Adam Dayan is joined by Nelson Mar, Senior Staff Attorney at Bronx Legal Services, to discuss Healing Centered Practices and the importance of emphasizing the strengths of individuals recovering from trauma. Nelson, who served as the lead attorney in a landmark lawsuit challenging the NYC public school system’s practice of sending students to hospital emergency rooms for disruptive behavior, shares his current work focused on creating safer, more supportive schools through trauma-informed practices and better access to mental health services.
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NYC Special Education Attorney Adam Dayan is joined by Nelson Mar, Senior Staff Attorney at Bronx Legal Services, to discuss Healing Centered Practices and the importance of emphasizing the strengths of individuals recovering from trauma. Nelson, who served as the lead attorney in a landmark lawsuit challenging the NYC public school system’s practice of sending students to hospital emergency rooms for disruptive behavior, shares his current work focused on creating safer, more supportive schools through trauma-informed practices and better access to mental health services.
ANNOUNCER: This is Curious Incident, a podcast for special needs families, and your window into the world of special education. Special needs parenting can be challenging, and we want to make it easier by providing you with the resources you need to help your child. Still deep into the world of learning differently with your host, special education attorney Adam Dyan.
ADAM: I am pleased to present Nelson Marr as my next guest on the Curious Incident podcast. Nelson Marr is a senior staff attorney at Bronx Legal Services. Over the last 25 years, Nelson has represented hundreds of families in a wide range of education law issues with a particular focus on the intersection of students with disabilities and student discipline in the hopes of disrupting the schools to prison pipeline. Nelson was the lead counsel in a ground-breaking lawsuit, TH et al. versus Farina et al. In the Southern District of New York, brought on behalf of 11 plaintiffs challenging the practice by New York City Schools of sending students to hospital emergency rooms for disruptive behaviors. Nelson also helped co-found the Bronx Anti-bullying Coalition and the Healing Centered Schools Working Group. Currently, Nelson’s primary focus is to bring healing-centered practices to New York City public schools. Nelson, it’s great to have you here today.
NELSON: It’s a pleasure to be here, Adam.
ADAM: Thanks for being here. So let’s start with something very basic. What is a healing-centered practice?
NELSON: So healing-centered practice refers to an approach that centers healing in addressing trauma. Many of the approaches tend to focus more on the trauma and more deficit-based, whereas a healing-centered approach focuses more on the assets of the individual and looks at healing as a holistic approach. And it also involves the collective approach to healing, which is somewhat different from some of the other approaches out there.
ADAM: So before we go any further, can we define trauma?
NELSON: Yes. So trauma, the general definition, is any event that overwhelms a person’s ability to cope with that event. Certainly many of us associate trauma with an accident or something physical, but it could also be emotional. So losing a loved one, experiencing food insecurity, those things too can also be traumatic events.
ADAM: Thanks for that clarification. And when you were talking a moment ago, you mentioned a holistic approach. Can you say a little bit more about what that means?
NELSON: When we talk about a holistic approach, we are talking about looking at all aspects of how we can work with people to heal. So it takes into account not only what’s going on with the individual, but also what’s going on in the environment, the ecosystem that that individual exists in. And I know we’re going to talk about it a little bit later on, but when we’re talking about healing-centered approaches in schools, that really encompasses the entire school community to work together to try to promote healing within that school community. So that’s what we refer to when we say holistic.
ADAM: And we’ll definitely get into this more, but we’re talking about not just the student, but also the teacher, the school staff, the parents, the community, any advocate, social workers, et cetera.
NELSON: Yes. I think one of the important differences with healing-centered schools approach is that it does put front and center the needs of educators in the school community. Their well-being and their social-emotional needs as well. A lot of approaches tend to be very focused on students for good reason, but I think we’re missing the equation if we don’t include also the needs of the staff. Because ultimately, they’re crucial and pivotal how schools actually respond to children if crises come up.
ADAM: So I’ve been practicing in this field of special education law for the last 15 years, and this idea of healing-centered practices is novel even to me. So I’m sure it’s novel for some of our listeners as well. Let’s just take a step back. Can you say a few words about where and when this concept originated?
NELSON: The concept originated in California in 1989 through the work of Dr. Sean Jin Wright, who’s currently a professor at Harvard School of Education. He was running a summer camp and this camp dealt with children who were exposed to traumatic events. And he realized that essentially we were sort of doing it wrong. We were focusing too much on those traumatic events. The children were telling him, why do we have to talk about the worst day of my life? Can we talk about how we can get better, how we can actually my aspirations, my goals, and the light bulb went off in his head. And we really need to focus more on healing because a lot of times when you talk about trauma, you forget that people are resilient and that the brain can actually heal. So we really should focus on that. And I think that’s really transformative.
ADAM: So that’s some helpful background. And now that we have that background, I want to see if we can paint the picture of the students this could potentially pertain to a little bit better.
NELSON: The reality is that we all are likely to face traumatic events in our lives. And so this approach is really about creating the school climate and the environment where people have been provided approaches that allowed them to be resilient and build resiliency in individuals so that when these events happen, they are less likely to experience the more negative effects of it. But certainly there are very common traumas that we could identify. We did mention loss of a loved one. In this city, there’s a lot of housing insecurity. So families often face evictions and potential homelessness. All of that is very traumatic. There are the interpersonal traumas that happen in everyday life, issues of conflict where people can be bullied, harassment, assaults. So those are just a short list of traumas. But again, this much like special education is very individualized. An event for one person may be very traumatic, whereas a similar event to another person may not be. I think we don’t want to say that this fits any certain category and that this is really to help address a wide range of traumas.
ADAM: Okay, so let’s use that as a segue into special education. How does this idea of healing-centered practices relate to special education and students with disabilities?
NELSON: We can talk about this more about the brain science of it. Essentially over the last 10, 15 years, there’s been a robust development in the area of brain science. And a lot of that has been driven by technology, the improvements in MRI scanning of the brain. So there have been a number of studies that have shown that more and more exposures to trauma and adverse experiences impact brain development. And those areas of the brain that’s impacted have been correlated to areas that are important to learning. And so such as attention, the parts of the brain that’s impacted a lot by trauma and adverse experiences is the frontal cortex. And in that area, that’s sort of seen as the air traffic control tower of the brain, where it controls our ability to pay attention, to concentrate, to make good judgments, plan and execute. Exactly. And those are really important skills that a person needs in order to learn in our very structured learning environments, in our public schools. So it’s understandable that the research finds a link between exposure to trauma to children also having learning difficulties, having behavioral difficulties, and also speech and language difficulties. And all of this plays out in students likely being referred for special education due to the impacts of trauma. Not so much because there’s an innate, organic learning disability, but that really these were the impacts of trauma during their years of development. And this also has a huge impact for students who exhibit externalizing behaviors. So children who act out because they’ve been impacted by trauma and they haven’t been able to be healed by it. So they then engage in externalizing behaviors, like hitting people or being aggressive or jumping out of their seats. So these students often then get disciplined.
ADAM: And I just want to clarify before we move forward with the discipline, right? There’s externalizing behaviors, which you just gave examples of. And there’s internalizing behavior, which is more depression, sadness, anxiety, fear, and perhaps make students sort of go inside a shell as opposed to the externalizing behaviors that you just described, correct?
NELSON: Yes. We want to just make clear that trauma, how it manifests in people can vary. And for some, it is externalizing behaviors. So if they’ve been impacted by trauma and they’re faced with a stressful situation, they will act out. Whereas others, if they’re more likely to turn inwards that internalizing behavior, when they’re faced with a stressful situation, they would shut down. They will put their head down on the desk.
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ADAM: As you were starting to say, it’s usually the students with the externalizing behaviors who receive discipline from their school. So talk a little bit more about how that plays out.
NELSON: If children who’ve experienced significant exposures to trauma and they haven’t been receiving the support that they need, some children deal with that and respond to that through externalizing behaviors, I think a good example would be what I think we commonly refer to the response to stress, fight, flight, or freeze. So this is the fight and flight part of that analogy. So children who do exhibit that oftentimes do wind up getting disciplined for being disruptive or if they actually do engage in more serious behaviors like actually fighting, they will then get suspended. And our system of discipline doesn’t really do much to try to address the behaviors and the reasons why the child is engaging the behaviors. Our system is really about punishing the student and providing a consequence regardless of whether or not the child is going to learn from this or actually build new skills from this. So it’s very negative. It’s sort of spirals because when a child is disciplined and not supported in these situations, they feel less connected to the school and to the school staff. And that just makes it even more likely that the students going to continue to engage in disruptive behavior because they don’t feel safe and they don’t feel supported.
ADAM: How do socioeconomic considerations factor into this conversation?
NELSON: It’s probably very intuitive. If you live in a under-resourced community, there is likely to be higher rates of traumas. We see that very clearly with crime statistics, crime happens at way higher levels in communities that are low-income, that are under-resourced, those crimes impact individuals and especially violent crime. Those are highly traumatic events. And on top of that, and it’s not just crime we mentioned before, food insecurity, housing insecurity is more common in under-resourced and low-income communities. People who are living paycheck to paycheck or on government benefits at times, they wind up short on the rent and that’s very stressful, thinking that you might be evicted at the end of the month or a couple of months and not having enough food to eat. So those are all things associated with low-income and under-resourced communities. And those are all significant exposures to traumatic situations. Those are all traumatic situations. So there is a greater likelihood that there will be higher exposures for children growing up in those under-resourced neighborhoods.
ADAM: Nelson, prior to the creation of healing-centered practices and schools, what actions have schools taken in the past and what issues have arisen from schools’ actions in this area?
NELSON: Unfortunately, the history of education in America is not great with regards to the social and emotional needs of students. It has largely focused on meeting academic benchmarks and meeting certain grade level requirements. Very little attention has been given to the social and emotional well-being of students. This is true even until very recently. I think that largely because of the pandemic and because of the Black Lives Matter movement, there has been a greater acknowledgement that we need to do more about the social and emotional well-being of students. I think we would still be pushing the boulder up the hill right now to convince educators that they need to address mental health issues with children and the issue of trauma with children, but for the pandemic. I think the pandemic made it very clear and it was something that no one could ignore, that this was the greatest collective trauma that humankind has ever experienced. And it really forced them to acknowledge it and also to take steps to address it.
ADAM: What role have the police played in these kinds of situations historically?
NELSON: I forgot to mention in the prior response that schools typically in the past have responded with discipline for children who would be experiencing distress as related to their trauma experiences. So oftentimes that discipline would result in exclusion from the school or exclusion from the class. And in situations where it was more serious, then police would be involved. And that’s again a more recent phenomena because before the 1960s, police were not really involved in school-related disciplinary matters. Certainly if there was a crime, that’s something separate. But I think what we’re talking about here is more about conduct that would fall more under disciplinary issues. But it was really during desegregation when black students were allowed to attend schools with their white counterparts that school officials and school boards, especially here in New York City, started involving police in school disciplinary matters. And it was in 1999 where former mayor Giuliani entered into a memorandum of understanding with the NYPD and the Board of Education to bring NYPD into New York City public schools as school safety agents. So since that time, NYPD has been in schools not as police officers mainly, but as peace officers as school safety agents. And they have been involved in a lot of disciplinary incidents, which they really shouldn’t be. Their role is there to safeguard external threats to the schools. However, school officials have often used them to address disciplinary issues. And as a result, we’ve seen a lot of cases that were very problematic where children were arrested because of a disciplinary incident that escalated. Right now, a lot of times schools also do call 911 when a child is in crisis. And when they call 911, police and emergency medical services respond. In those situations, typically it’s a child who’s in crisis, who’s been dealing with issues and school officials. When they try to interact with the student to get the student to calm down, their actions actually escalate the child and further trigger their child. And the child gets into a state where they feel where school officials feel they need to call 911 to get someone from outside to take the child away to the hospital emergency room. That’s a case that we dealt with in our lawsuit.
ADAM: So it seems to me that there’s been a certain amount of farming out with respect to these kinds of situations, farming out to NYPD to bring them in as school safety agents, farming out to 911, which either calls the police to respond to the scene or calls EMS to take the student to a hospital setting. We can talk about whether these individuals have the proper training to intervene in the way they’re intervening currently. But is it fair to say, do you agree that it seems there’s been a certain amount of farming out to entities outside the school system?
NELSON: Absolutely. And it goes back to what we were discussing before that schools don’t really have this issue on their radar about school climate, about the social emotional needs of students. A lot of pedagogues are hyper focused. And I guess partly because our policymakers require them to be hyper focused on grades. And as a result, schools aren’t equipped. Social workers are so crucial to helping schools deal with situations like this. But yet in the Bloomberg administration about 20 years ago, when he took full control of the New York City public school system, they started actually reducing the number of social workers in the system and actually put in a hiring freeze for social workers. So, and I know this because my wife at the time had her MSW and she wanted to move into the public schools, but found it almost impossible to do so as a social worker because there was a hiring freeze. So instead, she wound up having to pursue a degree in counseling because they were hiring school counselors and totally unnecessary and totally a reflection of how the focus was not in the right direction and that they were not prioritizing the social emotional needs of students.
ADAM: So, you were at Bronx Legal Services when Bronx Legal Services decided to take legal action in this arena. Can you talk about what prompted your organization to take action and what action you took to address these issues?
NELSON: We’re referring to the practice of schools using 911 in response to students who are having a crisis or who are being disruptive. This issue is something that I personally seen all the way back in 2004 and actually, if you look up this New York Times article, I’m quoted actually in it, the New York Times was approached by medical professionals who were upset that schools were calling 911, getting ambulances to take children who had behavioral difficulties and literally dumping them in their emergency room and sort of washing their hands of it. And those doctors got so upset about it, they actually went to the press in 2004. So this issue has been around. Over time, it seemed to become more and more common practice. By 2010, we were hearing it in our daily intakes at Bronx Legal Services and in our sister offices throughout the city at Legal Services NYC. And by that time as well, the medical professionals were reaching out to me again and saying, look, something needs to be done. They felt that the publicity route didn’t work in 2004 and they said, there’s no other option at this point. We have to bring litigation and they said, Nelson, you got to do this. So at that time, we started that effort and we did bring a lawsuit in 2013 against the city, the fire department and the New York City Department of Education.
ADAM: Is that the one I referenced in your bio?
NELSON: Yes. It was a case filed in federal district court in the Southern District on behalf of 11 plaintiffs who had all been EMS and had 911 called on them when they were involved in disruptive behaviors. In all those instances, these were children younger than six except for one, one of those plaintiffs. And for all of them, they were brought to the hospital emergency room, assessed and determined that there was no real medical emergency and they could be discharged. We were arguing that the practice was an illegal removal, that they were misusing emergency medical services in the hopes of just removing a disruptive student or a problematic student in their eyes. And I’m using air quotes here for those who are listening. And for the most part, we argued that they had other avenues to take, to actually address these concerns. Certainly as you’re familiar with, there’s the special education route. If these are behaviors that are persistent and impact their ability to learn and or impact the ability of other students to learn, those are valid reasons for referral for special education. In many ways, that’s what schools were actually trying to do. They were trying to get children evaluated to determine if they needed more intensive services. And we argued, well, there’s a less restrictive way to do it. Calling 911 and having a child sent to the hospital emergency room is very traumatic. And there were a lot of downstream impacts as well, especially for the parent because this practice comes with a cost. An ambulance at the time was about $800. So hospital emergency room visit was about $1,200. And even though the parent didn’t call and in many instances were objecting and arguing that they shouldn’t send the child that they were just minutes away from the school and that their child should be released to them, families were charged. We’re given these bills and they had to pay. Yes, they had to pay or their insurance covered. For those parents that couldn’t pay or who were on Medicaid, all taxpayers were then footing the bill. So I think we were trying to argue that not only was this practice illegal, but it was also unnecessarily expensive.
ADAM: What was the result of the lawsuit against New York City for its practices?
NELSON: We were able to achieve a fairly quick settlement. I think for you and other attorneys who do litigation, especially federal court litigation against big entities, these cases could drag on for years. But we were able to settle the case within a year. There’s a number of reasons why that happened. But essentially in that settlement, which I think was rather historic, the city acknowledged that they needed to do better. I mean, they didn’t acknowledge guilt, of course, but by agreeing to institute training at schools that had the highest number of 911 transports for children in crisis, they agreed that those schools would receive targeted training on crisis de-escalation. They also agreed to a period of data sharing. So they provided us data on EMS transports for about three years. They also agreed to institute a new regulation for the city schools. And that regulation would actually provide protocols and policies on how schools’ officials should respond to a child in crisis and if they’re considering calling 911. Be shocking, but up until then, there was no formal policy on how schools should respond to children who are in crisis and schools are considering calling 911. In that regulation, which we helped draft Chancellor’s Regulation A411, we were very insistent upon schools being required to develop a plan on how they will respond to children in crisis. So now all schools are required to develop a plan at the beginning of the year on how schools will do that, which I think is significant because if you’re not planning for it, it’s very ad hoc and it’s likely mistakes are going to be made. In addition to that, the regulation also makes it very clear that schools should not be using 911 as a form of just removing the child as a disciplinary response and they also made very clear in the regulation that parents had rights to talk to their child during this process. Schools should be contacting the parent right away if a child is in crisis and trying to have the parent help calm the child down, get the child more regulated, which we think is a no-brainer, right? Because who better for the child to respond to than his or her parent?
ADAM: Absolutely. Well, that sounds like a huge win. So congratulations.
NELSON: Thank you. I did also forget to mention that we got a monetary settlement as well for those families, so those 11 families that were involved. And we did get the fire department to re-emphasize their regulations that if parents refuse medical treatment, they cannot override that parent’s refusal unless they go through a separate process with a doctor through the fire department of New York, which I think is significant. Schools need to be trained on de-escalation and need to be thinking about how to support children who get dysregulated.
ADAM: And before you say how to do that, should we just take one step back and define crisis? We’re talking about de-escalating a crisis. So what constitutes a crisis?
NELSON: It’s a situation where a child is overwhelmed by the situation and is exhibiting behaviors that are concerning. So they could be externalizing behaviors, being aggressive, assaulting others, or it could be internalizing where a child says, really sad, I feel like there’s no point in going on or a child who’s sleeping the entire day at school. These could be examples of a child in crisis.
ADAM: Okay, thank you. So how should schools be de-escalating those kinds of crises?
NELSON: At the heart of it, it is about providing support showing that there is a caring individual at the school for that child. A lot of how we build resiliency is when people feel supported, that they feel that they have strong relationships with others who are there for them. So it’s important, I think, for schools to take that time to build those relationships. I’ve heard some crazy stories from colleagues and from friends who are educators where some of the teachers that they work with don’t know the full names of all their students. And this is after months of working with these children. That is problematic.
ADAM: If you don’t know their full names, how are you going to know what’s affecting them internally, what pain they’re feeling, why they’re exhibiting the behaviors they’re exhibiting?
NELSON: And it also reflects that there’s no real connection between that educator and the student. A lot of this is about relationships. A healing-centered approach is one where relationships are strengthened, between educators and students, between students and students, and between staff and staff, because these crises can happen to anyone, as we’ve mentioned before.
ADAM: So that’s the foundation, having that connection between staff and student. And then what? Once you have that connection, how should teachers and staff go about de-escalating crises?
NELSON: There are defined approaches. Gold standards, like therapeutic crisis and intervention in schools, TCIS. It’s an approach through Cornell University. There are other approaches as well. It does involve trying to acknowledge what the child is experiencing and trying to get them to redirect where their energy is. A lot of times, it is also about what folks shouldn’t be doing. It shouldn’t be trying to isolate the student, shouldn’t be trying to talk about consequences and about making decisions. It is really more about being there for the child to support them. I did also want to mention that it’s not only staff that could play a role into de-escalation, but it also could be fellow students, too. And we see that often being utilized in these restorative practices approaches, where they use circles to build greater relationships between classmates, individual classes, and throughout the school. And through those relationships, students can play a role in de-escalation at times.
ADAM: Nelson, you and I have spoken about end of the process versus front of the process. What does it mean to address the front end of the process when it comes to trauma or crisis?
NELSON: So, if we look at trauma on a continuum, if a child is impacted by trauma, the behaviors that they exhibit are really at the end of the process. And our lawsuit, when we sued the city about misusing 911, we were really dealing with things about the end of the process. So when students are exhibiting negative behaviors and schools responding inappropriately, our efforts to change that response was really about changing how they dealt with the end of the process. Really after our lawsuit, we realized that we got some significant wins in the settlement, but the practice continued. The data that we were able to get through the settlement showed that the practice stayed more or less the same and even spiked at higher numbers after our settlement. So that was sort of discouraging, but also pointed us to the fact that we needed to address the root cause, the front end of the process, which is how we can better respond to children who have been exposed to trauma by building resiliency at the front end so that they don’t get to the point where they get too stressed and overwhelmed and then engage in behaviors that result in negative externalizing behaviors. The front end is often referred to as root cause analysis. So you’re looking at what the root causes are. And if we can do more at the front end, we can help children heal from the traumas that they’ve been exposed to, we can also even look at trying to prevent some of the traumas too. So one of the things that we talk about a lot in the Healing Centered Schools Working Group as we try to encourage the New York City Public School System to adopt this approach is that schools can be sites of trauma, that incidents do happen in the school environment that can be traumatic and that could then further exacerbate what’s going on for individual students and even staff. So if we take a more holistic approach, a Healing Centered approach, then we could actually look at things that the school is doing so that they could then reduce the likelihood of traumas happening in school.
ADAM: Yeah, and I just want to underscore resiliency, which we know is that protective layer to help individuals deal with future adversity. So the more schools can focus on that and help their students build their resiliency, the better able they’ll be to deal with adversity in the future.
NELSON: Absolutely. And this is so important right now, given how clear it is that young people are experiencing a mental health crisis in our nation, let alone in New York City Public Schools. This is a huge nationwide problem only made worse by the pandemic and schools where children spend most of their time during the day should be doing more and to help build that resiliency so that there is less of a burden on our healthcare system. It’s impossible to have enough counselors, therapists for every child that needs counseling and therapy right now. And so if we can do more to provide approaches that actually build resiliency, that build community and build stronger relationships, then it’s less likely children will need these higher level of care, like individual therapy.
ADAM: Now, so I think we’ve touched on this a bit already, but if there’s more you want to add, why is it that traditional schools are so ill-equipped to address trauma?
NELSON: I did want to add that it is a significant issue of resources, not simply money, but also time. And schools do not have the time in the school day where they can hold these either restorative circles or healing circles to address the social and emotional needs of students where they can build connections with each other and with staff and try to improve their resiliency.
ADAM: Do you want to say a little bit more about your efforts to make schools more trauma-sensitive and trauma-informed?
NELSON: Yes. As I mentioned before, we were somewhat disheartened by the data that after our settlement on the EMS litigation, when EMS transports continued at the rate that they were prior to our settlement. And so we started to really look at those root causes because we said we’re addressing the back-end of it. We really need to address the front-end. So we went back to our partners in the community, the mental health providers that we regularly meet with. They said if you want to talk about the root cause, you really have to talk about trauma. Almost unanimously, they said schools are not a, trauma-informed or b, properly trained to really respond when children are coming to them with this trauma history. And it made total sense, right? Here we’re in the South Bronx, one of the poorest communities in the country, and where there’s significant socioeconomic factors that we talked about that likely lead to trauma. So we said then that should be our mission to make the Bronx schools more trauma-informed so that they can better work with students, so that we have less suspensions, we have less EMS calls. Through our initial work, folks at the New Settlement Parent Action Committee, folks that we’ve worked with for many, many years on school justice issues, they said, look, Nelson, we need to go beyond trauma because trauma is very deficit-based. It’s looking at the worst moment of a person’s life at times. We need to really talk about healing. And there’s this movement out there to realign that conversation because what’s often forgotten in this conversation is that people can heal. And that was so transformative when we heard that that we said, okay, we’re changing the name of a group right away. And we then formally began calling ourselves the Healing Centered Schools Working Group.
ADAM: So what does healing look like? How does one know when it’s been achieved?
NELSON: Well, healing is different for everyone. It’s not a linear process because things are constantly happening to us as individuals. But I think healing is where people are engaging in building resiliency in themselves and in others. I think one of the important tenets of the Healing Centered Schools approach is that
ANNOUNCER: this is a collective effort and through helping others, we are also helping ourselves.
ADAM: Some schools try to create positive social and emotional climate within their walls. Why is that not enough for children affected by trauma?
NELSON: Positive school climates and efforts to do that are great. Healing Centered Schools is one approach to improving school climate. I think what we see happening in practice is that often schools will sort of just adopt a slogan or adopt certain principles of positive school climate and social and emotional learning without really taking that deeper dive to understanding that this has to be really a holistic approach. We really have to involve people meaningfully in talking about how school climate will serve the social and emotional needs of everyone. Again, everyone, not just the students, but also the staff. Even the parents and community members that interact with the school community.
ADAM: Absolutely. As you’ve said, healing-centered practices is a national movement. What’s unique about how this movement is progressing in New York City?
NELSON: I think the main distinction is that the movement here in New York City is very much grassroots and has really come from parents, from educators, from advocates and mental health providers. This is in contrast to what’s happening nationally where a lot of the healing-centered approaches have been adopted through decisions by district school district administrators. One example is the Chicago Public School System where they did adopt a healing-centered school’s framework for the entire school district, which is amazing, but that did not happen through a grassroots effort like in New York City, like what we’re engaging in here.
ADAM: Before we wrap up, I’m wondering if there’s anything else you want to share about the progress that’s been made. I know we’ve been talking about the Bronx, and so I’m wondering, do you have plans to expand outside the Bronx and where else are these practices greatly needed?
NELSON: We’ve made significant strides, and I’ve been a little surprised at how far we’ve come to some degree, because in my mind, having interacted with the New York City Department of Education and understanding how bureaucratic it can be, I thought, it’s going to take at least five to ten years to even get them to acknowledge that this is an issue. So in 2018, we started the process of trying to develop a report, one that could provide a roadmap for how schools could become healing-centered. We focus mainly in the Bronx, because, again, that was the community we were working in, but then a little thing called the pandemic happened, and that really caused some of the folks in the Chancellor’s Office to really think about how they could be addressing trauma, and they turned to us because we had started engaging them on this issue, and we were able to wrap up a report in the Department of Education, use that report as part of reopening of schools in the fall of 2020. They also turned to us for recommendations about trainings for their staff, about trauma, and then in the subsequent years, we’ve been working with them to engage parents on healing-centered practices. They decided to institute a program called the Healing Ambassador Program, where they, in 21-22 school year, they were providing stipends for over 800 parents to take professional learning on healing-centered practices and on issues of wellness, and then they were required to turn key that learning to workshops and community events that focused on well-being and healing-centered practices for their school community. We thought this was an amazing program because it engaged so many parents, and throughout many parts of the city, obviously, that’s not all the schools in the school system. There’s over 1,000 schools, but that’s significant, 800 close to 2-thirds, 3-4 of the school system. Unfortunately, the program only lasted for a year, and we’ve been working with the Department of Education on smaller healing-embastator projects. Recently, we were able to get a grant from the New York Community Trust that is providing funding for us to work with 12 schools on a closer level to actually go the full 9 yards, or 10 yards, I guess, and to really look at trying to become a fully healing-centered school, where at the end of year 1 on this, and maybe I can update you after we’re at year 2.
ADAM: That would be wonderful. Before we end, just give you an opportunity to give any encouraging words for parents who are listening, or if there’s any main takeaways that you want them to have from this conversation now is your chance.
NELSON: In my experience, having worked with so many parents over the last 25 years, I can say parents of students with disabilities are some of the fiercest advocates out there who know how to use their skills and their strengths, and they recognize how important it is to work together. I salute them, and I encourage them to continue to do that, but also recognize that there are these bigger policy issues that we should address because it has a lot of impact for all children.
ADAM: I echo that sentiment, and so those parents as well. Nelson, where can people learn more about this movement?
NELSON: They can go to our website, legalservicesmyc.org. They certainly can Google Healing-Centered Schools Working Group. My email is my first initial, my last name, n-m-a-r-at-l-s-n-y-c-dot-o-r-g.
ADAM: Nelson, thank you so much for joining me here today, doing great work in the area of Healing-Centered Programs, and I look forward to seeing further progress in the future.
NELSON: Thank you for having me, Adam.
ADAM: It’s been a pleasure.
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