In That Number

Dr. Triplett’s Story

From when I was very young, I said that I was going to be a teacher; I just always did. I always felt like I was smarter than everybody. And, of course, the smarter you actually get you realize that you are not that smart at all! I think more than anything, I enjoyed the autonomy of teaching and having that captive audience. And I also just really, really, really liked school. I liked my teachers a lot, for the most part, and I really did credit education with helping me to change my life from a financial perspective.

My name is Dr. Vera Triplett and I am the Founder, CEO and school leader of the Noble Minds Institute for Whole Child Learning. I grew up here in New Orleans between the Third Ward and the Seventh Ward in the late 70s, early 80s. I'm old enough to remember when public schools in New Orleans were all really, really good and you went to your neighborhood school. I walked to school every day. I went to Valena C. Jones from Kindergarten through sixth grade, Francis Gregory as my middle school, and then McMain when I started living Uptown with my grandmother because I could actually walk there from her house.

When I started my career as a teacher I was very young - I was in my early 20s – and it was probably the first day that I realized I was not going to be as good at it as I thought I was going to be because I was just not equipped for all the other stuff. So not long after my first year of teaching I knew that I needed more education and I went back and got a Master's degree in counseling. What I really wanted to do was understand human development better because I just felt like “there's got to be something that I'm missing here.” And then there was also the reality that there are kids coming that are hungry. I've got kids coming that didn't sleep last night. I’ve got kids coming in that don't have parents in any real sense of the word. And so, from the very beginning, I knew that I wanted to do education differently, even though I wasn't really sure how. So then I taught for about five years in a variety of different grades, mostly middle and high school. Then I got my PhD and became a professor and was a professor for four years.

Then Katrina happened, and after Katrina I was like most people, trying to rebuild my neighborhood and schools, trying to come back. I had gotten my Ph.D. from UNO and the head of the College of Education there reached out to me and said, “Listen, we've got these schools and most of them are in your neighborhood. I know you're trying to help with the rebuilding of your neighborhood and it's never going to happen if schools don’t come back. Would you come in and work for us and help us get these schools back up and running?” I thought to myself, “You got to be crazy to give up your professorship.” Well…I did it because I was crazy. And that's really what brought me back to K-12 education.

After my youngest entered high school, I started thinking about what I was going to be doing as an empty nester. What would I like to do? What do I enjoy? I really like education, and I like kids, and I like schools. But I wanted a school that was going to be different - reform-minded in the academic and instructional delivery, but really traditional around the nurturing environment. I started thinking about Noble Minds from the standpoint of wanting it to be a school for all kids. I want it to be a school where parents don't have the anxiety of wondering if my child messes up, are they going to be kicked out of school?

One of the things that was most concerning to me, and part of the reason why I wanted to start this school, is that I witnessed adults holding children to standards that they didn't even hold themselves to. Always wanting children to be in control. Always wanting children to be well behaved. When, as adults, we're not any of those things. I think in some cases we do a better job of hiding it, but we want kids to do things that they've not been equipped to do. That can have a very negative impact because what it does, at the very base level, is impact self-esteem. Because what you've done is you convinced a young person that there's something wrong with them. “What is wrong with me that I can't sit still for six hours? Something must be wrong with me.” And really, these are not things that they're supposed to be able to do. Impulse control and good decision-making is a frontal lobe activity. It's an amygdala activity. That doesn't fully develop until well into your 20s. That's not to say that there isn’t value in asking students to be able to pay attention well and to be able to listen well. There’s just no value in expecting them to do it without a lot of guidance because they're kids. You’re going to need to tell them more than once.

What people don't understand is that there’s the chronic stress of poverty that can be one of the most debilitating things because there is no certainty in a child's life. Children crave consistency and certainty more than any other group of people. So when that's not there, it really disorganizes them in the worst way. Because they're always just waiting for the other shoe to drop; nothing is reliable. From their perspective, no one is afraid of disappointing them, so then they're not afraid of disappointing anybody. So the behaviors we most often see, really aggressive behaviors, are an inability to communicate their feelings. The inability to take in information because they can't focus. No matter how effective the instruction is, it's not getting through. It's not the information that's the problem and, in a lot of cases, it's not even the way we're giving the information. It's the fact that their brains are already so filled up with so many different things. They’re worried about whether or not the water is going to be on when they get home, or the lights, or are we going to move again, will we have food? People tend to think of traumatic events like, “Oh, this child saw someone murdered,” and they think of all of these, real traumatic things that happen. They do, but there are things that are traumatic to children that are just everyday things.

So when we see the behaviors, whether they are loud or silent, we tend to not want to see the small stuff. But for little people they can be really big. It impacts their behavior and their relationships. And for small-minded adults it creates a barrier because a lot of times adults will personalize the behavior of children when that behavior really doesn't have anything to do with them. You might be the person that's closest to them at the time when they're feeling the feeling or are going through the thing, but where we make the mistake is when we want to treat children like adults. And that's a problem. So if you get into an argument with your girlfriend, you can not answer her calls for a few days, or you can block her on social media, but you can't do that with a child. In particular, not one that you're responsible for educating every day. You can't say, “Well, I just don't want this child in my class,” or “It's me or him.”

My philosophy is that education is a right but it's also a responsibility. If you’re fortunate enough to get a really good education, it's your job to help others. Aside from all of the very practical knowledge of reading, writing, arithmetic, social studies, science, all of that kind of stuff, I think education should also be a personal development tool. Part of the reason we immersed ourselves so much into social-emotional learning, personal responsibility and social justice in our schooling is because I don't think you can do one without the other; I really don't. And I think many of our challenges happen because we try to do one without the other. We say, “Well, as long as they can read at a certain level, write at a certain level…” but if they don't know themselves, if they don't have self-regulation skills, if they can't solve problems and communicate effectively, then, we've seen some of the smartest people in the world just sort of lose it because they don't have those other skills.

Mental health and wellness is as important as the education. One without the other doesn't work. We all know some really, really intelligent people that can't pull their lives together because they don't have the tools. If you start from a very young age, making sure that children understand that it's okay to not be okay and that there's a person that you can talk to about this and share your feelings with, I think that's a powerful weapon in the fight for mental health and wellness. It makes it okay and normalizes talking to someone about your problems. I often say to my students, “It doesn't matter how you feel, you're still responsible for how you behave.” I care how you feel and I want to talk about it and I want to help you, but it's still not okay for you to hit someone because you're angry. It's still not okay for you to kick someone because you're frustrated. It's still not okay for you to throw something across the room, but I understand the feeling. With a lot of kids, the reason why they end up suspended or expelled is because nobody is really asking them about the feeling behind the behavior. Everybody’s focused on the behavior, so having a mental health person in your building that is really focused on mental health, it helps to bring people back, because you can forget.

It can help with the adults to bring them back to this understanding that you're still dealing with a child. Somebody who understands how to talk to a child and get to the real issue. Somebody who has the luxury of time, because teachers are teaching. What a lot of people don't understand is that it's difficult for a teacher to be the eagle strength for 20 kids. You can't do that. It's very difficult for them to be teacher and counselor and nurse, and even marriage counselor in some cases. It’s important to have a person that is qualified to help children and families. And I say families because when you're working with children, you can't do it isolating out the parent or the guardian.

We've had a child who's had mental health issues that were so chronic that he really needed more therapy than he needed education. So we had to find an alternative for him because no matter what we were going to do in this setting, it wasn't going to work. But we still did not put that child out of school. We partnered with another agency to make that work. He had an inability to focus - not a ton of impulse control, and he wasn’t able to sit for any period of time. So we did sort of a continuum to see what was going to work because we're not opposed to pulling a kid and going, “You're not going to do well in a class of 20. Let's put you in a group of five and see how you do.” With this particular kid, he had gone from the classroom to one-on-one, and it still wasn't working. In my experience, when you’re giving a child one-on-one attention and you still see those same behaviors, there’s something else going on. So we called in our evaluating team and they very quickly came back and said he‘s extremely developmentally delayed. There was for sure some trauma related to neglect and some other things. And so, we then said, “Okay, what is going to be best for this kid?” We brought in an outside resource to keep him in school but also provide him with the services he needed. It was really clear to us there had been at the very least neglect, at most, physical abuse. They came in, did some observation and concurred almost immediately that he would be a good fit for them. They started with home visits, which is always great because the environment the child comes from is incredibly helpful in understanding the behaviors that are manifesting. Then, even after school closed, they worked with him all through the summer. He started in their building at the beginning of last year and the difference it made was phenomenal because he was in a smaller physical space, which for some children is important, hence the smaller physical space that we have for some of our special needs kids.

There's a lot of pressure in doing school in a traditional way. When you think about school, you think about: we walk in lines, we sit on the carpet, we have to answer questions, we raise our hands, we have to remember to not yell out, just a lot of stuff for kids to remember. As an adult I don't remember what happened yesterday. So as a kid, when you walk into the building you have to remember where you put your books, this is where we sit for breakfast, this is how we sit for breakfast…there's a lot of stuff. And for a typically developing brain, kids adjust to that. But when your brain is not typically developing and when you're emotionally stunted, that becomes incredibly overwhelming. And so for this student, stripping all of that down and really allowing someone else to be his ego strength for a while, really, really helped.

I think the single most important thing that schools can do is hire adults who get it; that's the first line of defense. Because if everybody in your building gets it, then you don't necessarily have to go outside of your building. And in most cases, every school is going to need someone. I've seen a lot of people in schools that don't actually like kids and I can tell they don’t like them because of the way they treat them. It's horrendous. And I don't know if there's a question that you can ask, that's like the magic bullet to tell you, “Oh, this person is lying.” But what I believe in is what I see. And you can say whatever you want, but when you come and I see you interact with those children - because I know my kids - and when my kids don't want to be bothered with you (they love everybody, they love to be hugged,) that's a sign. You have to make sure that everyone in your building, your core group of people, understand how children's brains develop, how they develop emotionally and are able to deal with high-needs behaviors. I'm always really up front with people before I even hire them. Certain things are not options. Nobody forced you to come into education. You made a choice. So we're not putting them out of school. We're going to work with the parent. I say in the intro, “If they kick you, I'm not going to suspend them. There will be a consequence, but it will not be suspension. If they hit you, I'm not going to suspend. So when you accept this job, that's what you are accepting.” And we have had kids kick teachers and hit teachers. I've been kicked and hit on numerous different occasions. But again, the goal is not to say, “Oh, my God, you kicked me and I don't like being kicked so now I'm going to kick you out of class.” The goal really has to be a thought process of, “You're using physical violence to communicate a feeling and you could be using something else to communicate that feeling and we need to get you to that.” Now, if their brain is so imbalanced, that all of the intervention in the world won't stop that behavior, then we talk about, “Okay, so now what are some other alternatives?”

It’s important for us to have mental health people, nutritionists, yoga instructors, etc. for our students. Our kids do yoga. They meditate. They do all of the things that are usually reserved for people who can afford to do it. Because if it's good enough for everybody else, it should be good enough for our kids. Why wait for them to meditate when they're 25? They can be learning that skill right now. Those are the kinds of resources we value; not security guards and metal detectors militarizing and turning our schools into a penal system. Even when I was running New Beginnings many years ago as the Chief Operations Officer, one of the first things I did when I got there was take all the metal detectors out of the school and put more counselors in all the schools. Because I'm like, “first of all, what kind of tone does this set?” We're talking about very young children, in most cases. These were K-8 schools. Why do they need to walk through metal detectors? And I understand the reality of gun violence, but if we’re taking care of our children in the way we should be, and if we have strong relationships, we should be able to see those things. I feel the same way about the active shooter drills. How much more traumatizing can it be to say to a child, “It’s inevitable that somebody is going to try to come into this school to kill you. And it is up to you to protect yourself.” It's the craziest thing I've heard in my life.

I would recommend that schools study what a trauma-informed model is and what it looks like. I think there are a lot of misconceptions about what that means. I've actually had people say to me, “Well, it just means that you let them get away with everything,” and I'm like, “That's not what that means at all.” There is high accountability in this building. But the way that we hold students accountable is different. It's humane. I've also had people say to me, “Well, if you don't suspend them or expel them, what are you going to do with them?” And I usually say, “Well, if you have children in your home and they misbehave, do you send them out for three to five days? No, because you'd got to jail for doing that, because that would be wrong.” I'm probably the person that's the hardest on these kids of anybody in this building, and when they walk in in the morning, I get hugs. I get high fives. The day before I could have just been like, “I'm taking your recess. You're not going on that field trip, or you're not going to do fun Friday.” But the next day it’s fine because I’m also the first person when they do something right to say, “Oh my god, I'm so proud of you. Look at how you turned that around.” If you don't give up you get some really, really, really valuable outcomes, and you get kids who actually start to love education again, and they love you.