Abstract: The term “trauma-informed schools” has achieved buzzword status in our current educational landscape, fueled by the urgency schools feel to address the devastating effects of trauma on the academic, social, emotional, and behavioral functioning of our students. However, there is no clear consensus regarding the inputs, or the core components, of trauma-informed schools and there have been no rigorous evaluations of their outputs, or the effects on students, teachers, or schools. If trauma-informed schools are to become more than a passing trend, we must work harder to describe the inputs, document the outputs, and explain the complex processes that link the two. In this presentation, I will summarize the core components of trauma-informed schools, identify key implementation factors thought to facilitate the adoption and maximize the impact of trauma-informed approaches, and review strategies to evaluate the impact of trauma-informed schools. |
Stacy Overstreet, Ph.D. is a Professor of Psychology at Tulane University. Over the course of her career her research has focused on how sociological, cultural, familial, psychological, developmental, and biological processes influence and interact with one another over time to shape child adaptation to trauma. Over the past ten years, she has translated that research to inform the implementation and evaluation of trauma-informed schools. She has published several empirical and conceptual papers related to these areas and she was co-editor of a 2016 special issue on trauma-informed schools in the journal, School Mental Health. Dr. Overstreet is a founding member of the New Orleans Trauma-Informed Schools Learning Collaborative. Her work through the Collaborative includes a grant from the National Institute of Justice to determine whether a multi-component implementation strategy for trauma-informed schools improves school safety as well as a grant from the Department of Justice to develop and evaluate a Train the Trainer model for the implementation of trauma-informed schools. |