I cannot attend the Education Committee hearing on the bill addressing adversity and trauma in our Indiana schools on Wednesday afternoon , but I have written a letter that will be shared at this hearing!
Please share and pass along as it is time for a change in our educational system!
Dear Education Committee:
Thank you for the opportunity to share this research, the experiences and the core need of all educators who sit beside our students in our state’s schools and districts.
In Indiana, one third to one fourth of our students are carrying in significant adversity/ trauma. These students are living in a survival brain state and their neuro-anatomy is in a state of dysregulation, which drives their behaviors and neurobiologically hijacks their ability to learn.
We have continued to address and purport that we are sitting within a national educational crisis where our math, science and reading scores continue to fall, and yet, this crisis is rooted in childhood adversity and trauma with poverty contributing to these statistics. We believe it is time to pause and ask critical questions: What happened to these children and youth? What are we doing? We are misunderstanding that to develop and strengthen cognition, we must begin at the students’ level of brain development.
Trauma Sensitive Schools must also address the emotional well-being of our educators who are sitting beside our students carrying in pain based behaviors. Education is an organic process and the anxiety and adversity many of our state educators are facing and feeling as they sit beside students who are holding much adversity and trauma is critical to the shift in education policy. This bill must focus on the radical emotional and social well-being of our children, youth, educators and all those who interface with Indiana children and youth.
A traumatized brain can be tired, hungry, worried, rejected, or detached, and these states are often accompanied by feelings of isolation, shame, worry, angst, and fear. Shame and fear in children can look violent and aggressive. The neurobiological changes caused by negative experiences trigger a fear response in the brain. When we feel distress, our brains and bodies are flooded with emotional messages that trigger the question, “Am I safe?” We react physiologically with an agitated limbic system that increases blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration as the levels of the hormones cortisol and adrenaline increase in our bodies. Chronic activation of the fear response can damage those parts of the brain responsible for cognition and learning.
When the brain has experienced significant adversity, it becomes fundamentally reorganized. Past experiences can live on in the body and may be experienced as flashbacks, memories, or repetitive thoughts about the painful event. Adversity and trauma live in the nervous system and don’t go away just because the trauma is over!
Many children and adolescents come to school with a deep mistrust of adults because they’ve never formed healthy attachments. These young people have brains that are in a constant state of alarm. Attachment is the carrier of all development.
These children we see every day!
T. is eight years old although his lexicon is that of a street wise 19 year old! He is angry all the time. He is volatile, aggressive, and defiant beyond words. He feels deeply and is known to protect his younger sister at all costs. A few years ago, T. watched his mother murder his father. His mother is incarcerated and his father is dead. He lives with his grandmother and last week he walked into Room 9 telling his teacher that gunshots went through the screen of his window just missing everyone in the living room. They are looking to move. T is on ADD medication, blood pressure medication and medication for depression. He is eight years old! Some mornings he walks into the classroom and just flops on the carpet and sleeps.
Quinn is seven years old. He cannot sit still for more than 15 seconds. He is constantly hungry, trying to find crumbs on the classroom floor to eat. He will drink water out of anyone’s bottle and was bathed at school last year because he was so dirty arriving to school each morning. This is when they found welts all over his little body. He flinches when an adult comes near him. He cries most of the time, with an empty far away stare that I have rarely seen from another. His eyes and mind are not present during the school day as there is a state of disconnect that I am having trouble defining. When the classroom song comes on in the afternoon reminding students it is time to clean up and get ready to go home, Quinn panics and the hardest. When he is walked to the bus, he waves at his teacher until he can no longer, then presses his face against the window pane of the bus and waves a little more! To see Quinn in class is confusing because he can start several fights each day with a look, a punch, mean words, or an act of aggression. He is not a soulless “bad” child; he is a child bathing in trauma.
There are more stories to share. There are millions of stories that sound like the ones I just shared. We are living in a time of a national and state drug / opioid epidemic, significant national and state poverty and 15 million youth who have been identified with an emotional and mental disability. Twenty-five percent of these youth are receiving some assistance for these emotional disorders. The rest are left to somehow cope on their own.
Children and adolescents who carry in trauma and adversity are presenting with “pain based behaviors” in their classrooms. These behaviors are misunderstood and often times dismissed as intentional acts of disobedience and defiance. When we use zero tolerance and punitive measures to correct these pain based behaviors we are elevating the child’s stress response and creating increased fear, aggression or dissociative behaviors where the child or adolescents shuts down! This can become a negative cycle and we are missing the mark. I see this every day across Indiana and our nation. These students are starving for regulation and relationship.
The attachment and neuroscience research is solid supporting the practices of attachment, attunement and regulation that must be in place and active before learning and cognition can occur! Educational neuroscience is that framework / discipline for the exploration of brain development, dampening down the stress response and implementing strategies that engage and build brain architecture from the bottom up. It is in our schools where regulation and relationships can develop because educators spend time with students’ each day. But unless we are mentored and trained in the brain science of adversity and trauma we will continue to cycle in negative patterns escalating conflict and aggression while elevating survival responses within brain architecture.
Thank you for the opportunity to share this research, the experiences and the core need of all educators who sit beside our students in our state’s schools and districts.
In Indiana, one third to one fourth of our students are carrying in significant adversity/ trauma. These students are living in a survival brain state and their neuro-anatomy is in a state of dysregulation, which drives their behaviors and neurobiologically hijacks their ability to learn.
We have continued to address and purport that we are sitting within a national educational crisis where our math, science and reading scores continue to fall, and yet, this crisis is rooted in childhood adversity and trauma with poverty contributing to these statistics. We believe it is time to pause and ask critical questions: What happened to these children and youth? What are we doing? We are misunderstanding that to develop and strengthen cognition, we must begin at the students’ level of brain development.
Trauma Sensitive Schools must also address the emotional well-being of our educators who are sitting beside our students carrying in pain based behaviors. Education is an organic process and the anxiety and adversity many of our state educators are facing and feeling as they sit beside students who are holding much adversity and trauma is critical to the shift in education policy. This bill must focus on the radical emotional and social well-being of our children, youth, educators and all those who interface with Indiana children and youth.
A traumatized brain can be tired, hungry, worried, rejected, or detached, and these states are often accompanied by feelings of isolation, shame, worry, angst, and fear. Shame and fear in children can look violent and aggressive. The neurobiological changes caused by negative experiences trigger a fear response in the brain. When we feel distress, our brains and bodies are flooded with emotional messages that trigger the question, “Am I safe?” We react physiologically with an agitated limbic system that increases blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration as the levels of the hormones cortisol and adrenaline increase in our bodies. Chronic activation of the fear response can damage those parts of the brain responsible for cognition and learning.
When the brain has experienced significant adversity, it becomes fundamentally reorganized. Past experiences can live on in the body and may be experienced as flashbacks, memories, or repetitive thoughts about the painful event. Adversity and trauma live in the nervous system and don’t go away just because the trauma is over!
Many children and adolescents come to school with a deep mistrust of adults because they’ve never formed healthy attachments. These young people have brains that are in a constant state of alarm. Attachment is the carrier of all development.
These children we see every day!
T. is eight years old although his lexicon is that of a street wise 19 year old! He is angry all the time. He is volatile, aggressive, and defiant beyond words. He feels deeply and is known to protect his younger sister at all costs. A few years ago, T. watched his mother murder his father. His mother is incarcerated and his father is dead. He lives with his grandmother and last week he walked into Room 9 telling his teacher that gunshots went through the screen of his window just missing everyone in the living room. They are looking to move. T is on ADD medication, blood pressure medication and medication for depression. He is eight years old! Some mornings he walks into the classroom and just flops on the carpet and sleeps.
Quinn is seven years old. He cannot sit still for more than 15 seconds. He is constantly hungry, trying to find crumbs on the classroom floor to eat. He will drink water out of anyone’s bottle and was bathed at school last year because he was so dirty arriving to school each morning. This is when they found welts all over his little body. He flinches when an adult comes near him. He cries most of the time, with an empty far away stare that I have rarely seen from another. His eyes and mind are not present during the school day as there is a state of disconnect that I am having trouble defining. When the classroom song comes on in the afternoon reminding students it is time to clean up and get ready to go home, Quinn panics and the hardest. When he is walked to the bus, he waves at his teacher until he can no longer, then presses his face against the window pane of the bus and waves a little more! To see Quinn in class is confusing because he can start several fights each day with a look, a punch, mean words, or an act of aggression. He is not a soulless “bad” child; he is a child bathing in trauma.
There are more stories to share. There are millions of stories that sound like the ones I just shared. We are living in a time of a national and state drug / opioid epidemic, significant national and state poverty and 15 million youth who have been identified with an emotional and mental disability. Twenty-five percent of these youth are receiving some assistance for these emotional disorders. The rest are left to somehow cope on their own.
Children and adolescents who carry in trauma and adversity are presenting with “pain based behaviors” in their classrooms. These behaviors are misunderstood and often times dismissed as intentional acts of disobedience and defiance. When we use zero tolerance and punitive measures to correct these pain based behaviors we are elevating the child’s stress response and creating increased fear, aggression or dissociative behaviors where the child or adolescents shuts down! This can become a negative cycle and we are missing the mark. I see this every day across Indiana and our nation. These students are starving for regulation and relationship.
The attachment and neuroscience research is solid supporting the practices of attachment, attunement and regulation that must be in place and active before learning and cognition can occur! Educational neuroscience is that framework / discipline for the exploration of brain development, dampening down the stress response and implementing strategies that engage and build brain architecture from the bottom up. It is in our schools where regulation and relationships can develop because educators spend time with students’ each day. But unless we are mentored and trained in the brain science of adversity and trauma we will continue to cycle in negative patterns escalating conflict and aggression while elevating survival responses within brain architecture.
Troubled kids are distinguished by their regrettable ability to elicit from others exactly the opposite of what they really need.
( L. Tobin )
( L. Tobin )
Respectfully,
Lori Desautels, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
College of Education
Butler University
Lori Desautels, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
College of Education
Butler University
School News:
ISTEP Trial Test - All students in grades 7,8 and 10 must participate in an ISTEP Trial test on February 7th at the beginning of 4th period. If you have students in these grades, we will be issuing you test tickets closer to time. This should only take 10-15 minutes in theory! Please just mark you calendars and more information will come out soon. 25 school days until ISTEP!
Vocational WIN Presentations - We are going to move our Vocational WIN presentations to Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week so everyone will have time to communicate this with students. We will answer questions in our faculty meeting on Tuesday.
SAT/ACT Test Prep- Please encourage students to take advantage of the SAT/ACT Test Prep Sessions that will be available to them for FREE starting this week. Sessions are in the mornings 7:05 - 7:55 a.m. On Tuesdays, students can practice English with Ms. Petty in her room and on Wednesdays, students can practice math with Mr. Linne!
Snow Make-Up - We will now be coming to school on February 19th to make up our school days, along with the first four days of Spring Break (first week.)
Congratulations! - Congrats to our Commodore Manufacturing team and teachers. Perry Central wrote a grant to the Indiana Chamber for the School Counseling-Business Partnership Award and we won! We will be recognized along with Jasper Engines in a meeting in Indy on February 7th. Steven Parr will also be recognized and win a $1000 scholarship because of his success in the program. Keep up the great work!
Important Dates:
Monday, January 22 - Math WIN Meeting - First WIN/ Counselor Scheduling Meeting 12:30/ Boys Varsity Basketball @ Southridge 5:30 p.m.
Tuesday, January 23 - Faculty Meeting 7:20 a.m./ Girls Varsity Basketball @ Rock Creek 5:30
Thursday, January 25 - AR Meetings All Day/ English Team Meeting 7:30 a.m. High School Library/ Girls Varsity Basketball @ Tell City 6:00 p.m.
Friday, January 26 - Girls and Boys Varsity Basketball @ Home vs. Crawford County (Senior Night for Girls Basketball)
Saturday, January 27 - Boys Varsity Basketball @ Lanesville 5:30 p.m.
Thursday, February 1 - Perry County Job Fair - A few juniors and seniors
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