Breaking Down the Issue

• Trauma disrupts the development of core cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral competencies that are needed to succeed in school.
• Trauma is broadly experienced across the U.S. student population, but disproportionately concentrated among members of racially and ethnically marginalized and lower-income communities.
• The pandemic has placed increased pressure on schools to provide mental health support, especially for schools serving racially and ethnically marginalized students, and those living in lower-income communities.
• Many teachers and staff members report that they need more training in recognizing and responding to student trauma.

Strategies to Consider

• Investments in staff mental health can improve outcomes for both students and staff members.
• Whole-school (Tier 1) strategies for addressing trauma tend to be more effective than strategies that focus only on identifying individual students for secondary intervention.
• A limited set of school-based trauma-focused Tier 2 interventions have demonstrated effectiveness in helping children and youth recover from traumatic experiences.
• Schools can increase their capacity to meet the needs of students coping with trauma by creating a school-wide plan that includes all staff, in addition to family and community stakeholders.

Strategies to Avoid

• Plans that place the burden for supporting students on clinical staff, such as school social workers and counselors, are unlikely to be effective.
• One-shot awareness- building professional development that doesn’t connect to strategies for how educators can respond to students’ needs are unlikely to lead to improved student outcomes.

Trauma disrupts the development of core cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral competencies that are needed to succeed in school.

Unaddressed trauma can show up as internalizing and externalizing behaviors. The externalizing behaviors can often show up as challenging behavior in school.

• Trauma refers to the psychological, emotional, and spiritual wounds that are created by one or more events that overwhelm a person’s abilities to cope.
• Students experiencing trauma often externalize their feelings of distress into oppositional behaviors that can be challenging for educators. These include aggression, defiance, attachment disruptions, relational mistrust, and emotional dysregulation. Challenging student behaviors escalate when responded to with punitive and exclusionary discipline.
• Students experiencing trauma can also internalize their feelings of distress into behavior that often goes unnoticed and unaddressed in the classroom. Some of these behaviors include lack of engagement, anxiousness, and somatic complaints (excess focus on unexplained physical symptoms).

Unaddressed trauma diminishes students’ abilities to benefit from rigorous instruction because they are less likely to be in their “learning brain,” a regulated neurobiological state that facilitates the processing and encoding of information.

• The brain science of trauma informs us that chronic activation of the brain’s stress response reduces capacities of memory consolidation, concentration, sustained attention, and retaining or recalling information.
• Greater awareness of the common behavioral responses to trauma can minimize over-diagnosis of pathologizing and stigmatizing conditions, such as learning disabilities, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, emotional disturbance disorders, and oppositional defiant disorders.

Trauma is broadly experienced across the U.S. student population, but disproportionately concentrated among members of racially and ethnically marginalized and lower-income communities.

Approximately 25% of school-aged children overall and 80% of children in high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods have experienced at least one traumatic event that can profoundly affect child development.

• Large sociodemographic disparities in exposure to community violence and other traumatic stressors place subgroups of students at differential risk for school failure, and in turn, increased risk of criminal justice system involvement.

Research from previous disasters informs us to expect that serious mental health challenges will be exhibited by as many as one in three children who are in families that were directly affected by the COVID-19 virus and by the negative economic effects of the pandemic.

• The direct loss of caregivers to the virus, parental distress due to sudden and devastating job loss, and overall increased stress among adults in the household can contribute to child mental health challenges.
• The National Association of School Psychologists estimates that the COVID-19 pandemic will result in an overall doubling or tripling of students who exhibit social, emotional, and behavioral challenges at school.
• Strong evidence shows there is racial disproportionality in the likelihood that remote learning will be associated with increased exposure to adverse home and community contexts that increase psychological, emotional, and behavioral dysregulation.

The pandemic has placed increased pressure on schools to provide mental health support, especially for schools serving racially and ethnically marginalized students, and those living in lower-income communities.

70% of children who receive mental health services receive care in a school setting.

• Only 16% of all American children receive any mental health services, and of those receiving care, over 70% receive that care in a school setting.
• Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, schools had limited capacity to meet children’s needs for mental health care. The overwhelming majority of children in need of care do not receive services; this is especially true of children in low-income households.

The pandemic is exacerbating already large disparities in the presence of mental health challenges and access to coping and recovery services.

• SAMHSA’s report on COVID-19 and Behavioral Health Disparities for Black and Latino Communities in the U.S. highlights important differences in need and access across these groups. Indigenous/Native American communities are also disproportionately affected by the pandemic; addressing inequalities in school-based resources is necessary for mitigating vulnerability to COVID-19.
• Research from Hurricane Katrina and other disasters showed that mental health challenges were higher among racial and ethnic minority youth because their families were the most affected while having the least access to support.

Many teachers and staff members report that they need more training in recognizing and responding to student trauma.

Researchers found that even before the pandemic, most educators felt unprepared to meet the social and emotional needs of children coping with trauma.

• Classroom teachers reported needing training on how trauma affects students, and training that would help them define their roles in relation to students’ academic, behavioral, and social and emotional needs.
• Studies show that many educators also perceive a false dichotomy between meeting students’ social and emotional learning needs versus their academic needs.
• Research shows that staff struggle to support students coping with trauma and stress if they themselves are experiencing poor mental health.

Plans that place the burden for supporting students on clinical staff, such as school social workers and counselors, are unlikely to be effective.

Pull-out interventions focused on developing social skills don’t result in sustained learning unless they are coupled with practice and reinforcement in the classroom and other school spaces.

Social workers and counselors can be more effective by working with teachers to make their classrooms more developmentally supportive, rather than relying on pulling out individual students.

• Students spend the majority of their time with classroom teachers, and reliance on pull-out interventions comes with the cost of loss of instructional time.
• Additionally, multidisciplinary teaming increases collaboration and communication across staff roles in ways that improve school culture and climate.

One-shot awareness-building professional development that doesn’t connect to strategies for how educators can respond to students’ needs is unlikely to lead to improved student outcomes.

Effective professional development requires applied, pragmatic, and case-based learning for staff to learn and implement problem-solving strategies.

Professional development programming must be ongoing in order to improve teacher confidence and preparation, and it must address staff experiences of trauma in their own lives in order for them to address it professionally in their work with students.