Trauma program teaches keen eye for educators
San Antonio schools’ ‘EC Cares’ a model for other organizations
On a Monday afternoon in early May, a bus driver for San Antonio’s East Central Independent School District was making the rounds, dropping kids off at home, when she noticed a student acting up. The boy, a middle schooler, was a regular passenger, and she recognized his behavior — kicking flower pots outside his house and slamming the front door on his way in — as out of character.
The next morning, when she picked him up, the student was still visibly upset. Something was going on.
It would have been easy to let it go. In years past, perhaps she would have. But the driver had been trained by a new program, EC Cares, to keep an eye out for students in emotional distress and respond accordingly.
She texted her department head about the child’s behavior, who got the information to a school counselor who then was able to meet the student as he arrived, said John Hernandez. Hernandez had launched the program as director of student services for ECISD.
Discussion revealed that the student was going through a hard breakup with a girlfriend. The counselor talked to his mom, who said the boy was struggling at home and had been threatening to harm himself.
At the counselor’s recommendation, the student went to a local mental health treatment facility. But it was a bus driver, not a counselor, who triggered the intervention.
“We went back and told the bus driver, ‘Thanks to you, this kid is getting the help he needs,’ ” Hernandez said.
Before EC Cares, the transportation staff wasn’t trained to be aware of students’ emotional issues or potential crises, and there was no clear protocol on how to handle those that arose. But today, there are eyes everywhere, with employees in every corner of the school ecosystem — not just teachers and counselors but also cafeteria workers, coaches and, yes, bus drivers — on the lookout for trouble.
The EC Cares philosophy is to turn school environments, from top to bottom, into communities sensitive and responsive to the problems, and even traumas, that can hinder the success and well-being of students.
Hernandez became aware of a nationwide shift in how school districts handle these circumstances and devised a model that fit East Central ISD. Now, EC Cares is being held up as an example for San Antonio to follow.
Growing awareness
In Brockton Public Schools in Massachusetts, one of the country’s first to adopt such a strategy, school staff are made aware by local police, fire departments and family service agencies of which children were exposed to a traumatic event the night before.
The schools often don’t know the specifics of what happened, but the tipoff is enough for them to identify the child as a “KIN,” or kid in need, said Ed Jacoubs, the grants and projects director in the Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office, who began working with the program in 2007.
Discipline cases that could result in suspensions declined nearly 80 percent in two years. And in 15 years, overall juvenile delinquency in the county was down by about 75 percent, which Jacoubs largely credits to the schools.
Implementing trauma sensitivity is most successful when it’s driven by educators, when it’s not mandated and when there is a sense of urgency, said Michael Gregory, a senior attorney with the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative, which highlighted Brockton’s success in a training manual.
In the aftermath of school shootings, that urgency is now being felt in Texas. State legislators have sought input from law enforcement and schools, including families who were affected by the Santa Fe High School shooting in Galveston County last spring. Besides taking stock of security, school districts have also considered what mental health options they offer students.
With a population 60 percent Hispanic, the demographics of San Antonio point to a particular need for such help, say doctors and researchers at Salud America!, a Latino health program at UT Health San Antonio. Studies show Latino children are at greater risk of health problems and run-ins with the law.
A landmark study by the Centers for Disease Control and prevention in 1998 about adverse childhood experiences that surveyed roughly 17,000 adults and children found a link between childhood trauma and issues in adulthood such as poor health, mental illness, drug addiction and violence.
More than 46 percent of children nationally have suffered at least one traumatic experience such as living in poverty, incidents of sexual or physical abuse or witnessing a crime, the study found. But about 78 percent of Latino children suffer at least one adverse childhood experience, and 28 percent suffer four or more, according to sociocultural component of the Hispanic Community Health Study.
Dr. Amelie Ramirez , the director of Salud America!, points to this research when touting programs like EC Cares.
“We put that in the state of Latino childhood development, and it hits home for us,” she said.
Salud America! is now promoting EC Cares with a starter kit to help other schools implement their own trauma sensitivity program.
The ‘gaps just grow’
The East Central bus driver was trained on what to recognize, and it made all the difference.
In a trauma-sensitive environment, adults see a child’s destructive or dismissive behavior as a sign of suffering instead of an annoying or rebellious act. Every adult who works in schools needs to understand what happens to a child’s brain when they experience trauma, said Amanda Merck, a Salud America! research area specialist.
The most common responses to trauma are known as “fight, flight or freeze.” Experts say this is a physical reaction, caused when neural pathways in the brain change direction.
“Neural pathways are like walking trails. The more you walk it, the more defined they become,” Merck said.
When the stress response is activated, children stay in a survival state, and the neural pathways don’t make it up to the part of the brain in charge of learning, Merck said. They feel mental and physical pain. This affects brain development and the ability to focus in the classroom, resulting in learning gaps.
“Those gaps just grow,” Merck said. “And then they just don’t catch up.”
So the child sitting in the back of the classroom, head on the desk, or the kid who pushes back against a teacher’s instruction might actually be dealing with an event that happened at home the night before — and teachers and other staff might be in a position to help.
“Some confuse (mental health responses) with counseling — go to counseling one hour a week or one hour every two weeks,” Merck said. “Science behind stress response isn’t solved one hour once a week. It’s seconds. That time for that bus driver to connect with that kid is seconds.”
EC Cares emerged two years ago from the convergence of several factors. House Bill 2398, a Texas law requiring schools to intervene in student truancy before sending kids to court, had been enacted and ECISD needed to implement it. Figuring out how fell to Hernandez, who had just been moved to student services.
Truancy, Hernandez realized, was itself tied to deeper issues. A lecture he heard on student trauma got him thinking about how schools could better engage with those problems. Also, in a single year, each of his family members had tipped him off to a different example of student trauma.
Hernandez’s wife, a teacher, had a student whose sister died of cancer and whose mother got hooked on pills. His daughter had a close friend whose parents both died in a head-on collision. His son had a classmate whose mother died in childbirth.
“Those three stories kind of dictate the DNA of EC Cares and what we’re about,” Hernandez said. “We’re all about helping more and (seeing) what else we can do. Because these were in my own kids’ lives — they’re in every classroom across the country.”
Fulfilling ‘emotional needs’
But adverse childhood experiences can only be helped if they’re noticed in the first place, and that means training staff.
“We want to help the kids,” said Joe Hubbard, head football coach at East Central High School and an early participant of EC Cares. “We want to help them be successful. And the only way starts with safety, and it starts with dealing with their emotional needs and well-being.”
In addition to transportation and athletics, Hernandez has trained leaders in the district’s nutrition, technology, registration and custodial departments, among others. He’s now looking at school resource officers and maintenance workers.
EC Cares has also developed ways to better respond to student trauma once it is identified, including a notification system that piggybacks on iTCCS, an-Bexar County’s existing system for tracking things that might impact who can sign kids out of school (like restraining orders and custody battles). Under EC Cares, counselors and administrators see bright red notifications that follow traumatized students as they change grades or schools, even alerting them to anniversaries that might trigger problems.
The notifications don’t specify what the trauma actually was, Hernandez said, to protect student privacy — getting further details requires reaching out to whoever initially created the notification. But counselors can get a heads-up on when a student might start acting up, and they’re better equipped to seek further information and incorporate that knowledge into a disciplinary response.
EC Cares also maintains a list of external resources counselors can use to connect students with hotlines, support networks, advocacy centers, food banks, charities and other services.
“We want to assist but not step in where others are more qualified,” said Nancy Britton, the ECISD child nutrition director and another early adopter of EC Cares.
Hernandez said he built the resource list by pretending “I was a 15year-old with a weapon in my hand (who had) no insurance, no food, (no) place to stay, but I wanted to hurt myself.”
He called each agency or provider two summers ago. It was a sobering exercise.
“Called them all up, one by one,” Hernandez recalled. “The scary thing was that I eliminated six off this list because they put me on hold for over two hours.”
Now heading into its third year, EC Cares is still trying to tighten up systems, improve the quality of interventions and expand the network of staff trained to notice and respond to student crises.
“All means all,” Hernandez said. “We’re going to train them all.”
And other schools and organizations are taking notice. Hernandez said he’s made presentations to nine school districts, big and small, some of which are considering starting their own version of the program.
Eventually, he’d even like to see an analogous program implemented at the collegiate level.
“My vision is, could every school in the country duplicate this, you know?” Hernandez said. “That would be my ultimate vision.”