Table Of ContentAlleviating the
Educational Impact
of Adverse Childhood
Experiences
A volume in
Current Perspectives on School/University/Community Research
R. Martin Reardon and Jack Leonard, Series Editors
Alleviating the
Educational Impact
of Adverse Childhood
Experiences
School–University–Community
Collaboration
edited by
R. Martin Reardon
East Carolina University
Jack Leonard
University of Massachusetts Boston (Retired)
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CONTENTS
Introduction .........................................................................................vii
1 North Carolina Resilience and Learning Project ...............................1
Katie Rosanbalm, Elizabeth DeKonty, and Sheronda Fleming
2 Trauma-Informed Partnering ............................................................39
Jack Leonard
3 Our School Behavioral Health “Y’Alliance”: The Development
of a Rural School–Community–University Collaboration Focused
on Supporting Children Who Have Experienced Trauma ..............59
Travis Lewis, Karen D. Jones, Karen Koch, Kia Glosson,
and Karen Harrington
4 Pedagogy and Adverse Childhood Experiences: A Teacher’s
Action-Learning Journey in Mitigating the Impact of Trauma
Through Changing Teaching Practice ..............................................83
Michelle Montgomery, Roberto H Parada, and Brenda Dobia
5 Systemic School Reform Partnership to Address Adverse
Childhood Experiences in Flint, Michigan .....................................107
Bryan Beverly, Nicole Ellefson, and Brian J. Boggs
6 River of Emotions: Reflecting on a University–School–
Community Partnership to Support Children’s Emotional
Processing in a Post-Disaster Context ..............................................135
Carol Mutch, Jason Miles, and Sarah Yates
v
vi Contents
7 Increasing Trauma-Informed Practices in a High Poverty
Elementary School: A School, University,
and Community Partnership ............................................................157
Betty V. DeBoer and Alyssa M. Boardman
8 Schoolwide Trauma-Informed Professional Development:
We Can! Building Relationships and Resilience .............................183
Armeda Stevenson Wojciak, Jan Powers, and Laura Medberry
9 An Integrated Approach to Mitigating Adverse Childhood
Experiences Through Trauma-Informed Yoga ...............................207
Lauren Dotson Davis and Rebecca Buchanan
10 Bridging Education and Neuroscience to Support
Transformation in Teaching and Learning:
A Design-Based Approach ................................................................233
Alison Wishard Guerra, Shana R. Cohen, Amanda Datnow,
Timothy Brown, Terry Jernigan, Matt Doyle, and Alan Daly
11 Coalescing Streams: Interrupting the Progression of Adversity
Through Cross-Sector Mobilization and Systems Alignment ........259
John T. King, Aprille Phillips, Todd Bloomquist, and Peter Buckley
12 A Research-Practice Partnership Serving Students
Experiencing Trauma: Best Practices Revealed by an
Investigation of a Dropout Prevention Alternative School ............285
Nicole Ralston, Rebecca Smith, Cara Megan Wright,
and Jacqueline Waggoner
13 Creating Holistic Trauma-Informed Schools: School-Based
Health Centers ...................................................................................309
Sherry Shamblin, Dawn Graham, and Erin Lucas
About the Contributors .....................................................................331
INTRODUCTION
Recent crises—whether policy-induced (e.g., family separation at the
Mexico/U.S. border) or natural disaster-related (e.g., hurricanes in Florida
and North Carolina and wildfires in California)—have galvanized the at-
tention of the United States and the international public to the plight of
children who endure these traumatic events. The sheer enormity of such
wrenching events tends to overshadow the trauma endured by the children
whose everyday life circumstances fall short of affording them a safe, stable,
and nurturing environment.
At the national level, three rounds of data collection spanning Janu-
ary 2008 through April 2014 constituted the National Survey of Children’s
Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV) that—according to Finkelhor, Turner,
Shattuck, and Hambly (2013) in reporting on the 2011 round—assessed
“a wide range of childhood victimizations” (pp. 614–615). Among many
other findings, Finkelor and colleagues concluded that “overall, 57.7% of
the children and youth had experienced or witnessed at least 1 to 5 aggre-
gate exposures (assaults and bullying, sexual victimization, maltreatment by
a caregiver, property victimization, or witnessing victimization) in the year
before this survey” (p. 619). According to the recent revisiting of NatSCEV
II by Turner and colleagues (2017), “Almost 1 in 4 children and adoles-
cents ages 5–15 in the United States lived in family environments with only
modest levels of safety, stability, and nurturance, while about 1 in 15 had
consistently low levels across multiple domains” (p. 8).
Alleviating the Educational Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences, pages vii–xvii
Copyright © 2020 by Information Age Publishing
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. vii
viii Introduction
Adverse childhood events (ACEs) have both immediate and long-term
impacts on children’s health and well-being (Banyard, Hambly, & Grych,
2017; Bowen, Jarrett, Stahl, Forrester, & Valmaggia, 2018; Walker & Walsh,
2015). Children do not shed their entanglement with ACEs at the school-
room door. To highlight just one study, Jimenez, Wade, Lin, Morrow, and
Reichman (2016) conducted a secondary analysis of a national urban birth
cohort and found that experiencing ACEs in early childhood was “associ-
ated with below-average, teacher-reported academic and literacy skills and
[more] behavior problems in kindergarten” (p. 1).
The detail of the mosaic featured on the cover of this volume—courtesy
of Carol Mutch (lead author of Chapter 6)—is a strikingly appropriate mo-
tif for a collection of chapters in which the authors recount their school–
university–community collaborative endeavors to alleviate the educational
impact of ACEs. The detail is a small segment of a substantial circular mo-
saic the construction of which was proposed by Mutch to contribute to the
alleviation of the impact on young school-age children of a series of major
earthquakes in the Canterbury region of New Zealand in 2010/2011. As
Mutch recounts in Chapter 6, the children attending the local elementary
school in Kaiapoi, led by Jason Miles (the second author of Chapter 6),
were invited to bring shattered remnants of structures to be incorporated
into the mosaic over the course of 18 months under the guidance of Sarah
Yates (the third author of Chapter 6).
To draw the parallel, alleviating the educational impact of ACEs involves
inviting those so impacted to attain an accommodation with the trauma of
what they are currently experiencing or have experienced. The chapters
in this volume offer a range of research and narratives on how the jagged
personal remnants engendered by ACEs can be integrated into coherent
subsequent structures. Even if the end-state is not as aesthetically satisfying
as the Kaiapoi North School mosaic, at least some level of personal integra-
tion will facilitate the discernment of a path to healthy adaptation to the
realities at hand.
In a definition that is pertinent to less objectively verifiable trauma than
a series of earthquakes, Crouch, Probst, Radcliff, Bennett, and McKinney
(2019) defined ACEs as “traumatic events of childhood that include physi-
cal, sexual, and emotional abuse, as well as the experience of household dys-
function, such as divorce/separation, domestic violence, or living with an
adult experiencing mental illness, substance use/misuse, or incarceration”
(p. 209). Humans are hardwired to adapt to the realities at hand, but that
does not mean that they can single-handedly compensate for the impact of
those realities. For example, Brown (2014) compellingly recounted how Joe
Rantz adapted to and, over time, transcended the many ACEs he confronted.
For Rantz (gold medalist in eight-oared rowing, Berlin Olympics, 1936), the
acceptance he found in the close-knit family of rowers who gravitated to the
father figures of the coaches and the resident boat builder at the University
Introduction ix
of Washington compensated for the disinterest in him—bordering on child
neglect—that he experienced in his real family. In many ways, for Rantz, “the
boat” was analogous to “the mosaic” for the Kaiapoi students.
If one is being pursued by a bear, an adrenaline rush followed by a flight
response are adaptive—in this case, arguably more adaptive than a fight
response! However, sustained exposure to contexts in which fight or flight
is adaptive has the potential to engender toxic stress: “The excessive or pro-
longed activation of the physiologic stress response systems in the absence
of the buffering protection afforded by stable, responsive relationships”
(Garner et al., 2012, p. e225). An important point highlighted by the refer-
ence to buffering in the Garner et al. (2012) definition is that it is not the
context per se that is traumatic. Rather, trauma inheres in the way that the
individual is impacted by the stressful context—implying the potential for
alleviating the educational impact of ACEs through, for example, educat-
ing the traumatized individual about coping strategies. Two instances of
individuals who have been assisted by educators and their colleagues to
transcend their ACEs trauma have been widely publicized recently.
“DON’T LET THIS MOMENT DEFINE YOU”
According to Pelley (2019) “as a 12-year-old in Virginia, [Green] was the au-
thor of an impressive rap sheet” (para. 1). In a masterfully crafted 60 Minutes
segment, Pelley set the context by explaining that Green and his brother
were raised by an abusive mother and that Green reciprocated that abuse,
culminating in an episode in which he threatened his mother and brother
with a knife. Green recounted to Pelley how the police officers who respond-
ed to a call for assistance on that occasion decided to remove him from his
mother’s apartment (in a low-income, high-rise apartment next door to a
“crack house”) in shackles and handcuffs and drove him about four hours
away to a juvenile detention facility. While he was detained in that facility,
Green’s fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Hughes—at whom he had thrown his
desk on his first day in her class because he refused to be taught by a White
woman—called him and implored him not to “let this moment define you”
(para. 16). Mrs. Hughes had handled Green’s recalcitrance calmly and subse-
quently earned his respect, so her caring phone call precipitated an outburst
of shame and anger from Green who was put in solitary confinement—the
“lowest point of my entire life” (para. 23). At some stage, Priscilla Piñeiro
Jenkins, a case worker at the juvenile detention center who was unfazed by
Green’s anger and verbal aggression, convinced him that she “gave a damn”
(para. 32) and was listening. With the additional aid of a psychiatrist, Green
emerged from the detention center 2 months later to a fresh start. Green was
encouraged by his football coach at his new school to join chorus (an osten-
sibly easy subject that was not easy at all), and eventually earned admittance
