From coping to thriving: Hope and the role of education in trauma recovery

The goal of this dissertation was to conduct a study of the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative (TLPI) and the 2004 Legislation it helped pass through the Massachusetts legislature. The initiative was established in 1998 by the Massachusetts Advocates for Children (MAC), whose work led to the creation of the “Creating a Safe and Supportive Learning Environment: Serving Youth Traumatized by Violence”, or Trauma Sensitive Schools (TSS) Program, in 2000. Rather than retraumatizing children through punitive disciplinary practices, the TLPI created a framework for assessing trauma symptoms and creating an environment in which recovery would be assisted, or at least not hindered, thereby leading to greater school success. I studied the program as it is being implemented in one particular school in Western Massachusetts.;During the Fall 2008 semester I spent time in the school observing classrooms and overall school environment, reviewing archival data, and interviewing adults involved with the program. Additionally, I attended regular meetings of the Service Team, a principal component of the program. I also attended the Trauma Sensitive Resource Team, Pilot Teachers Resource Team, School Management Group, and District Policy Committee Meetings, as well as several conferences and working sessions related to the program. I employed field notes for my all levels of data collection. Additionally, I used digital recordings and transcriptions for all meetings, conferences and interviews.;The data and analysis enabled me to create a well-rounded picture of the benefits, shortcomings and barriers in implementing this program. I found that the school personnel, as well as several programs and structures already in place in the school, were key to creating a strong Trauma Sensitive Schools Program in the school. Practiced alongside these other programs and structures, the program did appear to provide needed resources and supportive environments to students who struggled in school for various reasons. Additionally, the program appears to provide critical support for the teachers to feel more effective in their teaching. Among the biggest barriers were insufficient resources and a sense that even with the program many of the students, particularly the most traumatized ones, still needed so much more clinical support than the school could provide. I believe the most important finding was that more than creating a school that is beneficial specifically for traumatized children, the school I studied created a school that was a good, even ideal, school for all students. This was shown by the ways the program was implemented in a school-wide approach that did not limit benefits to students with a particular label or diagnosis.;This dissertation has policy significance on two levels. On the first level, this work provides an empirical study of a particular piece of policy, the “Safe and Supportive Learning Environment: Serving Youth Traumatized by Violence” program, as implemented in one particular school. By spending time in a school implementing the program I created a ground-level view that provides a means for analyzing the program's path from its initial conception, through its codification by the legislature and administration by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), to its ultimate implementation in a particular school. This provided an opportunity to study what transpires with the knowledge and expertise that goes into a particular policy along the path to implementation.;The second level of policy significance is an application of lessons learned by following the above-mentioned path of this particular policy to policy-making, in general. By superimposing the lens of Paulo Freire's Stages of Consciousness on policy implementation, we can evaluate policies vis-à-vis their likelihood of addressing the root causes of social problems. In this way I hope to have illuminated a major barrier between the policies we create to address our deepest social issues and the potential for their success in actually creating social change and reducing both structural and interpersonal violence. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).