Responsive Schools: Building a Trauma Responsive Learning Community for All Children

This project aims to change the culture of ten public schools to become trauma responsive communities of learning.

Through training and coaching of trauma collaboratives or teams (TCs) of school staff, the project team will use a participatory action quality improvement approach to help them develop sustainable trauma-responsive programming using implementation science to guide culture changes.

Our project had started successfully but Covid-19 closed our schools in the face-to-face environment and our University halted all face-to-face research.

• Decided to pivot our project in order to respond to the Covid-19 stress that school personnel face both professionally and personally.
• Surveyed Indianapolis school personnel for signs of stress, coping, and resilience, in addition to their perspectives around the ability of their schools to keep children and school personnel safe.
• Received over 1300 surveys and are working to write reports for each district and make recommendations for districts in order to assist their personnel to cope with stress.
• Working to write reports for each district and make recommendations for districts in order to assist their personnel to cope with stress.