BY STEVE NUZUM
Content warning: because of the subject, this article necessarily contains descriptions of physical and emotional harm to students and staff members, both during and after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on— unchanged and immutable— as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past.
— Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., The Body Keeps the Score (2015)
Schools are, by definition, places of growth. Learning is growth; developing new skills and new ideas is growth. One of the more confusing anti-public school arguments of the past several years has been that learning new things-- about history, about different perspectives, or about living in a pluralistic society-- should not create any “discomfort”.
But there are important differences between topics and experiences which cause healthy discomfort-- the kind that pushes students to stretch further into what educational psychologist Lev Vygotssky called the “zone of proximal development”-- and those which trigger or even create traumatic experiences.
Research suggests that the traumatized brain can be incapable of separating a past experience-- such as the fear of imminent death or bodily harm-- from a present trigger. And it may not be possible for people who have experienced traumatic experiences to use logic or other common coping strategies to get themselves away from the feeling that something unsafe or frightening that happened in the past is now happening again in the present.
While schools are often the ideal place to explore new, exciting, and even uncomfortable topics, they can also be places of trauma, places where emotional, mental, or social growth becomes frozen in a negative experience.
There are the obvious examples of severe trauma in schools: school shootings or other violence, the sudden loss of members of the school community, and natural disasters, can immediately change the face of a school community. And while some students and staff members may simply move on from these experiences in a way that incorporates them into their understandings of the world in healthy ways, others may not be able to move beyond those experiences without help.
There are also subtler traumas, and also subtler moments that exacerbate already existing traumas. For many students and adults, school is a place of intense stress and anxiety. For example, performance on tests and assignments can weigh heavily on students and families. A bad grade may be in a sense just a number on a page, but it might trigger an argument or a fight at home. A comment from a teacher or peer intended to be benign may trigger deep feelings of hurt or shame in a student who has brought traumatic experiences into the classroom.
And over the past several years, the majority of students and school staff members have shared experiences which may meet psychologist and researcher Bessel van der Kolk’s definition of traumatization, by changing individuals’ psychic landscapes until their world has been influenced by trauma. In small or large ways, school may be no longer associated with growth or with positive change.
I stopped teaching this school year, and when I think about school I have a lot of positive memories, but I also have images in my mind which seem to meet this definition of trauma.
For example, I vividly remember walking to my classroom in a building that normally rang with the intense noise of almost two thousand students; now, I could hear the soles of my sneakers on the tile floor.
Ahead of me, just past my classroom, was a temporary wall covered with thick, semi-transparent plastic; with so few students in the building, the district had decided to complete major renovations during the school day, and the sound of jackhammers shattering concrete walls sometimes filled the mostly-deserted building. I knew when I got to class I would be sitting in a room, designed for about twenty students (and normally filled with around thirty), either alone or with one or two students. We would be sitting far apart, wearing masks, and largely communicating through the computer screen so that the majority of students, who were home, could be included in our conversations and lessons.
Sometimes the feeling that we were living in a dystopian or even apocalyptic reality was oppressive and frightening. But it was something that, as a community, we would never really talk about together.
During the height of the pandemic, our school community lost people. Our district witnessed the death of several employees to the COVID-19 virus, including a twenty-eight-year-old teacher. Two of my students, siblings, lost both of their parents. Our school zip code often reported the most new cases in the state, and the death and hospitalization counts were often terrifyingly high, though the state and country would seem to largely forget this in the months when cases were low. We went back to school in person before a vaccine had been available in our state-- Governor Henry McMaster famously released a statement on vaccine eligibility in the state, saying that, “If we allow teachers to jump the line, we are taking vaccines from our most vulnerable population who are dying from this virus.”
During my last year as a teacher, two students were involved in a confrontation that resulted in one student stabbing the other. Although the student who was stabbed recovered from those injuries, staff members vividly remembered the experience of seeing the student bleeding in the hallway, and of getting the student’s blood on their own hands and clothing as they tried to help. The incident was also witnessed by other students, and presumably the experience was especially traumatic for the student who lay in the hallway bleeding from the wounds.
For many people who spend every weekday in the school building, it’s hard to move on from these kinds of experiences, hard to see the school building as a place of safety. Knowing intellectually that schools are now relatively safe may not be enough to help adults or students who are having a hard time stepping foot in those buildings.
American political rhetoric around schools has long prioritized metrics like graduation rate, seat time, daily attendance, and staff retention rates, but if we don’t see the potential for trauma or other factors-- both the large and systemic ones and the personal and intimate ones-- to complicate the meaning of those numbers, we are unlikely to be able to use them or to change them, where necessary.
I’m not sure any school is really equipped to respond to these kinds of trauma, whether slow-moving or sudden and violent. And because of the politically-motivated cultural battles that have been playing out over the past several years-- what writers Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider call “The Education Wars” in their upcoming book of the same name-- schools may be even more afraid than before to address “social emotional learning” or to incorporate trauma-informed practices into the everyday culture of a school.
Complicating matters, introducing real, research-based psychological practices into school buildings is often challenging and expensive. Well-intentioned districts (or districts simply trying to respond to increased pressure to be all things to all students) might incorporate sketchy or superficial programs that don’t actually address mental health issues. It may be impossible with current budgets to hire mental health staff like licensed and trained counselors.
All of this points to a need for educators and public school advocates-- perhaps especially parents and students-- to steer the educational conversation away from the “education wars” and back towards nuts-and-bolts solutions to real problems. Making schools actually safer-- both by incorporating research-based mental health interventions and by physically upgrading outdated facilities-- can be part of an overall solution. But part of why there are so many walking wounded people in school buildings is that American society has fallen for the lie that schools, alone, can fix almost every social problem, from pandemics to violence to social media and substance addictions to poverty.
Schools simply cannot do this, and those of us who care about kids and about the people who teach and care for them need to push for social supports that go beyond warehousing kids and pretending that they all enter with the same experiences, with the same advantages and disadvantages, and without underlying mental health challenges that might need to be addressed before meaningful growth and learning can happen.
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