Former Stoneleigh Fellow and the Philadelphia School District’s current Deputy Chief of School Climate and Safety Abigail Gray spoke to the Philadelphia Notebook about the challenges of creating trauma-informed schools in under-resourced settings.
Joanna Schwartz, a second-grade teacher at Eliza B. Kirkbride Elementary School, was about to take a scheduled break and desperately needed a place to have peace and quiet.
But the only place she could find was a broom closet.
A few years earlier, in another school, Schwartz said teachers were baffled by a third grader who continually fell asleep in class. Was he bored? Hostile? Disrespectful?
None of the three, as it turned out.
