HILLTOWNS — Berne-Knox-Westerlo is celebrating itself as the first school district in New York state to be considered a trauma-skilled school, following its accreditation through the National Dropout Prevention Center. 

The skills learned from the center will help the district give its students structure, organization, and resilience as they balance personal hardships — which are often described as adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs — with their potential for achievement, Superintendent Timothy Mundell told The Enterprise this week.  

Addressing students’ ongoing hardships is important because the toll of these hardships can be widespread, Mundell explained. 

An adverse experience may be anything that may lead to toxic stress, according to Harvard Health. When ACEs were introduced in 1995, they fell into three categories: physical and emotional abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction, but the definition has since expanded to include other sources of toxic stress. 

Toxic stress refers to the physiological consequence on the body, which, in response to a stressor, goes into its emergency fight-or-flight mode, Harvard Health says. When the body is in this state for too long — which is all the more likely in the modern era, where things like poverty or systemic racism are treated by the body the same way an immediate physical threat is — it takes a toll on a person’s organs, immune system, metabolism, hormone levels, and brain. 

This is likely why people who experience a high number of ACEs without adequate intervention are more likely to suffer from heart disease, obesity, depression, substance abuse, poor grades, time out of work, and/or an early death, Harvard Health says. 

According to the New York State Department of Health, around 42 percent of New York State residents were believed to have two or more ACEs, with fairly even splits between men and women, and across all income levels. 

“It can be child abuse, or domestic violence in the home, or just constant arguing or bickering, or drug or alcohol abuse, sex abuse …,” Mundell told The Enterprise. “All of these things, they’re not just things that happen to people who live in poverty. These are things that can happen to all of us in our lives. We all have trauma in our lives that we have to overcome and be resilient to in order to succeed.”

In 2019, the same year that BKW announced that it was seeking its trauma-skilled certification,  The Enterprise reported that more than half of BKW seventh-graders surveyed by the district around that time reported experiencing trauma, and school social worker Ashley Warren said that number may have been low since some students may not have considered a traumatic event or circumstance as such.

Mundell said that, when he came to the district eight years ago, he observed that several teachers, particularly in the elementary school, were struggling with classroom management, and that kids were arriving each year for kindergarten with poor foundational language skills, which made communication difficult. 

These things, paired with the sparse population of the rural district and families who might not be able to afford certain necessities like food, clothing, or heat, contributed to the “complexity of the school building,” Mundell said.  

“As we got a little more sophisticated, what teachers recognized is that if [they] saw students struggling, there’s probably events in their lives that individually contributed to that struggle,” Mundell said. 

The quest then became about finding “the key that unlocks” their potential, Mundell said. 

John Gailer, who directs professional services for the National Dropout Prevention Center, told The Enterprise that the difference between trauma-skilled schools and more traditional schools that deal with trauma is that “most educational responses to trauma and chronic stress involve identifying students who have difficulty in that area and providing support to help them.”  

But, he said, “An approach that involves identification only provides help for those who have been identified, missing many who have not been identified.  The trauma-skilled approach infuses practices in the routines of the school day which allow students to preemptively regulate before problematic effects occur.”

Mundell summed it up as the “application of teacher observation, knowledge, and awareness.”

He sketched out a hypothetical scenario where a student named Joey is sitting in class with his head down on his desk and not participating in classroom tasks.

“That’s a cue to say, ‘Hey, Joey, how’s it going today? What do you think? Where are you at?’” Mundell said. “You’re engaging and building relationships and exchanges to figure out what’s going on.”

From there, the teacher strategizes ways to get Joey participating and makes sure to follow up with him at the end to cement the positive results of engaging with other students and the classwork. 

“It’s not clinical at all,” Mundell said. “It’s just tools teachers use to keep kids moving forward.”

According to data from the State Education Department, BKW had a dropout rate of 11 percent in 2022, more than double the state average of 5 percent. A cohort of 56 BKW students were tracked from ninth grade, showing females with a 91-percent graduation rate and males with a 79-percent graduation rate.

Economically disadvantaged BKW students had a lower graduation rate, at 71 percent, than students who were not economically disadvantaged, at 88 percent. The lowest rate was among students with disabilities who had a graduation rate of 58 percent: seven of an initial 12 graduated.

School culture

Both Gailer and Mundell said that the goal is to develop an overall school culture where students are able to use the five factors that make up resiliency: connection, belonging, achievement, autonomy, and fulfillment.

In addition to being the first in New York state to be certified, BKW is one of just 11 schools in the nation that’s considered trauma-skilled, Gailer said; nearly 70 are in the process of earning their certification. 

When asked whether this training might help BKW address some areas where the district has said it wants to make improvements in recent years — specifically chronic absenteeism, special education test scores, and a high homeschooling rate — Mundell said that the district is “in a really good place right now.”

He attributed the 22.6 percent chronic absentee rate in the high school during the 2021-22 school year and the 13.6 percent rate in the elementary school — which is the highest it has been in years — to the pandemic.

Because the school did not offer remote learning that year, any time students had to isolate because of COVID exposure or any other issue, they had to miss school completely, instead of being able to log into class from their homes. 

Mundell said he’s “enthusiastic” about the current level of student participation once COVID is controlled for. 

He also highlighted the district’s improved test scores, and said that reaching out to homeschooling families to let them know about “the options and these exciting things for kids” at the school is “the next thing up on the agenda.”

As he often does, Mundell praised the district for its sense of community, and said that the pandemic, while difficult, led to the district’s residents “rallying around the school, because it is the center of the community. It’s been really neat to watch that sense of unity evolve and it’s a really good place to be right now.”