New Worcester program could lead way in dealing with traumatized students

WORCESTER — An experimental coaching program for educators working with young children in Worcester who have experienced trauma has yielded promising results, according to the groups that collaborated on the project.

The “Building Resilient Children” pilot, which took place at seven early childhood education centers around the city from November 2019 through June of this year, specifically resulted in a decrease in expulsions, classroom behavioral incidents and other negative outcomes for participating children, they said. 

The program, funded by the state, was developed by the Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate and Commonwealth Medicine, the public service consulting and operations division of UMass Medical School, and implemented locally by Family Services of Central Massachusetts in partnership with Commonwealth.  

About 37 early childhood educators participated in the whole pilot, which started out as a one-day training course and then shifted to a more intensive coaching program in which four coaches worked with staff at their respective centers. The ultimate aim was to help those educators tailor their teaching, as well as their classrooms, to better meet the needs of children suffering from traumatic experiences. 

“Experiencing trauma – such as abuse, neglect or the impacts of neighborhood poverty or systemic racism – can have a lifelong impact on a child’s health and well-being,” state Sen. Harriette L. Chandler, D-Worcester, who helped secure funding for the program, said in a statement. “Yet if we can better identify and provide support to young children who have experienced trauma, we can change the entire trajectory of that child’s life.” 

Audrey Smolkin, project lead and director of Child and Family Policy at UMass Medical School, said not only does investment at the early childhood level change the child’s life but also saves money in the long run, since that student will have a better chance of not ending up in the justice system or requiring some other costly intervention. 

There’s also a racial equity component to the project, since it’s most often children of color that are punished for their trauma. Black boys, for instance, are removed from classrooms at 3.6 times the rate of white boys, Smolkin said. For that reason, in addition to receiving coaching on how to deal with childhood trauma and build resiliency in students, participating staff also received racial equity training.  

One of the most promising findings of the pilot, according to Smolkin, is that those investments yielded almost immediate results. 

“You can do things in a short period of time that make a big difference in the classroom,” she said. “This is not 10 years of training, and then you see changes.” 

According to the organizations that ran the program, for instance, after just two coaching sessions, the percent of coaches reporting a student had been expelled for behavioral reasons had dropped from 16% to 4%.  

Smolkin also said she feels confident the program, which was funded with around $250,000, only a portion of which was for the actual coaching, can be feasibly scaled up statewide without outsized cost. While it might be difficult to achieve the exact coach-to-staff member ratio of the Worcester pilot, enough coaches should be able to be hired to keep a statewide program in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range, as opposed to millions, she said. 

The need for such an initiative is only getting greater, Smolkin added, with the pandemic exposing vulnerable children to even more trauma. Many of the kids involved in the pilot come from households where parents are emergency workers, she said; in some cases, the only adults some of those children are interacting with on a daily basis are their early education teachers.  

But it’s also not just family situations that contribute to childhood trauma. Where a child lives, whether they have access to play areas and whether racism is a regular occurrence in their lives are factors as well, according to Smolkin, who added the pilot specifically sought out centers in low-income areas and with high numbers of Department of Children & Families-involved kids. 

“Now you layer on COVID, and we’re seeing kids who are really struggling,” she said. “This work is always important, but it’s even more important now.” 

Scott O’Connell can be reached at Scott.O’Connell@telegram.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottOConnellTG