Helping Traumatized Children Learn
A Report and Policy Agenda:
supportive school environments for
children traumatized by family violence

Helping Traumatized Children Learn demonstrates how trauma from exposure to family and other forms of violence can help explain many educational difficulties teachers across the Commonwealth face everyday. Such difficulties include the inability of children to focus, understand instructions, form meaningful relationships with peers and teachers, and control their behavior in appropriate ways. 

The report provides a school-wide flexible framework and a public policy agenda for creating ?trauma-sensitive schools??environments where traumatized children and their classmates can focus, behave, and learn. 

Download or Purchase Helping Traumatized Children Learn.

Join us! TLPI's growing coalition will help make all schools become trauma sensitive. YOUR help can make a difference for children! Email TLPI.

Acclaim for Helping Traumatized Children Learn.

Read the comments of the Massachusetts Commissioner of Education and his plans to host a conference on Trauma as a Barrier to Learning in May.

Read all about it! Read Boston Globe editorial, news articles, and teachers' remarks -- highlights of the October 19, 2005, press conference and celebration of the release of Helping Traumatized Children Learn.

Helping Traumatized Children Learn is the product of the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative (TLPI). TLPI is a partnership of Massachusetts Advocates for Children and Harvard Law School?s WilmerHale Legal Services Center, works to ensure that children traumatized by exposure to family violence succeed in school. TLPI was formed when MAC staff learned that many students at risk for suspensions and expulsions, truancy and dropping out of school were children who had experienced family violence, either as witnesses to abuse of their caretakers or as direct targets of abuse or neglect.

Download or Purchase Helping Traumatized Children Learn.