The Rise of Urban Public Boarding Schools
They’re designed to provide extra attention to students who suffer from trauma. But are they worth all the extra taxpayer dollars?
WASHINGTON—The founding Monument Academy teachers and staff knew that running a 24-hour school for children who’ve survived trauma and violence would be difficult.
They just didn’t know how difficult.
“It was chaotic,” said Emily Bloomfield, the school’s founder and CEO, recalling the first few weeks of class last summer. “There was a lot of fighting ... a lot of cursing, a lot of running around.”
The 40 fifth-graders who started in August at this unusual new charter school in northeast Washington include children in foster care or at risk of entering the foster-care system. Some live in homeless shelters. Some have seen or experienced domestic violence or abuse. Some have grieved painful losses. And some have changed schools or been suspended or expelled so many times that they’re significantly behind their peers, both academically and emotionally.
That means students as old as 12 are reading at a kindergarten or first-grade level or exhibiting behaviors like thumb-sucking that are typically seen in much younger children.
When the students moved into their new “home,” their fragile emotions collided, staffers said.
“They fed off each other,” Bloomfield recalled. “There were a couple of kids who were really in crisis and when you have a child in crisis, and by that I mean, really, totally unregulated, melting down, behaving very dangerously, it’s a trigger for many other kids and their anxiety level goes up and their behavior goes up.”
Furniture went flying. Fights broke out. Police were called and ambulances were summoned to take kids to psychiatric hospitals. One child who had been accustomed to roaming the streets alone at night brought a fake gun to school for protection. And some staffers started to wonder if they would find a way to make it work.
But Monument’s founders had designed a secondary school that will eventually educate fifth- through 12th-graders using every tool they could find that’s been proven to work for kids who’ve experienced trauma. They scheduled yoga and meditation classes in the daily curriculum. They hired as many therapists as Are Urban Public Boarding Schools the Answer to Serving Students Who Suffer From Childhood Trauma? - The Atlantic: