Introduction
ACEs are stressful or traumatic situations that happen in the person’s childhood years before age 18. ACEs are various types of child maltreatment, inattentive attachment, and socially disorganized environments that affect a child’s growth and future health consequences. The issue of ACEs understanding is relevant for educators because they have to realize how these experiences influence behaviours, relationships, and capacities in the classroom environment. Therefore, the paper reveals a summary of ACEs and the implications of this phenomenon for the education sector in California based on reading from the Roadmap for Resilience report from the California Surgeon General.
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)
Some of the common ACEs include emotional, physical and sexual abuse; emotional and physical neglect; and social challenges like parents’ mental illness, substance abuse, divorce, violence and incarceration. The CDC-Kaiser study conducted in 1998 produced strong evidence that ACE is correlated with the harmful effect of negative adult health. The higher the ACE scores, the greater the lifetime probability of facing such issues as heart disease, unemployment and substance abuse (Pediatrics, 2014). ACEs may cause changes in brain development and stress-induced reactions that can potentially destroy health. Children who have ACEs often display behavioural issues, learning challenges, and struggles with relationships in the field of education.
Stress Responses
ACEs have a devastating effect, one of the most important consequences of which is toxic stress that impairs students’ capabilities to learn and control themselves. Unlike usual stress responses in which the stress response systems return to their baseline very soon, toxic stress is a prolonged activation of the body’s stress response systems. In cases of repeated or chronic adversity and failure to have a caregiver around, the children develop hyperarous responses to threats that may last beyond childhood. They can behave in a fight-or-flight way, with antagonism or timidity at school. The impact of toxic stress includes adverse effects on the developing immune, hormonal, and neural systems, leading to deficient memory, executive functioning, and impaired emotional regulation (Pediatrics, 2014). This shapes the challenges with concentration, behaviour and interpersonal relationships. Recurring trauma is experienced by children who have high ACE scores, and they develop complex trauma. Education Institutions should understand how Toxic stress influences the students’ feelings, assumptions, and reactions.
Impacts on Education
ACEs and toxic stress affect school students and schools in different ways. Children with ACEs are more likely to have cognitively, emotionally and socially challenging issues, leading to academic challenges, increased days of missing school, and poor engagement. The adverse events in early childhood have been associated with low IQ and language scores, a higher risk of learning disorders and grade repeats, and lower secondary school graduation rates. Academic inadequacies with ACEs treated as root causes in schools are often addressed without remediation. Trauma and toxic stress also increase the incidences of inappropriate mental health issues, wayward behaviour, poor peer interaction, and strained teacher-student interpersonal relations (Pediatrics, 2014). Educators need trauma-informed training so as not to retraumatize students and instead use sensitive support. ACEs must be identified as entities that damage educational equity and school climate.
Primary Prevention Strategies
Primary prevention strategies aim to begin prevention before an ACE occurs through level societal, community, and family interventions. In the school setting, primary prevention encompasses policies and programs geared towards preventing factors that might contribute to ACEs, such as child maltreatment, domestic violence and substance abuse. This implies setting standards where the rules are clearly defined and ruthlessly enforced, and the student feels connected, respected, and appreciated. Other major prevention strategies include parenting training, screening for mental health, violence prevention curricula, early childhood family visits, and referral to community resources. To prevent root causes, schools can contribute towards the establishment of safe and stable home environments that reduce the levels of traumatic exposures.
Secondary Prevention Strategies
Secondary prevention helps identify and respond to ACEs at the early stages of development after their emergence to minimize further damage. This, to schools, is universal screening to detect any student or, even more so, groups of students suffering from adversity or stress. Screening allows for early interventions such as mentorship, counselling, social-emotional curriculums and cognitive behavioural approaches. ACE education provided to caregivers assists families in appreciating the influence of ACEs and toxic stress (Pediatrics, 2014). Referrals link families to programs supported by evidence-based practice in the area of parenting, treatment for mental health issues, and access to resources for public assistance that limit sources of adversity.
Tertiary Prevention Strategies
The tertiary strategies support learners manifesting problems that are still lingering, owing to past ACEs and toxic stress. Trauma-informed multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) are an approach that many schools adopt, where the interventions move up a scale based on the level of need of the student. Tertiary tier supports offer sub-specialized treatment, which includes school counsellors, social workers, psychologists and community mental health collaborations. This intensive model comprises assessments, crisis planning, social skills instructions, psychotherapy and family case management. For students with Emotional and Behavioral Disabilities in Complex Trauma, interventions are mainly behavioural plans that are tailored to the individual student, relationship classrooms with extra staff members, and wraparound services.
Case Study
The case studies demonstrate the approaches in which schools embraced MTSS in trauma-informed care. The three priorities I should implement are initiating school wellness leadership teams to direct trauma initiatives, integrating mental health staff who can provide consistent counselling and crisis support, and adopting whole-child approaches in high-needs classrooms that incorporate social-emotional skill-building into everyday routine. Wellness teams promote wellness as a competing priority for the sustainability of a trauma focus (Pediatrics, 2014). The presence of embedded mental health professionals assures that students are provided with responsive care and that staff have access to collaboration support. Both are fundamentals of traumatized schools.
Connections to SEL
Knowing ACEs and how they influence education is crucial for those hoping to develop collaboratively oriented classrooms based on social-emotional learning. Most of the problematic, maladaptive behaviours demonstrated by students are a result of social skill impairment, emotional regulation and decision-making dysfunction that may arise from trauma and toxic stress rather than defiance. SEL instruction focusing on self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making does so by remedying these deficits (Pediatrics, 2014). However, educators should be aware of the incidence of ACE and their neurobiological effects to avoid exclusionary responses and recognize the trauma signs
Conclusion
This assignment allowed me to accumulate a wide range of new knowledge on the incidence of early adversity and its sustained impact. Many of the difficulties experienced by a student were SMC issues, not root causes such as ACEs. Toxic stress has changed my beliefs about student behaviours, and I now understand the causes of social-emotional, cognitive, and behavioural student challenges due to trauma. Going further, I will pay more attention to the fact that emotional breakdowns, attention problems, and gaps in school performance may be legitimate adaptations to adversity, not character issues.
References
Pediatrics, A. A. of. (2014). Adverse childhood experiences and the lifelong consequences of trauma. Calio.dspacedirect.org. https://calio.dspacedirect.org/handle/11212/2211
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