In That Number

Whitney’s Story

I knew early on that I wanted to be a teacher because I knew that education was important. I grew up in East St. Louis, Illinois in a 2-bedroom shotgun house that was home to up to seven people at one point. So it was always a vibrant household. I was like the oldest child living in the house, so I was always the one that people went to for homework help - to help them break down this thing or that thing. And, so, I knew early on that I was good at it and it was something I drew a lot of passion from.

My name is Whitney Henderson and I’m the Navigator-In-Chief for EdNavigator. I went to undergrad at Jackson State University and majored in secondary education. I had awesome professors, who fueled the fire even more to want to hone in on a particular practice or way of teaching, which they modeled so well. I came to New Orleans after I graduated, right after Katrina. It was such a paradigm shift, just being able to focus on learning how to teach, but also being interrupted with the aftermath of the hurricane and thinking “What now? What next?” I was thinking about how to incorporate my past pedagogy because it wasn’t going to apply anymore post-Katrina. There were new circumstances and a totally different way I had to think about educating kids. I had to think about the environment, think about their circumstances, think about how to even make sense of this all through writing, through literature and text, because I’m an English teacher. I haven’t veered from that path since, but I’ve gone through a lot of different growth as a teacher to principal to now leading a non-profit organization, but the purpose is still there. The goal is to make sure kids self-actualize and live their best selves every single day in everything that they do - especially through communication.

As a writing teacher I saw trauma impact students a lot because they wrote about it. The basis of my work as an educator was all about communication and expression. Part of English is building your vocabulary. When children would write and express themselves, the language or lack thereof that they used to express things they were dealing with, situations they’d seen, experiences they truly didn’t have words for, it was really up to me to help them use the English language in a way that really got to what they were trying to communicate to an audience and how to provoke that audience to change. Trauma is multi-faceted, so on the one end this is what the child is projecting on paper, but then on the other end, they’d share some troubling stories and now I’m reading this like what do I do with this information? Who do I tell this to? Am I legally responsible for sharing this with someone?

When I was teaching, I would see trauma show up at least a couple times a day. That’s how frequent these situations were happening. Just to introduce you to the scope that we’re talking about, I’m meaning self-harm, harm to other people, harm that they have seen prior to coming to school, both to other people or that they’ve been involved in themselves. I mean depression, suppression, not wanting to eat. There are so many different things, all in one school day. And usually the approach would be, “Let’s talk.” School aside, let’s really understand what’s going on. And oftentimes it will be one of two responses. One of the responses might be, “Ok, Ms. Henderson, I’ll engage,” or, “Ms. Henderson? I love her but I’m not engaging.” And so for the ones who would engage, I would still find that they did not have a way to talk about it except for “I don’t feel good.” What does that mean, though? What do you mean when you say you don’t feel good? So I would give them a bank of words to help them express themselves and ask them to point or say which one they may be feeling and why, and what may be triggering it. I feel like the word bank was really helpful. My background in child psychology was helpful for that reason, but I’ll say that I was at no point an expert and I hope I was not doing anything that could further trigger a child.

But that’s the risk that you run when you’re not an expert. You may have all the good intent in the world, but still be either retriggering a situation for a kid, making matters worse or, worst-case scenario, doing something totally illegal. And I’ve experienced this. Not with myself, but one teacher had been sharing information about what was going on in a student’s household to other teachers rather than to the proper authorities. That’s just never okay. Though I may not have the capacity to help a kid - which felt like 95% of the time - we start to become a bit more functional when we think through how these things are either contributing positively or negatively to their day. And my recommendation was always to go to the counselor, always. Because capacity is just maxed out for a lot of teachers. When I was at the School of Education at Jackson State, it was such an encompassing experience because, not only do you learn to teach the content that you’re getting ready to teach as a teacher, you also have to learn about child development. You have to learn about public health and safety. You have all these different components that make up an education and developing a whole child. In New Orleans, however, most teachers are certified through an alternative route. So you have Teach for America, you have Teach NOLA, you have Teach New Orleans. You have all these different pipelines that are great because they attract a lot of different talent to our City. However, it is a very linear approach because what they typically get is just pedagogy - how to be a good math teacher, how to set up your curriculum, how to align your unit plans, how to assess students, and basically prepare them in a lot of different ways that are sometimes incomplete, I would say. So when you have a pipeline of teachers who are mostly trained that way then there’s the absence of a lot of different things. And since these pipelines don’t see this as a priority, mental health professionals are always going to be the best option to really help kids understand and unpack trauma and create ways in which they can start to solve and unpack it on their own.

But stepping back, how do we get those wraparound supports? There’s such a multi-faceted approach when it comes to educating a kid. It’s not just the teacher; they encounter multiple other people throughout the day and what they’re projecting also comes off on children. When you think about the different stakeholders of a school you have the cafeteria staff, custodians, bus drivers, and all of these different people who the students interact with on a daily basis. Schools can do a much better job when it comes to having a shared definition of what trauma is, thinking about what trauma looks like. There’s an assessment phase at the beginning of the day and I think some schools tend to have really good communication methods between stakeholders. I remember one school, in particular, I was the first person who greeted the buses as they came up and so the bus drivers would have a report for me every day. “Ms. Henderson, I’m going to let you know this happened. This is what’s going on. So and so is not feeling well today, and all of these things.” And I appreciated that so much. What that was was data collection, essentially. You have a lot of kids who are giving off information, so early in the morning (like 6:00am/5:45am), and to me, that’s valuable because it’s framing a kid’s day. What I would do with that would pretty much set them up in a position that would either be a continuation of a crappy day or a continuation of a really empowering day. I would say something like “I know you’re feeling really discouraged right now and I know some things were said to you earlier, but I just want you to know, you are beautiful and perseverant and you will have a wonderful day.” And you see, kids would smile and say, “Oh my god, Ms. Henderson said I was beautiful.” Which would always make me feel really good. I think those lines of communication are really important. And it doesn’t just stop with the bus drivers; it goes on. The next thing the kids would do is that they would go to the cafeteria line and interact with the cafeteria staff, and it was just more information that was being collected. So I think that better schools are defining trauma, understanding how it manifests, and engaging all school staff in the importance of early identification rather than just waiting for things to explode.

Schools have gotten better at the identification of trauma, but what we’re not really good at what to do with it. So, of course, adults have seen kids come into schools with different moods. But not a lot of adults would take the initiative to say, “Hey, I’m noticing x,y, and z,” or “Why is it that…?” I’m starting with questions and, again, that question deals with the language of “how do we express trauma?” But I think when kids go through a school day and adults see these different behaviors or these different symptoms of withdrawal - or whatever the case may be - and don’t ask, that’s when you have the suppression of emotion and then kids don’t understand how to express it. Then it becomes the negative connotation of trauma, which is “I’m going to express it in a way that gets me attention.” So now it’s all the negative things we don’t want, when it really could have been solved by asking simple questions, and I think schools need to have a framework for that.

I think a really basic way to recognize and address trauma in NOLA is to reconsider the three major pipelines of teaching. As I mentioned before, those pipelines are really focused on the pedagogy of teaching but not necessarily the whole child. And I think that we can see a lot of ripples and effective waves in the way that teachers are starting to tackle how to be better at this idea of trauma-informed practices, and if it becomes a priority for these three pipelines. Every summer, two hundred to three hundred teachers per pipeline are being trained to become teachers - career changers mostly. Even a week of trauma-informed practices - defining it, knowing what it is, how it’s going to manifest in your classroom, what quick simple, troubleshooting looks like - all of those things could really have a transformational experience for kids in New Orleans. I have a lot of hope for a lot of the charter management operators to see a lot of value out of this, too. What I don’t want is for something negative to happen first for everyone to then come and ride the wave because that’s just counterintuitive rather than being proactive and preemptive. And that’s the type of city I want us to be. Not reactive to things but really having the forethought to think “we don’t want these outcomes.” So the root of that is really going in-depth with children and their families about the trauma they experience and really helping them understand how it can be mitigated through practical solutions and strategies that they themselves can employ.

Best case scenario, an education has to be liberating; sometimes it’s not just about academic achievement or success. There are many ways to define liberation and I think that, in order to truly be free, we have to use tools and things that we have gathered from our journeys to create pathways of access that then lend themselves to opportunities and experiences that kids want. We need to think about how our kids are learning to cope, how our kids are learning to express, how our kids are learning to achieve and thrive, and in order to get that first we have to feel like they belong and that they are safe. Best case scenario, once a kid finishes a public school education, they should feel empowered to have the answers or know where to go to get them. And that’s a different kind of freedom and liberation than when you’re being indoctrinated. I think the opposite of that would be not being able to deconstruct the history that you’ve been taught and never being able to see yourself within it in the first place. Not being able to really look at life and say “Ok, now I’m an adult and I’m a contributor to this democratic society. Now what? What do I do?”