Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
Trauma DispatchTrauma news you can't get anywhere else. |
|
|
CATEGORY: SCHOOLS  Melanie Geddings-Hayes, LCSW, Director of Clinical Services, Paths for Families Source: Paths for Families press release Read time: 2.5 minutes This Happened. Paths for Families, a nonprofit organization in Maryland, announced April 8, 2024 that it was awarded $770,000 by the state to implement trauma-informed services in Prince George’s County high schools. Who Did This? The funding comes from the Maryland General Assembly under the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. The Blueprint was a major piece of legislation passed in 2021 that made comprehensive changes to Maryland’s public education system that spans pre-K to high school, with a priority on diversity and equity of outcomes. Among other changes, it mandated access to mental health practitioners for students and professional development for school staff on how to provide trauma–informed interventions. Melanie Geddings-Hayes, LCSW, director of clinical services at Paths for Families, said “Our team has worked with populations in need of trauma-responsive care for more than three decades, so we're uniquely qualified to serve this critical community need.” The Premise In 2021, Maryland embarked on a massive plan for investing $3.8 billion over ten years to raise the quality of public education because various metrics showed mediocre performance, including large academic achievement gaps based on race and income [1]. One of the recommendations to elevate under-performing students was to institute “broad and sustained new academic, social service, and health supports for students and schools that need them the most,” which, to a large degree, meant trauma-informed care. The premise of this strategy is based on the belief that trauma is a source, perhaps the main source, of a vast array of mental and physical problems for dysfunctional individuals in society. The $770,000 funding to Paths for Families was for only one of Maryland’s twenty-three counties for just a 16-month period. Prince George’s is the second most populated county in the state. According to the press release, Paths for Families will provide evidence-based counseling to high school students living in foster care or with an adoptive parent. They will also conduct trauma-informed care trainings for teachers and staff at all 33 high schools in the county. Analysis The strategy to provide evidence-based counseling to high school students sounds potentially helpful, but there are a number of problems with these types of programs. Uptake and effectiveness are notoriously poor with counseling for youths and families who are not seeking it. Providing counseling to youths does not provide the same guarantee of benefits as providing medical care such as vaccinations, medications, eye care, and dental care. In addition, the counseling is likely to be school-based, on the grounds that this makes access easier for youths. There is, however, little to no data that shows school-based produces better, or even equal, uptake or results than office-based. Plus, it has the disadvantages of minimizing parental involvement and problematic issues of maintaining confidentiality for students. Further, there is zero good scientific evidence that treating trauma leads to remediation of learning problems or school achievement on a public health scale. Details of the training for teachers to be provided by Paths for Families were not listed, but if it is like all other trauma-informed trainings it will be based on the doctrines of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) and toxic stress, which teach that stress and trauma permanently damage brains, cause a huge swath of physical diseases, and cause most of the problems of disadvantaged groups in society. Despite a consensus of a subgroup of medical and social sciences researchers who advocate for this ideology, none of the claims based on ACEs and toxic stress have been proven. The claims are based on poorly-designed cross-sectional studies and one-sided interpretations of data to fit their worldview. Why Is This Happening? Over the past decade, dozens of programs nearly identical to this have emerged over the country, mostly in counties and states controlled by progressive leftist legislators. They are based on an ideology that human nature is highly malleable from life experiences, which is the basis of a larger suite of progressive doctrines that attempt to explain disadvantages and minority groups as products of oppression which require government control and intervention. REFERENCES [1] Maryland Commission on Innovation & Excellence in Education (December 2020). Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. Final Report. Department of Legislative Services, Annapolis, MD. Accessed 5/10/2024. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. Comments are closed.
|