Kid Refuge

Typically an upcoming holiday break leaves young students with their noses pressed against the schoolhouse window, ready to bolt for freedom as soon as that last bell sounds.

But at Spokane’s Bemiss Elementary, teachers noticed something unusual: Their students weren’t excited. The holidays meant losing the predictability of school, Principal Kevin Peterson says, and rather than freedom, many of the students faced two weeks of not knowing when or how they’d be fed (85 percent of the school’s population receives free or reduced lunch).
For many, the holidays may mean returning to a bad family situation — or no family situation.

“I’m always careful when saying, ‘What are you going to do for Thanksgiving?’” Bemiss counselor Kara Eckhardt says. Many of the kids don’t know; others just don’t want to think about it.

For young students with chaotic home lives, school can be a refuge, a shelter from the storms at home. And now teachers at Bemiss are trying to understand how best to reach those students traumatized by poverty and uncertainty. This fall, after receiving a Mental Health Transformation grant, the school partnered with WSU Spokane and the Devereux Institute to study the issue.

They’re taking workshops and reading literature. They’ve set up teams and task forces to brainstorm solutions. They’re testing a new survey to help teachers quantify and record student resilience. The goal is simple: Create a “trauma-sensitive” environment, where even the most troubled children can learn in comfort.

Fifth-grade teacher Scott Stone says some of his students lack parents at home. Some parents are working full time, some are in jail and some are too busy doing drugs.  Only one or two of his students have both parents together.

“I’ve got [fifth-grade] kids that are in charge of getting their first- and second-grade siblings up and dressed in the morning,” Stone says.

Bemiss is set on figuring out how to reach these kids. Aided by the grant money, Natalie Turner from WSU Spokane sent Bemiss teachers through a workshop session brimming with statistics, studies and research.

Yet, for all the teachers’ questions, Turner refused to give them simple answers. That’s because there really aren’t any. There’s no silver bullet, no panacea, no one-stroke psychological deus ex machina that will work on every kid.

“That’s not the way this works,” Assistant Principal Susan Surby says. “It has to be personalized to every child. … Each kid comes with a backpack, and that backpack has different experiences.” While a teacher may find some secret to reaching one kid suffering from one type of trauma, the answer may not work for others.

Trauma comes in all shades, hues and textures. It can affect smart kids and rich kids. It can stem from abuse, divorce, hunger, uncertainty, loss of a pet or incarceration of a parent.

According to “Helping Traumatized Children Learn,” a report from the Massachusetts Advocates for Children, trauma adversely affects the brain itself. The development of the prefrontal cortex can be damaged, possibly harming verbal processing and social skills. Trauma can wreak havoc with one’s ability to identify cause-and-effect relationships, take another’s perspective, regulate emotions or concentrate on classes.

This leads to the discipline dilemma: Should a traumatized kid be held to the same standard as everyone else? What’s the best way to show damaged kids that they’re being punished out of love?

It’s a thorny question Bemiss hasn’t yet untangled. But it’s bound to come up, because traumatized children are some of the most likely to act out. 

“There’s so much turmoil and chaos [at home],” Peterson says. “If it isn’t at school, they need to create it.”

So what follows is bold experimentation. Stone added a “safe break” into his discipline progression. After an unheeded warning, Stone sends disruptive kids to a corner to think and write about what’s going on. That lets Stone figure out what the students are struggling with.

“It’s a fine line between holding kids accountable for their actions, but being sensitive to that trauma,” Stone says.
Some kids may seem to rebel against order, lashing out against rules and authority. But they actually crave it, he says.

“The toughest kids respond so well to consistency,” Stone says. “They test me, [but] they ultimately like the order.”  If they know the rules and know the consequences, it gives them something to follow.