10 trauma-informed things elementary teachers in New Jersey are learning

Fear, emotional fragility, and empathy are the new classroom staples.

CATEGORY: SCHOOLS

Carteret Elementary training

Source: Essex News Daily
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
On June 2, 2025, teachers at Carteret Elementary School in Bloomfield, NJ attended a workshop to be trained in “trauma-informed teaching.”
 
Who Did This?
The workshop was led by Guidance Counselor Marissa Acosta and special education teacher Beth Armstrong. Funding for the workshop and subsequent implementation of the skills is provided by a state grant.
 
The Premise
The premise of the training is that emotional trauma experienced outside the classroom may affect a child’s performance in the classroom.
Teachers must be taught to:

1. Understand that today’s children live in fear.
   
2. Be comfortable talking about fear in the classroom.
   
3. Recognize the symptoms of trauma.
   
4. Know what activities may trigger a trauma reaction.
   
5. Recognize that teachers themselves may be affected vicariously.
   
6. Academic performance and emotion development of students depend on teachers forming positive relationships.
   
7. Prioritize empathy in the classroom without losing control of classroom management.
   
8. Teachers of today must therapize students and understand what is bothering disruptive students.
   
9. Achieve a “mind shift” that classrooms of today “are not easy places to be.”
   
10. Teachers are in a “different era” where much revolves around emotions and trauma.

 
Analysis
The concepts taught were true to the trauma-informed ideology which posits that individuals who have experienced trauma can be distressed when re-triggered by insensitive behaviors when they try to obtain routine services in society. Their distress is so disabling that it prevents them from getting education, medical care, mental health care, and every other service that involves the interaction of a consumer with a live human [1,2].
 
These types of trainings in education settings raise at least two concerns. First, there is no evidence that therapized teachers projecting more empathy than they already naturally show can have a substantial impact on trauma child victims.
 
Second, this training promotes a model of educator-student relationships that risks overstepping traditional professional boundaries by encouraging teachers to assume roles more appropriately held by parents. Critics have raised similar concerns in the context of transgender-affirming and DEI programming, where educators are seen as inappropriately displacing parental influence. Worse, these ideological shifts occur without meaningful parental knowledge or consent.
 
These types of workshops train teachers to foster in children an identity that they are highly fragile, and instill an identity in teachers that they are savior-replacements for incompetent parents in the emotional lives of children and serve as essential barriers to protect children from an imagined, haunting specter of oppression in society.
 
Why Is This Happening?
The motivations of the trauma-informed movement have puzzled many people since the movement was launched out of nowhere in 2001 (see here and here). It was devoid of any empirical basis and had no constituency calling for it. 

It has, however, become gradually evident that trauma-informed care was part of a broader national shift toward identity-driven narratives in public life.

While the visibility of the movement has remained relatively low compared to its better-known cousins within identity politics of DEI and transgender controversies, its influence—especially in blue states—has expanded through publicly funded trainings and other programs.

​Being a movement rather than an evidence-based public health issue, trauma-informed trainings have become a way to group diverse domains under a common term to the end of shaping political objectives. Trauma-informed approaches are meant for any type of social agency, medical practice, and perhaps any business that must interact with consumers. These trainings are the new version of ‘party cells’ for organizing at the grassroots level that were common in the Communist Party in the early twentieth century.
The aim is to reframe the social contract between humans and community structures based on the premise that humans can be made dysfunctional through oppression. The revolutionary remedy is widespread reforms of therapized empathy in consumer interactions to guide them back to a utopian path of perfectibility.
Nothing good has ever come from a societal praxis of this sort of vision. This falsely divides the world into oppressed and oppressor. Victims are coached to be endlessly fragile. Non-victims have their freedoms intruded upon to cater to the victim’s special rights. It enables dependency of a subset of free riders who are more than willing to take advantage of others’ compassion and reduces their incentive to flourish through their own initiatives.
 
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References
[1] Harris M and Fallot RD (2001). Envisioning a trauma-informed service system: A vital paradigm shift. New Directions for Mental Health Services, 2001: 3-22. https://doi.org/10.1002/yd.23320018903
[2] SAMHSA, (2014). SAMHSA’s concept of trauma and guidance for a trauma-informed approach. HHS Publication No. (SMA) 14-4884. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.