American psychiatrist and Child Trauma expert, Dr. Bruce Perry, has dedicated his professional life to studying the impacts trauma causes on developing brains. As teachers, our primary job is to impact the development of adolescents’ brains; increasingly, schools across the nation are becoming “trauma informed,” and when pressed, typically reveal that their staff has had a bit of in-service on the topic. Disproportionate to their white peers, black, brown, and other members of the global majority experience significantly higher rates of suspension, expulsion, and discipline forms that remove them from their peers and their instructional environment.
In Vermont, a predominantly white state, data show that students at or below the poverty line and those with special education services, are those marginalized by disproportionate discipline measures ostracizing them from their school communities. For a host of reasons, our students’ learning is interrupted and the effects are seismic.
To address this inequity, the loss of connection students experience though isolating discipline, the interruptions in instruction and the conundrum facing school budgets (no new money, no new staff), I posed the question to the Rowland Foundation: “What, if instead of administrators and handbooks leading the response to harm in schools, we empower students to lead the effort through mentoring, response to harm restorative conferences, and fairness committees?” To that query, I have spent the past year, alongside my steering committee, developing a K-8 mentor program. In addition, my colleague and I developed and co-chair the 12th-6th grade mentoring program to provide community and youth advocacy. Simultaneously, we are training our students by collaborating with The Circle Keepers of Brooklyn, NY, an all-youth Restorative group, to begin the process of learning how to run response to harm conferences with the ultimate goal of generating a youth-led fairness committee to help resolve disputes at Northfield Middle High School. The end goal of this collaborative project is to have created sustainable youth-led and trauma-informed systems that preserve human dignity, and center our primitive need to belong to our communities.
