ASHLAND – What if, when faced with behaviors we don’t understand, we stopped asking “What’s wrong with you?” and started asking “What happened to you?”
Ashland High School principal Mike Riley believes that shift could transform our schools, churches, families and communities by helping people build the resilience they need to overcome childhood trauma.
Riley shared his passion for what he calls trauma-informed schools and communities in a presentation at Ashland University’s Dwight Schar College of Education Thursday. The event was part of an ongoing community conversation about local illegal drug problems.
Riley walked attendees through a series of “aha moments” he has had in the past few years. It began when University Hospitals Samaritan Chief Medical Officer Jim Mooney and Mental Health and Recovery Board of Ashland County Executive Director Steve Stone introduced him to the concept of Adverse Childhood Experiences.
What are ACEs?
The ACEs concept is based on the Adverse Childhood Experiences study from Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Riley said.
Adverse Childhood Experiences, like experiencing emotional or physical abuse at home or living with someone who suffers from addiction, can make a child feel chronic stress and convince them they have little value or meaning in life. This can lead to an array of negative outcomes physically, emotionally, behaviorally and academically.
Riley began analyzing graphs of individual students’ test scores over several years and found kids with dramatic drops in performance from one year to the next often endured one or more ACEs during that same period.
“It’s not what’s wrong with Jimmy,” Riley said. “It’s what happened to Jimmy.”
Riley became convinced that schools needed to do something to intervene in these kids’ lives to combat the effects of ACEs.
“We have these young people for 15,000 hours and there is no other institution like us that has that kind of access to these children,” Riley said. “Whenever there’s a serious issue developing in culture or society, we’ve got to look at what we can do.”
Responding to ACEs
In most cases, schools can’t stop ACEs from happening to children, Riley said, but educators can help kids develop resilience.
“The essential intervention isn’t math or English, it’s convincing (the student) he matters,” Riley said.
In 2016, Riley had each student take a purpose-in-life assessment. He then assigned staff members to “adopt” kids with the lowest scores, going out of their way to affirm, celebrate and connect with the student unconditionally.
This freely-given, unearned affirmation is what the church calls grace, Riley said.
By the end of the year, those students experienced an 11-percent increase in purpose-and-meaning scores, while their peers who had not been adopted showed little change or even a slight decrease in purpose-and-meaning scores.
In 2017, Ashland High School got even more aggressive with the strategy, assigning multiple staff members to each at-risk student. At the end of the second year, adopted students showed a 20-percent increase in purpose-and-meaning scores.
The school also added a peer-to-peer component to the program, teaming up a select group of seniors to “adopt” freshmen and middle schoolers.
“This is the model we’re applying, and we think it will pay dividends,” Riley said.
ACEs and addiction
Quoting the work of neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl, Riley said people who become frustrated in their search for purpose and meaning in life are more likely to gravitate toward addiction, depression and aggression.
Often, he said, substance abuse is a misguided attempt to self-medicate for ACEs.
“It’s ritualized, comfort-seeking behavior,” Riley said.
When asked about specific anti-drug programs in the schools, Riley said the schools do teach about the dangers of drugs in health classes and work with Ashland County Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse for substance abuse awareness and prevention efforts.
But he also encouraged the group to consider why people use and abuse illegal drugs. It may not be that they don’t know about drugs’ harms but that they are trying to compensate for ACEs, he said.
Expanding trauma awareness
Ashland City Schools’ board of education has adopted trauma-informed language in its new strategic plan, committing to “creating organizational support structures to enhance student success.”
Other building leaders in the district are strarting to apply Riley’s work to their own buildings.
Participants in the community conversation on drugs applauded Riley’s presentation Thursday and said they would like to see Riley’s model spread to other schools in the county.
Meanwhile, Mental Health and Recovery Board has launched an awareness campaign to educate the community about ACEs and resilience. Together with other community partners, the board produced the following video and is encouraging community members to take online ACEs and resilience asssessments.
Sharing a community understanding and a common vocubulary among service providers, educators, law enforcement officers and parents is vital, Riley said.
Helping adults understand ACEs and build resilience in their own lives can help them limit their own kids’ ACEs.
“I think we have a lot of parents that may not be doing a stellar job as a parent, but they want to be,” Riley said. “The message of ACEs for a lot of parents will bring them to tears about what happened to them. They’re going to be able to take mercy on themselves, and I think it brings a lot of healing.”
Committee to Reduce Illegal Drug Activity
The ACEs and resilience model is one of several responses to the local drug epidemic being explored by a group of concerned Ashland County residents.
The community conversation about illegal drug use began several months ago when the Center For Civic Life at Ashland University and the Mental Health and Recovery Board of Ashland County teamed up to hold a forum about how the Ashland community should respond to the opiate epidemic. That forum led to a community conversation in April, which yielded the formation of a committee unofficially called Ashland County Committee to Reduce Illegal Drug Activity. Learning about the recent rise of meth use in the Ashland area, the committee broadened its focus to all illegal drugs, rather than just opiates like heroin.
The committee decided to hold a series of informational sessions looking at various existing responses to the drug crisis. Riley’s presentation was the second of those sessions, following an initial presentation from law enforcement officers.
The next session will feature Kris Hickey from ACCADA with a presentation on drug education programs for school children 6:30 p.m. Aug. 20 in Room 204 in Ashland University’s Schar College of Education.
After hearing from all the speakers, the committee will come up with a set of recommendations to reduce illegal drug use in the county.
