Baltimore schools’ mission: Help students cope with trauma

BALTIMORE — When she transferred to a new K-8 school two years ago, Tinazsha Johnson was in deep distress. With the help of a $2.3 million federal grant in 2016, officials have transformed 13 public schools in troubled West Baltimore into the trauma-sensitive schools where students have access to full-time mental health clinicians, mindfulness and breathing exercises, and “peace corners” with pillows and exercise books where they can retreat and compose themselves. When officials applied for the federal grant, about 4,600 students attended the future trauma-sensitive schools — about 5.5 percent of Baltimore’s 84,000 public school students. In a May Baltimore Sun opinion piece, a leader of a behavioral health nonprofit wrote that the children of Maryland’s biggest city face a “mental health crisis.” Last week, a city councilman announced in another opinion piece his plan to make trauma response a focus of all city agencies that deal with children. And yet the neighborhood and sometimes their family circumstances don’t permit that,” Carter said in his office, decorated with photos of civil rights leaders including Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. “So we straddle this world between creating high academic expectations but also realizing, for instance, at the age of 9 you shouldn’t have to take care of all your brothers and sisters because of family disintegration.” Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton University, said children “enter their classrooms carrying the burden of violence with them,” which harms their ability to get a good night’s sleep and concentrate.