This article was co-written with Julie Ziegler. To continue the conversation, please reach out to them respectively at jharris@illuminateed.com or jziegler@illuminateed.com. When you look around your schools, would you believe that 1 out of every 4 students has experienced at least one traumatic or adverse childhood experience? In fact, 1 out of every 2 people … Continue reading School-Aged Youth & Trauma: How Education Communities Can Help
As an adult, it can be difficult talking to young children about issues such as abuse and domestic violence on their level. If a child is experiencing problems at home, however, it’s important that trusted adults in their lives help them to understand and cope with their family situation. Abuse in the home, whether of … Continue reading Talking to Kids About Domestic Violence
October is National Bullying Prevention month, and we want to do our part in tackling an issue that affects more than 30% of our young people across the nation. In our request for community members to share a personal story or experience, we were touched by one story in particular. The following story is from Lorri Borgeson, a current … Continue reading Overcoming My Personal Battle with Bullying
At a time when many Americans are preoccupied with the “war of words” between presidential candidates, a different news story captured my attention. For days, I read everything that I could about it. And the more I read, the sadder and angrier I became. The story took place in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and it contains powerful … Continue reading How to Identify & Combat Child Abuse
During a recent flight that I took from Charlotte to Phoenix, one of my seatmates who was a neonatal unit nurse told me a troubling story about her older brother. She said her brother was a brilliant, functional alcoholic: one who, unfortunately, was never able to recover from a traumatic experience that happened in the first grade. Her … Continue reading Making Schools Safer by Tackling Bullying