the Classroom A collection of fact sheets on a variety of mental health disorders, many of which can be co-occurring in children with a history of trauma. Adoption and School: Why the classroom discipline plan often fails for our kids by Julie Drew. Sticker charts, red-green-yellow behavior cards, and "Fun Fridays" are often ineffective for children with a trauma history. Read why, and learn alternative ways to deal with behavioral concerns. IEP Helps for Parents Wrightslaw has TONS of resources. The files below can be modified for your own use. The first file is a historical comparison table showing for each year (grade / age) how things were going at school (taken directly from teacher comments on report cards, assignments, and in IEP meetings), at home (parent comments), and a listing of traumatic events. When viewed as a whole, this document tends to portray a picture of a damaged child – rather than a disobedient child or a hostile and over-controlling parent. Hopefully as you create this document, you will yourself see patterns that you may not even have realized before. I suggest having an educational advocate look over this document for wording before using it in a meeting or turning it over to educators or school staff. Historical Comparison example The next file is a blank Word version of the above document you can modify for your own use. Historical Comparison blank The next file is an example letter from a therapist describing the impact of attachment disorders and PTSD on school behaviors and performance, specifically tailored to a particular child. If you can get your own therapist to provide a similar letter, it may carry a lot of weight at school, perhaps more so than the articles listed here. Letter: Psychological Impacts of RAD and PTSD at School Finally, a simple little thing called “Parental Concerns” letter. Write one, documenting all your concerns and ask that the letter be included in the IEP. The little box they give for parental concerns on the IEP form isn’t big enough. The school is legally required to include it. with the formal IEP records. It doesn’t guarantee that those who need it most will read it, but it’s part of your continuing trail of documentation. The following is an example. Parental Concerns letter example Crisis Management Not strictly a school issue, crises can occur at any time. The following guides will help you prepare for potential crises, and manage a crisis more confidently should you find yourself in the middle of one. Mental Health Crisis Planning for Families published by NAMI - MN - Learn how to recognize, manage, prevent and plan for your child's mental health crisis. How to Work Effectively with Police when Youth are in a Mental Health Crisis Tip sheet for families of children and youth with mental, emotional, or behavioral health problems.