Being a school counselor often demands more than addressing academics, career goals and the personal lives of students, said Kelli Aiken.

School counselors often also have to deal with the effects of what is going on in kids’ lives when they’re not at school.

“We’re putting Band-Aids on some really big wounds,” said Aiken, a counselor at Lakes Magnet Middle School in Coeur d’Alene.

Those Band-Aids are temporary solutions to a wide range of adversities children face, which if left unchecked, could negatively affect them throughout their lives. Aiken and other North Idaho professionals who work with children have found hope in the form of a scientific study and a former Walla Walla, Wash., principal who used that study to turn around a crumbling high school.

“A bigger hammer”

Children don’t walk around with signs hanging around their necks stating things like “My dad went to jail last night,” or “My parents are using meth.” Aiken has a mental checklist of things she considers when attempting to determine what could be the driving force behind a child’s disciplinary issues at school: Lack of food, inadequate clothing, poor health care, fighting parents, a death in the family.

“All of those things are huge traumatic experiences for kids,” Aiken said. “It’s stuff that they can’t control and they can’t make better; the adults have to do it. That leaves them coping and their coping mechanisms aren’t healthy.”

Aiken said in her office at Lakes, she sees those unhealthy coping mechanisms broadcast in students who are missing a significant number of classes, failing multiple subjects or showing aggressive behavior. More dramatic effects of adversity in the home include signs of mental illness, depression and suicide ideation.

Drug use is a common coping mechanism, Aiken said, because it numbs the pain children are experiencing. At-risk kids have a tendency to find other at-risk kids to hang out with, she added, which can compound the drug use.

People often misinterpret the tell-tale signs of adverse situations at home and believe troubled children are being willfully defiant. Instead of thinking about the underlying problem causing the behavior, Aiken said, frustration causes adults to go straight to punishment and instilling fear.

“Then we want a hammer, then a bigger hammer, and then a bigger bigger hammer,” Aiken said. “There’s just really not a big enough hammer to scare these kids into shaping up and doing the right thing.”

The Phoenix

Aiken’s brother is a juvenile court administrator in Washington, and she said the two often talk about their experiences with at-risk children. During one of those conversations, Aiken learned about the efforts of Jim Sporleder, a high-school principal in Walla Walla.

In the spring of 2007, Sporleder took over as the principal of Paine High School — an alternative secondary school that served 77 of Walla Walla’s most at-risk students. Shortly after his arrival, he held a contest to rename the school as a way of giving the school, and its students, a clean break from the past.

The students eventually chose the name Lincoln High School, and adopted the phoenix as their mascot. Sporleder also adopted a “trauma-informed” model of teaching, which looked at the underlying issues causing the types of trouble and outbursts that led students, primarily from a court order, to his school.

To do this, Sporleder referred to the Adverse Childhood Experience study, one of the largest investigations of the connections between childhood maltreatment and health and well-being later in life. A collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente’s Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego, the ACE study queried 17,000 patients about their childhood experiences. Participants were asked 10 questions that would reveal whether they had experienced significant traumatic events including verbal abuse, physical abuse and neglect.

Principal Sporleder used those same 10 questions to determine the level of trauma his students had experienced. A higher ACE score meant a larger degree of adversity.

Sporleder dramatically changed the way his school handled discipline and brought in a trainer to teach every member of the staff, from teachers to secretaries, about the study and the science of resilience — factors, external or internal, that help a person bounce back from setbacks and overcome challenges.

By focusing on building relationships and resiliency in students, Lincoln High saw the graduation rate nearly triple during Sporleder’s tenure.

“I was pretty sold on everything they did there,” Aiken said. “They totally changed their approach on discipline. Instead of ‘Why did you do that?’ it became ‘What is happening to you, what’s your story?’”

Building a Movement through ACEs

When Aiken began exploring how to educate the community on the Walla Walla model, she quickly learned she wasn’t alone. Others, such as Lynn Thompson, were already working to implement similar “trauma-informed” models of working with at-risk children.

“We’re medicating these kids, putting them in intensive services, and we’re not really seeing a lot of movement,” said Thompson, chief of children’s mental health for Idaho’s five northern counties. “It caused us to look at what we were missing.”

Humans are wired to respond to chronic stress and adversity in a way that Thompson said can often look like oppositional behavior or attention deficit disorder. Thompson added that traditional methods of combatting that behavior can have little effect on a child who is living in adverse circumstances.

“But what the ACE study tells us is that it’s really about healing through relationships and really developing that resiliency,” Thompson said. “It’s about informing our process through a lens that’s not just about the medical problem. We’re really looking at this kiddo as a whole person and what types of life experiences contribute to their current presentation.”

The beauty of the ACE study, according to Thompson, is that anyone can play a dramatic role in building resiliency. Expensive training and programming is not necessary. Instead, the focus becomes instilling a feeling of safety and building healthy relationships.

“These kids have learned that adults may or may not be safe, so why would they listen to us?” Thompson said. “We need to think about that relationship and how we can use those interventions to help kids know that they are OK. These kids are then going to feel safer and they’re going to have better outcomes.”

“That’s what gives us hope”

On April 30 at the Salvation Army Kroc Center in Coeur d’Alene, Thompson, Aiken and more than 400 professionals who work with children attended a conference exploring the ACEs movement and “trauma-informed” therapy models.

The event kicked off Mental Health Awareness month and Thompson said the response they received was overwhelmingly supportive, with many attendees having “Ah-Ha” moments. Others said everyone they work with should have attended, which gives Thompson hope that a movement is building in North Idaho.

“To have a name for it — and be able to say this might be an explanation for what we are seeing — makes us want to yell that from the rooftops,” Thompson said. “We want people to know that what we’re seeing is not because these kids want to have high-risk behaviors, it’s because they might have some sort of traumatic background.”

Her ultimate goal, and the goal of the professionals like Aiken with whom she works closely, is to get the message to the entire community. Everyone can play a role in building resiliency in children and preventing traumatic experiences from having a negative impact on the rest of their lives.

“There are thousands and thousands of people with those high ACE scores who are remarkable adults and they’re impacting the world in a very positive way,” Thompson said. “That’s what gives us hope.”