Kids In 5 Schools Getting Trauma Help

Mom didn’t know that her 9‑year-old boy heard her crying every night. His acting out in school brought that fact to light — and led to a solution.

A solution to her crying. And a solution to her son’s misbehavior.

A team of social workers from the Clifford Beers Clinic found that solution. They found it in a new program that has them working with troubled kids and their families in the public schools. The program started last year in three city schools. It has expanded in this new school year to five schools in all, with 200 kids being helped.

It works like this: Principals at each school list the 40 kids displaying the most misbehavior. The Clifford Beers team meets with the kids at the school and with the kids’ families outside the school, looking for underlying problems and the solutions to those problems. Sometimes the solutions involve mental health help, talking out the problem. Sometimes they involve help finding food or work.

The program dovetails with New Haven schools’ broader efforts at ​“restorative practices” or ​“restorative justice,” aimed at keeping troubled kids in school and addressing the root of their misbehavior rather than suspending or expelling them. It also dovetails with a growing focus on the ​“social-emotional” needs of schoolchildren, addressing the problems they bring into school that prevent them and others from learning.

In the first year of the program, in which the clinic worked with 139 elementary schoolchildren, those solutions worked well enough that two-thirds of the participating kids were no longer listed as chronically absent, and 80 percent of students deemed clinically depressed at the beginning of treatment no longer were by the end.

The crying mom’s case showed how it can work right, said Kim Jewers-Dailley, Clifford Beers’s point person for the New Haven program.

The boy, who was 9 nine years old, was disrupting class each day. He would throw a tantrum. Or he’d run out of the classroom.

He would be sent home. It turned out that was what he wanted. The Clifford Beers team learned he was upset because of his mother’s nightly crying.

“I do cry,” the mom reported at a subsequent family counseling session. ​“I didn’t know he knew all the times I was crying.”

Mom was crying because she felt under stress. She was unemployed. So was her boyfriend. She needed a job.

The Beers program arranged and paid for her to get her certification renewed to work as a licensed nurse. Then it helped her find a new position.

Then came a new problem: She had to work when her son came home after school. The team found the boy a spot in an after-school program.

And he stopped acting out in school.

The five schools participating in the program this year are Bishop Woods, Truman, Wexler Grant, Creed (formerly Hyde), and Career High. The program expanded this academic year thanks to a $925,000 grant from Barbara Dalio and the Dalio Foundation. Parents have to agree to participate once the principal identifies a kid in trouble. Most do, according to Alice Forrester, the Beers Clinic CEO.

Forrester traced the high number of kids needing help coping with trauma — a quarter or more of the population at some schools — in part to the increased incarceration of adults in New Haven. Among the children with whom the program works, 45 to 50 percent have had a parent or caregiver incarcerated. Many have also seen their parents get arrested or witnessed violence that led to the arrest.

“We are paying for the epidemic of drug abuse” and lock-em-up policies of recent decades, she said.

Lack of food at home or unemployment have also contributed to much of the trauma kids experience. Hence an approach that combines mental health services with tackling ​“basic needs.”

Forrester and Kim Jewers-Dailley spoke at length about the program on an episode of WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program. Click on or download the above sound file to listen to the full episode.