Part 2 - Peek Inside a Classroom: Danny goes to school

by Daun Kauffman, Pennsylvania BAT

originally published on his blog: http://lucidwitness.com/2014/09/13/danny-goes-to-school/

  

Danny Goes to School

Danny’s young parents struggled to find steady jobs and income for their family. (All names are pseudonyms for real people in a very true story.)  Both parents were still dealing with the trauma and stress experienced from their own family’s relocation to the U.S..  Their families had left everything.
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Photo © Daun Kauffman

Danny’s family moved into a rough section of a major city, full of crime and drugs.  He lived with two older siblings, Mom and Dad.   Sadly, Danny’s dad (also named Danny) was violently murdered when Danny was very young.  During Danny’s early years, he was told his dad was “away”.

Danny’s mother, Maria, left alone to support all three children, became despondent and desperate herself.  Drinking and drugs seemed to dull her grief and stress.  Her own attempts to survive financially, regretfully led to her incarceration.  Danny was left without a normal relationship with either parent.  After his mother was released from prison, Danny and siblings lived with Maria for a time, in a deteriorating row house in another crime-ridden neighborhood.  Danny still believed his father was “away”.

Maria was preoccupied with trying to find work and restarting her life including training at the community college.  The traumas of her husband’s murder and memories of childhood violence were engulfing at times.

  Photo by Concha García Hernández

The older siblings had also often witnessed violence.  They had a different father, who had taken custody while Maria was incarcerated.  Reunited with their mother, they now bore the brunt of Maria’s frustration and stress.  Danny often witnessed rage and terrifying violence between his mother and siblings, eventually leading to Maria’s decision to send them back to their dad.

Danny told me that, in his own mind, he was responsible for his separation from his siblings.  He misses them both, especially his older brother.

All alone with Danny, his mother now confided in him that his father was not “away”, but that he had been murdered.  Confusion and grief tortured Danny .

It was at that point, eight years of age, Danny walked into my second grade classroom.  Some days, at first, he seemed resilient.

Photo by Jorge Royan

Danny could share a great, toothy smile that stretched from ear to ear. That smile that connected his ears to his always-bent-or-broken glasses. The layers of tape seemed to mangle the frames more than they helped. . .
Danny loved learning and sharing about his family’s culture. He also loved to run, sprinting, seemingly free as a bird, in those moments.  Danny was a talented artist too, at times loosing track of his surroundings while he created other worlds on paper.

On his good days,  it was clear that Danny’s academic ability was on par or ahead of his classmates and his street smarts were well above average. Those were precious, rare days.

Underneath Danny’s smile was a learned mistrust of adults, and refusal to attach.  Danny’s mother was using alcohol again, and he’d been told (and then physically reminded) that spilling a single drop  any of Mom’s alcohol would result in immediate punishment: standing naked in a frightening, extended icy-cold shower. He also hinted that “somebody’s” anger was why his glasses were broken or “lost” so regularly.

His mistrust created misunderstandings with other kids too.  He spent recess alone as often as he joined in with others.  Danny once told me that his favorite toy and game was “guns”… so that he would be practiced and ready when he was able to find his father’s killer…

Although Danny’s chronological age was only 8, his life was already overwhelmed with fear and loss.  His hyper-vigilant scanning for any threat he might perceive in the classroom created a wall between Danny and others.  Often, Danny’s traumas could be retriggered by a classmate’s slight shift in position, or the most innocent comment or look.  It was impossible to anticipate.  Sometimes Danny arrived at school already triggered by events at home or along the way.  When his fears were triggered, Danny could go off track quickly with a loud, nervous laugh, or an equally disruptive threat yelled to someone across our classroom.  Then he would rip up his classwork, and throw his books, dump his desk, and often make a run for the hallway, with angry tears, screaming “f___ you”.  His classmates watched, gripped in fear.  Danny didn’t know it, but 11+ other children in the same room had similar life stories filled with trauma.

At other times, Danny kept his panic hidden, emotionally “dissociating”, maybe drawing or reading something off-topic, but experiencing the same fear state.  At least twice during his dissociating, Danny quietly, but tensely broke small plastic pencil sharpeners.  When confronted, he quickly put a jagged piece, on his tongue and when further approached, he swallowed.  On another occasion he threatened to swallow the loose blade…

Maria was informed, and the seriousness of Danny’s state was clearly explained.  Her initial responses were to claim that Danny was just having a bad day and to inflict corporal punishment at home.  “It will go away”, Maria claimed.

Meanwhile, our school district did not have other spaces or adults available to allow Danny to de-escalate.  I could not leave the other 25+ children to be with Danny.  Our counselor was on long-term leave with no replacement.  Our school was not staffed with a nurse, daily.

Photo © Daun Kauffman

Danny’s story is NOT an aberration.   Most of my students(6 to 10 years old) know someone who was murdered…  There is about a murder a day, on average, in our city.  Many of the victims have children or familes.  Murder is only one trauma source.  In our classroom there were at least 11 other children with 3+ categories of trauma, who were equally often triggered, often by each other.  See Failing Schools or Failing Paradigm?

 

Wide Scope

Groundbreaking research into childhood trauma, was conducted by Felitti and Anda/CDC among 17,000 participants.  The participants were suburban, middle-class, college-educated, mostly white, employed people with health insurance. Keep in mind: beautiful, suburban San Diego.

The research defined 10 categories of  “adverse childhood experience” (ACE):  physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, or physical or emotional neglect; and/or reside in households with members addicted to alcohol or drugs, or have a mental illness, or where children witness a mother being battered, or lose a parent to separation or divorce or incarceration.

The research findings were stunning !  Two-thirds of participants had experienced at least one of the CDC’s types of childhood adversity, and 22% had experienced 3 or more ACE categories.  Increased ACEs correlated with earlier death ! Prior to death,  experiencing 3+ ACEs correlated with  doubling the risks of depression, adolescent pregnancy, lung disease, and liver disease. It triples the risk of alcoholism and STDs. There is a 5X increase in attempted suicide.




ACE rates seem even higher in urban settings. Across our city, on average, a shocking 37% of the urban population (tens of thousands of children) has experienced 4 or more ACEs, according to the data.  In our specific zip code, the prevalence is a devastating   45+% with 4+ ACEs, essentially half of the children!
It is morally wrong to normalize childhood fear, injury  and ongoing trauma (no matter who is to blame).  How can we just accept this crisis and continue?

The children are not sick or bad, they are injured.  As educators, we cannot immediately prevent the injury, pain or chronic trauma.  But we can fulfill our mission in public schools to educate all who come in through our doors.  See “Do Children Have a Right to be Safe ?”
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Towards Trauma Competency

In a safe setting, a school district would screen for childhood trauma, then injuries would be acknowledged and attended to as the priority.  Whether those injuries are physical, emotional and/or neurological is not relevant.  Equal access to their education is physiologically impossible in “survival” mode.

The lead ACE investigators documented many impacts of 3+ ACEs in the presentation  “Connecting a Developmental Lens to the Health of Society”(especially pgs. 50,51).  Classroom-specific impacts of not addressing the trauma included worse health, more frequent suspension, lower standardized test scores, more frequent designation as special education students, 250% more likely to be retained in grade.

Photo © Daun Kauffman

Trauma-impacted children who are not identified and who live with unaddressed trauma can not access education equally.  They do not perform on standardized tests at the same level as others.  Yet, to receive funding from various sources, our state and our district, continue to be required to evaluate the children  (like Danny) solely as a conglomeration of “standardized test” scores.

It should be the adults who have accountability for training to become trauma-informed.  Adults have responsibility to screen, identify and address trauma in children.  Adults have accountability to accomplish the above promptly to protect the child from permanent damage from chronic traumatic stress.

Away from Trauma Competency

Conversely, many “Education Reformers” (most have not been in our classrooms) are blindly oblivious to the child’s injuries and to the child’s resulting, continuing  fears and stress.  None of the above is even discussed by “reformers”.  Classroom impacts are not acknowledged.  The epidemic of childhood trauma is widely ignored in reformers’ misfocused, impersonal, reform “prescriptions”.

Ignoring, or not caring, adult Education “Reformers” continue to push and push for more ‘standardization’, more testing.

Photo by Alex “eflon” on Flickr

They push on, effectively “bullying” the children, even though the test content itself is in question.  They “bully”,   even though the data says that enduring the test and its high stakes adds even more trauma to already very precarious emotions for Danny and many of his classmates.  “The test” does not discriminate trauma-impacted children from others.  Instead, the test ignorantly masses together our “epidemic”  22% to 45+% trauma-impacted children with all other children into one “score” for the school, and then misleadingly compares the school’s score to other schools.  (Of course this still ignores the additional, roughly 20% of our students who have IEPs, or are ELLs, who also can’t equally access the test,  in this same “mass” score.)

The “reformers'” ill-advised approach is so very unsafe in many ways for so many of our children.
The ultimate injustice is then to classify, or label individual trauma-impacted children like Danny based solely on results of “the test”.
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Becoming Active

I choose to confront the bully.  Join me.

Children do have a right to be safe, in all ways,  when they go to school and they have a right of equal access to their education.

Photo Pixabay public domain

• If you’re not trauma-informed , read here, or  research childhood-trauma  or seek training here or here.

• Listen to a child’s story.  Go back to the child; listen again.

• Read “Failing Schools or Failing Paradigm?“

• Be part of a group (or start one) which invests one-to-one with a group of trauma-impacted children.

• Help raise awareness of trauma in your school and community.  “Share” this blog broadly.

• Read “Do children have a right to be safe ?“

• Learn about political strategies in MA, WA and San Francisco.

• Vote.

Course corrections must all start with the child as the priority.

                       “. . . we must not look away”

Now, when I see a child with a small, plastic pencil sharpener, I still trigger…

“Peek Inside a Classroom” is a series about childhood trauma in public education.   Another part, “Peek Inside a Classroom: Jasmine:“ is here.  “Jasmine” defends against childhood trauma more aggressively than Danny.   “José,  at “Peek Inside a Classroom; José” uses a detached, dissociating defense, which can be confusing.