Teachers Are Allowed to Be Human Starting With Trauma-Informed Care of Educators Who Care for Youth

Welcome: The Importance Of Our Care And Humanizing Heart Work

As a school social worker, I have had the privilege of being a member of the many care and learning systems, and also being a lonely department and glue that holds many resources together for students, families, and staff. For 20 years, I believed and trusted the rhetoric with which most people are indoctrinated while working in schools: “The struggle” of this work is “just the way it is” (NEA, 2022, para. 4) I have experienced repeated work days that included death; I have seen horrific acts committed on children and families; I have met with members of legal prosecution teams; I have served as a grassroots developer of resources; and I have been the voice elevator for the students, families, and staff I serve. Starting in 2017 in Sonoma County, California, parts of the community were burned to the ground by wildfires for 5 subsequent years, which also included 2 years of flooding that destroyed two towns. Then, as reinforced the organization Trauma Transformed (2023), and people’s shared experiences of the COVID-19 global pandemic and resulting shelter-in-place mandates; protests and vandalism connected to Black Lives Matter; distance learning; and skyrocketing numbers of homelessness, domestic violence, and child abuse. In addition to the “normal” elements of working in schools, I carried the load of these experiences with my teacher peers into the classroom and was asked by educational and human services system administrators to use a trauma-informed approach with students—without a trauma-informed approach being applied to us. There cannot be one without the other. Working in schools means being a human and working with one’s heart; yet, there is only so much the heart can take before it breaks without equitable, inclusive, encompassing maintained care for the adults, first. Early childhood educators and providers are not shielded for these types of challenging experiences. Early childhood teachers and support providers actually have the opportunity to potentially see and experience the challenges faced by youth and families early on in a child’s development; in some ways making their heart work more intense as these adults are providing prevention and early intervention. As a school based social worker my early childhood colleagues and I would consistently carry the worry of “what can we do before things get worse and harder for everyone involved”.

This question is how conversations have often started with many of the teachers I have collaborated with, trained, and mentored for over 20 years. I have sat across and looked into the eyes of compassionate, dedicated teachers and care providers, who realized they were not adequately trained nor cared for by the education system to do the job they were expected to perform. In my current role working in Preschool–12^th grade school districts, I have listened to these teachers’ countless stories of how their students were suffering in their classrooms, trying to manage their lives and development while attempting to learn. The phrases I have heard weekly at my job, and which I have struggled to answer, include: “How am I supposed to help them learn if they have so much going on?”; “My heart breaks listening to what my students go through every day”; “I cannot fix what happens outside of my class”; “What is happening to my students is real and in my face . . . what do I say?”; “I am so tired, stressed, overwhelmed . . . I don’t know if I can do this . . . who can help me?”; “This stuff is not my job. I am here to teach the standards”; and “I am not ok, and other parts of my life are being impacted by my job.”