Aliyya Swaby Photo
Ana Rodriguez got reports of two weekend break-ins in one month at Clinton Avenue School. The computers were not ransacked but the teachers’ vending machine was.
The principal soon realized the burglars were her own students, in search of food and a place to spend the night.
When approached about how to best help students at Clinton Avenue who are experiencing trauma, Rodriguez (pictured) knew the answer had to be: Feed them.
Mental health clinic Clifford Beers worked with the school to start a “backpack program” through the Connecticut Food Bank, which now sends about 50 Clinton Avenue families home with nonperishable food items to hold them through the weekend.
The break-ins have stopped, Rodriguez said.
Through a five-year federal grant from the Department of Children and Families, Clifford Beers spearheaded the creation of a coalition to address “small traumas” in six local schools, prompted by the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, said Monica Daniels, project coordinator.
Filling The Gaps
Clinton Avenue is one of six pilot schools in the New Haven Trauma Coalition, along with High School in the Community, John S. Martinez School, Metropolitan Business Academy, Truman School, and Wexler/Grant School — all Boost! affiliates. The program has been in the making for a couple of years, but just got off the ground this fall.
“Right now, we are in the building relationship phase,” Daniels (pictured) said, “making sustainable systematic changes to make [school communities] more trauma informed.”
As a partner in the coalition, the district wants to change the culture of its schools to be more responsive to trauma, said Sue Weisselberg, head of wraparound services. Many children in the city have experienced trauma in some way, in ways as direct as household violence or indirect as hearing gunshots in their neighborhood.
The New Haven Trauma Coalition is one of many partnerships in a larger network targeting this issue, each with its own role and funding source. Now, collaborators are working on ensuring funding streams are “maximized” so that community groups can “coordinate, instead of replicate” services, Weisselberg said. For example, the Moms Partnership is working to set up a hub of community health “help desks” in 12 of the city’s public places, including Stop & Shop on Whalley Avenue.
The district is planning a 30,000 print run of a booklet in English and Spanish filled with resources families can use for various needs, including contacts for physical and mental health professionals, food pantries and soup kitchens, and affordable housing.
Helping families take care of basic needs will allow them time to “focus on employment opportunities” and general life success, Weisselberg (pictured) said. Sometimes parents attach a stigma to the concept of “mental illness” — framing the services as being targeted toward “stress” can help increase families’ comfort with using them.
Students Mimic Violence
Clifford Beers tackles this problem at a school level. Each of the six pilot schools needs something a little different, Daniels said. For example, Clinton Avenue has a majority Latino student body, with many from immigrant families. Students may be “dealing with the fact that mom is in America working two jobs, because dad’s in Puerto Rico and can’t come over,” she said.
In each case, Clifford Beers care coordinators began by sitting and listening during student support services team (SSST) meetings, where administrators and teachers discuss kids who are having trouble, Daniels said. They attend Boost! meetings and keep track of services the schools already offer.
Families can get their needs met much faster, since involvement with the Trauma Coalition gives them direct access to services such as therapy or parenting support, said Carmen Padilla-Dechalus (pictured right), Boost! coordinator at Truman School in the Hill neighborhood.
Clinicians go into families’ homes to assess their needs, she said. Of the K‑8 school’s 530 students, almost 90 percent is Latino and the remainder is African-American.
Students see a lot of violence in their community, and often in their homes, said social worker Omayra Binion (pictured above left). Many are in families below the poverty line, where “parents are having issues meeting basic needs” such as stable access to food and shelter.
That community violence too often is translated into school violence, since students “mimic what they know or what they see. They don’t know how to handle these situations,” Padilla-Dechalus said.
Social workers and psychologists may work in the schools a few days a week; when they aren’t around, “kids run to the teacher they’re closer with” to confide any personal issues, Daniels said. But teachers may not necessarily feel equipped to fill those roles.
So Clifford Beers teaches them, not only how to best support their students, but also how to take care of their own mental health.
The coordinators have built a “learning relationship” with each school, collaborating with the community to find gaps in its response to trauma, instead of implementing a preconceived strategy, Daniels said: “We don’t come in telling them what to do.”
Talk Therapy Rx
Melissa Bailey File Photo
Sabrina Breland, principal at Wexler/Grant School, said that in the fall, Clifford Beers counselors helped staff members, many of whom are “new to teaching,” better identify trauma in students. “Sometimes people react instead of responding to behavior. We were not always handling that the best we could,” she said.
Clifford Beers counselors taught teachers strategies to de-escalate confrontations, such prompting students to remember breathing techniques or other stress control tactics before situations got out of control.
Wexler/Grant has a relatively high rate of transience, with about 14.5 percent of students last year transferring in after Oct. 1. At least seven students transfer to the school in June each year. About 420 students are enrolled at the preK‑8 school.
Breland said the school population can be “challenging,” and many conflicts that arise happen between new students. “We have students who have demonstrated behaviors you see from students who have seen trauma,” including physical aggression, she said.
Some of this year’s sixth graders have been especially challenging. After preliminary discussions with school administrators, Clifford Beers clinicians used cognitive behavioral techniques to teach coping skills to two groups of Wexler/Grant sixth graders.
Sixth-grade teacher Janice Quinn said three boys and three girls from her classroom joined the groups, which are separated by gender — a method Quinn recommended because “girls have different issues than boys and don’t want to be teased about it. It works very well.”
About a dozen students received parent permission to participate.
Quinn recommended one student to the group who recently transferred to Wexler/Grant from a school in Hamden, because she thought it would make the student’s transition easier. The student, whom Quinn described as “very very hyper and very very verbal and getting into trouble,” was eager to join.
“These kids are very needy. … They want to be heard. Some of them need that encouragement,” she said.
She said she has sat in on a few of the weekly meetings, in which students are asked to “chart their feelings” in order to help them control their behavior. Quinn said she can tell when her students are upset, just by seeing “a look on their face” — many of them don’t feel comfortable having in-depth emotional conversations with their families.
“Kids need a sounding board where someone could listen to them about their concerns,” she said. She said she thinks students would benefit from summer sessions, instead of having support suddenly pulled at the end of the school year.
Breland said she is glad to be part of the Trauma Coalition. But the school still has a long way to go and “hasn’t found a prescription to help some of our students.”
Exit Strategy
Similarly, Rodriguez said there will never be a shortage of Clinton Avenue students needing food. Existing programs such as Meals on Wheels visit the same homes “over and over,” especially in the strip of the city bordering the Quinnipiac River. “In this particular geographic area, trauma is embedded in the culture.”
She said she worries about how they will fare during this Christmas break — more than a week with insecure access to food — with no funding for extra meals, not even through the backpack program.
Clinton Avenue will soon have its own regular small-group behavioral therapy sessions, and Rodriguez has asked teachers to recommend families and students they think need the extra help. Over two or three weeks, teachers brainstormed — and shockingly came up short.
“Children do share, but teachers feel like it might be overstepping boundaries” to share it with outside counselors,” Rodriguez said. “They worry about [Department of Children and Families’] involvement with our children,” that it will tear families apart and do more harm than good. Family outreach is a crucial part of the Trauma Coalition; its initiatives are “well meaning” but need to be thoroughly communicated in order to help the widest range of families, she said.
Rodriguez and the school’s assistant principal, Heriberto Cordero (pictured), said community leaders such as black and Latino ministers should be involved in the process of addressing student trauma. Religious leaders “see the pain almost immediately” after traumatic incidents happen, Rodriguez said, and might be able to “get to the school administrators and give the names of the families they’re working with” to bolster support.
“We have to hit the spiritual needs of kids, because it’s a huge part of their wellbeing,” in addition to mental and physical health, Cordero said.
“We can’t keep working in isolation,” Rodriguez said. Reaching out a hand to students before they begin to “internalize” the trauma will “empower” them and break the cycle of violence.
She said she knows from experience that Clinton Avenue needs an exit strategy, a way to keep addressing trauma once the funding for the coalition inevitably runs dry. The school’s social service staff should embed these strategies in its everyday routines.
The Trauma Coalition should be considered an additional support to existing staff, who have been working on these issues at Truman with whatever resources they have available, Binion said.
“In an ideal world, we’d love to have more afterschool programs,” said Padilla-Dechalus. “It’s a challenge finding additional resources.”
But administrators at all three schools said it was a challenge worth taking on, to improve the quality of life for children and their families — and to be able to teach them.
Discussing and strategizing around trauma is very different from experiencing it, Rodriguez said. Part of bridging that gap is bringing the “human element” to the children and offering them “a little bit of compassion.”