JCISD: Whole Child
AUGUST 2019
Trauma-Informed Schools: This Teacher's Viral 'Check-In Board is a Beautiful Example of Mental Health Support
Excellent teachers do so much more than teach. They can be mentors, role models, guides, and even confidants. Sometimes a teacher is one of the only trusted adults in a child's life—a fact that drives home the immense responsibility educators hold in their hands.
Perhaps that's why a photo shared by Facebook user Tara Mitchell Holman has touched so many people. It shows a teacher's whiteboard with "Monday Check-in" written on top and sections underneath labeled, "I'm great," "I'm okay," "I'm meh," "I'm struggling," "I'm having a tough time & wouldn't mind a check-in," and "I'm not doing great."
"Wow," wrote Holman in the caption. "This teacher has her students write their name on back of a sticky note and place it on the chart each Monday. She then talks privately throughout the week with each child about where they placed the sticky note and if they need to talk. A weekly check in on her students. ❤️❤️ Maybe we could pass this along to teachers."
The photo has been shared more than 135,000 times.
This kind of "check-in" is a beautiful example of supporting students' mental health.
Childhood can be hard. Being a teen can be even harder. That's nothing new, but studies have shown that mental health issues among young people are on the rise. Some of that may be due to the pressures of social media or the ubiquitous 24/7 news that stresses all of us. It could also simply be that we are getting better at understanding and diagnosing mental illnesses like anxiety and depression.
Whatever the reason, kids and teens can use all the mental and emotional support we can give them. Since young people spend the majority of their waking hours in school, teachers are in a prime position to offer that kind of support.
But figuring how to do that most effectively can be a challenge. Most teachers are already tapped out from their actual teaching work, and it's a lot to expect them to act as counselors on top of that. At the same time, people who work with students understand that so many issues can be remedied by staying in tune with their emotional well-being. This Post-it Note method of checking in with students is simple enough to help teachers determine which students might need some extra attention or help with their challenges outside the classroom.
Culturally Responsive Teaching: How Schools Can Help Teachers Understand and Address Racial Bias
As first period gets underway at Cambridge Street Upper School, veteran math teacher Stephen Abreu leads a small-group discussion. But the conversation isn’t about middle school algebra, and Abreu isn’t talking to students. Seven of his fellow teachers, nearly all of them white women, are sitting across from each other talking about race, white privilege and how their own biases affect their relationships with students.
Each of Cambridge Street’s staff members participate in meetings just like this one every week. They’re known as cultural proficiency seminars and attendance is mandatory. Teachers describe these 45-minute sessions as candid and, more often than not, uncomfortable. But they say the discussions are helping them to become better educators within a system in which predominantly white staff teach in schools with significant numbers of black and Latino students.
In New York City, the nation’s largest public school system, a $23 million initiative is underway to combat implicit bias, the unconscious attitudes formed about racial and cultural groups different from one’s own. The centerpiece of the effort, as it has been outlined by the department to date, is a mandatory daylong implicit bias training for every teacher and administrator. But even advocates for such trainings caution that all they can really do is raise awareness of educators’ personal biases. Mitigating the effects of implicit bias on student behavior and performance requires teachers working closely with their peers, and school leaders making those efforts a priority. This isn’t a quick fix. The effort must be ongoing.
“There’s no evidence to show that a one-day training for teachers and staff will foster change,” says Circe Stumbo, president of West Wind Education Policy, an Iowa-based group that provides analysis of school equity policies. What’s needed, she says, is a schoolwide commitment to making cultural proficiency a priority, with systems in place for continual personal reflection and accountability.
“What we’re trying to have teachers see here,” says school counselor and cultural proficiency facilitator Kini Udovicki, “is that white people have benefited their whole lives from white supremacy and now they’re in a position of power in a classroom setting and so you have to recognize what that dynamic looks like.”
While these conversations can be awkward, teachers say they play an essential role in helping them become better at their jobs.
“In our meetings we talk about real stuff that happens around race because it happens all the time in the classroom,” says math teacher Kendal Schwarz. “Teachers want and need a space to talk about this. It feels useful. You feel the practicality of it.” This kind of dialogue, she said, was largely absent from her graduate school teacher-training program, where issues of race and bias were rarely mentioned.
To read more of Amadou Diallo's article from the Hechinger Report, please click here.
Attendance/Truancy
A Two-Step Process for Reducing Chronic Absenteeism
4,875 (21% of or 1/5) students in Jackson County were chronically absent during the 2017-18 school year.
Every day a student is absent is a lost opportunity for learning. Too many absences not only can affect achievement for the absent student (more likely to lack reading skills, have lower test scores, not graduate, and receive exclusionary school discipline) but also can disrupt learning for the entire class. Chronic absenteeism, defined as students missing 10% or more of total school days, affects 1 in 7 students nationwide.
Typically, schools try to identify who is chronically absent and determine if there are cohesive subgroups of children most affected (recent immigrants, households with single parents, or caregivers with economic or health challenges). Sometimes the conditions that lead to absenteeism have more to do with family circumstances than student motivation. This is valuable and important information for school staff to have when deciding necessary supports for an individual child.
But it’s not enough to simply get a student back on track with school attendance. Teachers, faculty, and staff need to continue their work in making all students feel welcomed at school. Finding ways to get students back into the building is step one, while continuously finding ways to let them know that they have genuinely been missed and are valuable to the community is the second-order change we need. Empty seats may have economic ramifications for a school, but continually filling the hearts and minds and raising the spirits of our students can have major social, emotional, and educational benefits.
WHAT ARE FIRST STEPS?
According to the National School Climate Center, creating a positive climate is the basis for academic success, social-emotional and character development, and the prevention of harassment, intimidation, bullying, and other problem behaviors. And studies show a relationship between school climate and attendance in general—though so far this knowledge has not been directly extended to discussions of chronic absenteeism. But when we think of chronic absenteeism, an essential part of the long-term solution most likely involves getting all students to feel engaged in school so that they will want to be present.
As schools attempt to identify and bring back individual students with frequent absences, it is essential that the affected students feel as if the school is their oasis, not their holding cell. Schools must have a culture and climate that embraces all students and families. Kids have exquisite fairness detectors and know when they have been treated more punitively than another child.
CREATING A WELCOMING AND POSITIVE SCHOOL CLIMATE
The Social-Emotional Learning Alliance for New Jersey has worked to identify and develop some of the key elements of a positive school climate.
Inspiring: Schools should connect to students’ aspirations and actively encourage them to reach for the stars. Students should be asked to set specific goals for the school year and for each subject or class period. Goal-setting should be a school-wide practice.
Supportive: Challenge must be accompanied by support; schools benefit from collective efficacy, where students are encouraged to help one another. In CASEL’s Social Decision Making/Problem Solving program, for example, elementary students are encouraged to set individual, ongoing character improvement and study skills goals and to buddy up with classmates to help in this process—improvement is not seen as an individual task, and setbacks are seen as a normal part of learning.
Safe and Healthy: A supportive SEL culture needs to be developed throughout the school, and in every classroom. Ultimately, we are each others’ keepers, and so students must be upstanders for all classmates. They need support in learning how best to respect themselves by attending to their own good physical and social-emotional health, as well as others’.
Respectful: Respect for others is an important expectation in a school building, and its modeling is essential—student to student, student to adult, and adult to adult—including parents and caregivers. Schools must be especially attuned to how intimidating and unfamiliar school can be for some family members, such as those who are recent immigrants or those families struggling economically.
Engaging: Learning defined as “engaging” is active and problem-focused, and it leads learners to create meaningful products. Classroom communities should set and pursue goals for learning together, and so should adults in the building—this includes teacher groups, student support staff, security personnel and school resource officers, office staff, grounds and maintenance personnel, and school administrators. All school members should have ongoing goals for improving themselves and their contributions to their schools, and work together to overcome roadblocks they meet on the way.
Public education is about opening the doors to learning and citizenship for all. Meeting this sacred responsibility is possible when our schools work to have a positive school culture and climate. If we build this, kids will come. And when they can’t, once we help them with family and related hurdles and they do come, they are more likely to stay.
For more ideas on how to address chronic absenteeism, visit attendanceworks.org.
Upcoming Learning Opportunities: Summer & Fall 2019
August 2019
ACEs Trauma Training - 8/5/19 from 9 AM-4:30 PM
Location: Community Action Agency Main Conf. Room, 1214 Greenwood Ave, Jackson, MI 49203
Registration: https://www.nonprofnetwork.org/event-3353271/Registration
SafeTALK - 8/6/19 from 1-430 PM
Location: LifeWays Community Mental Health Birch Room
Registration: https://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/eventRegoeidk=a07egfduote07077c92&oseq=&c=&ch=
Bridges out of Poverty - 8/7/19 from 1-5 PM
Location: Jackson District Library - Meijer Branch 2699 Airport Rd, Jackson, MI 49202
Registration: https://www.nonprofnetwork.org/event-3275564/Registration
Youth Mental Health First Aid - 8/21/19 from 8AM-5 PM
Location: LifeWays Community Mental Health Pine Room
Registration:
Bridges out of Poverty - 8/27/19 from 8:30 AM- 12:30 PM
Location: Lily Missionary Baptist Church 1117 W G Wade Dr, Jackson MI 49201
Registration: https://www.nonprofnetwork.org/event-3336892/Registration
September 2019
Jamie Nabozny, a Safe School Advocate, to come speak to middle and high school students on the days leading up to the Stomp Out Suicide event
Stomp Out Suicide - 9/6/19 from 6-9PM
Location: The Michigan Theater
ACEs Trauma Trauma Training - 9/10/19 from 9AM-4:30 PM
Location: The Kratz Education Center, Room 220, 6700 Browns Lake Rd, Jackson, MI 49201
Registration: https://www.nonprofnetwork.org/event-3358934/Registration
October 2019
Bridges out of Poverty - 10/2/19 from 1-5 PM
Location: Jackson District Library - Meijer Branch 2699 Airport Rd, Jackson, MI 49202
Registration: https://www.nonprofnetwork.org/event-3275567/Registration
SafeTALK - 10/11/19 from 8 AM- NOON
Location: LifeWays Community Mental Health Pine Room
Registration: https://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/eventRegoeidk=a07egfduote07077c92&oseq=&c=&ch=
November 2019
Youth Mental Health First Aid - 11/8/19 from 8AM-5 PM
Location: LifeWays Community Mental Health Pine Room
Registration:
Janelle Buchler
Email: janelle.buchler@jcisd.org
Website: www.jcisd.org
Phone: 517-787-5903
Caitlin Williams
Attendance Officer and Homeless Programs Coordinator
Email: caitlin.williams@jcisd.org
Website: www.jcisd.org
Phone: 517-768-5264