What Does It Take for Traumatized Kids to Thrive?

May 6, 2013 • By Laura Tillman
 
About a decade ago, Washington State embarked on an early social experiment to educate people about the impacts of stress on children. The results are starting to show.

Paine High School was a shambles when Jim Sporleder arrived to serve as its new principal in the spring of 2007. Housed in a run-down, brown-brick building with metal security screens on its windows, the “alternative” secondary school served 77 of Walla Walla, Washington’s most challenging students. And for years, by nearly all accounts, it had served them exceedingly poorly.

About half of Paine’s students had been ordered to attend the school by a judge; most of the rest had been ejected by the city’s mainstream high school due to behavioral problems. Students weren’t the only hard cases that wound up at Paine; troublesome teachers and feckless administrators also had a history of being diverted there by the district, according to a 2007 city-funded report on the school. Members of the staff referred to their workplace—a dysfunctional campus with a broken intercom system and no hot lunches—as the district’s “dumping ground.”

Sporleder, moreover, was arriving at an especially difficult time: the previous principal was relocated midyear, and the school was “on a downward spiral,” as one student reported at the time.