Education Week - September 18, 2019 - 1

To inspire and empower.

Vol. 39 * Issue 5 * September 18, 2019

edweek.org

| BUILDING A TRAUMA-SENSITIVE SCHOOL
PART 3 of a series

How Caring for
Students Can
Take a Steep Toll
Math teacher Veronica Lyon is one of the people who makes support for traumatized students
work at Lincoln Middle School in Clarkston,
Wash., a rural community on the Idaho border.
She was an advocate for distressed students
in the early days of the school's six-year traumasensitive schooling initiative, and has developed
a course that pairs math instruction and social
skills development. Her former students often
drop in to tell her how much their time with her
has helped them academically and emotionally
in high school.
But every year, there comes a point when she
"hits [her] max," and her work triggers social
anxiety.
"I get burnt out pretty easily because, you know,
the more you're around people, the more they tap
you out," Lyon said. When it happens, "I wake
up in the morning and I feel a sense of dread,
like waking from a nightmare, but I didn't have
a nightmare. And I'm like, oh no, here it comes."
Teachers can make or break efforts to create
trauma-sensitive schools. Yet in the rising number of schools adopting these initiatives, both
administrators and educators often underesPAGE 12 >

| CITIZEN Z

Could Testing
Wreck Civics
Education?

Nicole Craine for Education Week

By Sarah D. Sparks

Adrian Galvan, right, is a bilingual paraprofessional at Lyman Hall Elementary School in Hall County, Ga. He is part of program that aims to
recruit teacher-candidates who reflect the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the student population.

Wanted: Teachers as Diverse as Their Students
By Corey Mitchell
When Adrian Galvan came to the United States at
age 5, he knew little English.
He knew even less of what to expect in his new
school, Lyman Hall Elementary.
Now, 16 years later, Galvan works in those same
classrooms, helping immigrant children much like
the one he used to be, adjust to their new lives.
Galvan is part of an experiment-a grow-your-own
educator program that aims to close the gap between
the number of Spanish-speaking students and Spanish-speaking educators in Hall County, Ga., where
immigrants from Mexico and Central America have
changed the face of the school district.
Since the late 1990s, the share of Latino students
in the district has increased more than 200 percent,

rising from 14 percent in 1999 to 44 percent this
year.
Despite the drastic change, the teaching workforce
hasn't kept up: 90 percent of the district's educators
are white; only 5.5 percent are Latino.
"There's a disparity there," said R. Bradley Brown,
the assistant superintendent for human resources.
"We just need more bilingual people who are native
speakers in our schools to help with communication,
to help with reading and also to set examples."
In response, the school system partnered with the
University of North Georgia to create the RISE (Realizing Inspiring Successful Educators) program, designed to prepare Spanish-speaking Latino students
for careers in education. The district covers college
tuition for participants and offers them paid partPAGE 8 >

By Catherine Gewertz

Teachers on Front Lines of Making
Schools Safe for Transgender Kids
Rachel Woolf for Education Week

Imagine that you're in charge of civics instruction in your state or district. You want to figure
out whether this new approach you're taking-
emphasizing not just knowing civics facts, but
living a civically engaged life-is working. What
do you do? Do you survey students to explore
their actions and attitudes, asking if they're
engaged in community issues, for example, or
if they see themselves as empowered to make
change?
Or do you give a standardized multiplechoice test? You could ask them to identify the
three branches of government, or press for
more complex thinking as in this question from
Florida's state exam: How did Britain's King
George try to dismantle the early U.S. governPAGE 10 >

Districts try
'grow your
own' programs
to get the
workforce to
better mirror
the student
body

At a training in Boulder, Colo., to help educators foster
safe and inclusive classrooms for LGBTQ and gendernonconforming students, teacher Sid Flint's name tag
indicates the pronouns they use.

By Madeline Will
Homecoming kings and queens.
Lines for boys and lines for girls. Class
rosters with names and gender seemingly set in stone.
Schools can be a battleground for
transgender students or students who
are gender nonconforming. And the
potential land mines go far beyond restroom assignments, which have been
a politically charged focal point in conversations about transgender youth for
the past few years.

Advocates say teachers must create a safe, supportive, and inclusive
classroom for transgender and gender-nonconforming students, whose
gender identity or expression does not
conform to the traditional expectations of the gender they were assigned
at birth. And that means teachers need
specialized training.
"Educators really need guidance on
these issues," said Sophia Arredondo,
the director of education and youth
programs at GLSEN. "Most of them
PAGE 14 >

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Education Week - September 18, 2019

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