Side-Lining Trauma Sensitive Practices in Schools and Next Steps

Abstract

Studies reveal students who deal with complex traumas must manage negative impacts to their development. These impacts reveal themselves in the challenges young children and adolescents face with learning and behavioral management. Yet, schools across the United States are not mandated to learn about, create, nor implement trauma sensitive schooling. The negligence around tending to young scholars with trauma by revising school policies, practices, and educator training has led to students who have experienced complex traumas being unfairly punished by the education system in a multitude of instances. One of these instances occurred in Compton, Los Angeles, during the year 2015. Eight students, who had dealt with two or more traumas in their lifetime, were met with suspensions and expulsions rather than assistance and guidance from the educators they came across, year after year. This case study will explore one student’s story, Peter P., and how the school district failed to provide him the proper support necessary to assist him in having equal access and equal opportunity to educational success, as a scholar who faced trauma, starting from his early childhood.