Shelsea, a 9-year-old volunteer, demonstrates how a sand tray is used in ChildSavers’ therapy sessions with children. (Photo courtesy ChildSavers)
The fifth-grader wasn’t sleeping at night; her father had died of an overdose recently, and she was living with an aunt in a public housing community where it wasn’t uncommon for people to knock on the door looking to score drugs from a tenant who had lived in their unit previously. On a scale of 1 to 10 measuring adverse childhood experiences, the elementary schooler scored a 7. In school, she hardly spoke.
Her story, shared by Bob Nickles of the nonprofit ChildSavers, is one example of the toll that chronic stress takes on children in neighborhoods served by Richmond’s East End schools, where about 70 percent of residents live in poverty and many students live in one of the area’s three public housing communities. Aside from the immediate trauma of such exposures, the long-term consequences on a person’s health can be exacerbated if left unaddressed.
Resilience is the ability to recover quickly from adversity, and studies show it counteracts the effects of trauma.
That’s in part why, in 2016, Richmond Public Schools approached ChildSavers, which works with children in trauma, about collaborating with Greater Richmond SCAN (Stop Child Abuse Now) and East End schools that feed into Armstrong High School to help address and counter the effects of chronic stress and trauma through professional development, parent engagement and in-school mental health services.
“We’re dealing with two things,” says Nickles, the program supervisor who oversees the in-school mental health clinicians staffed through the Richmond Public Schools Resiliency Partnership. “How do you particularly develop resilience and manage learners that aren’t developmentally on target — but then we’re also dealing with the fact that we just kind of assume that any participant in our professional development is bringing in some trauma history themselves, even just the trauma of working in urban education and witnessing things happening to kids they care about.”
The privately funded partnership launched at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in 2016 with the help of seed funding from the Robins Foundation. The project then expanded to Martin Luther King Jr. Pre-K and Woodville Elementary, both in the East End. An Impact 100 grant brought the program to George Mason Elementary this year.
Lindsey Leach, interim development manager at ChildSavers, says professional development has also begun at Armstrong High School and Fairfield and Bellevue elementary schools in the East End, Overby-Sheppard and Carver elementary schools on the North Side, and Oak Grove-Bellemeade Elementary and Elkhardt-Thompson Middle schools on the South Side. Parent engagement is also offered in several of those schools. Leach says the partnership’s goal is to reach all 700 employees and 4,500 students in the “Armstrong pyramid.”
While the initiative provides free services and support to students and staff, the cost per school averages $200,000, which is funded by donations from Bon Secours, the Memorial Foundation for Children and the Richmond Public Schools Education Foundation.
Through the partnership, staff members receive education and ongoing support to ensure that they’re able to address the needs of their students, while students build coping skills and tools for self-expression. Embedded in four schools are ChildSavers mental health clinicians; two other full-time staff from SCAN coordinate the parent engagement elements of the program.
“What we want to figure out is not if the child is bad, but if something has happened to the child to cause misbehaviors,” says ChildSavers CEO Robert Bolling.
In 1997, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente’s Health Appraisal Clinic published findings of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACES), which explored the effects of childhood abuse and neglect on later-life health and well-being. The study included a metric for evaluating exposure to trauma before age 18. The conclusions were pivotal in understanding the effects of “toxic stress” — experiences that can range from sexual abuse to violence, food insecurity and poverty — on the developing brain.
Among them: Children exposed to toxic stress have lower frustration and anger tolerance and are more likely to be uncooperative, avoid challenges and be chronically absent from school. Later research indicates that adverse experiences in children and teens are also related to impaired flexibility and creativity in problem solving, attention span, abstract reasoning and executive functioning skills. Sustained levels of toxic stress can result in long-term health issues such as autoimmune disorders, chronic lung and liver disease, depression, and anxiety.
The focus on professional development is not limited to better understanding and addressing students’ needs, but also helping staff cope with secondary trauma — a term used to describe the toll on those who are constantly exposed to the adverse experiences of others. Effects can include chronic fatigue, emotional detachment, absenteeism and physical illness.
During a professional development training session at Armstrong High School in November, there were signs of fatigue as dozens of staff members listened to Nickles in a classroom after school.
“The follow-up from [Principal Willie] Bell was, ‘I’m worried about our teachers — can we do more? Can we lean into self-care and compassion next time?’ ” Nickles says later, noting that those topics would be the focus of a December session.
And the fifth-grader whose story Nickles told earlier? When he met with her more than a year ago, she would draw a simple triangle or circle. By the end of the school year, she was creating elaborate artwork, speaking up for herself and asking for help getting to basketball practice.
“I think it’s really important to understand that these children are our children — I feel strongly about that,” Bolling says. “We describe the deficits of schools — whether it’s test scores or buildings or what have you — but there’s a lot of value in these neighborhoods; we’ve got to highlight that and raise that up.”
