Resources

Creating school environments that center positive relationships, safety and belonging, staff well-being and youth and family voice, and equity starts with being open to learning. Search our comprehensive database of resources and build knowledge, add classroom strategies to your toolbox, learn about what other schools are doing to build school communities that ensure every child in every school is safe, supported, resilient, and thriving.

Below are examples of how you can search our Resources database. You can filter using trauma-responsive school domain, pillar and type of resource. For more information on these terms, scroll down. To view resources and all that the Learning & Resource Hub has to offer, please log in or sign up.

Our Learning & Resource Hub supports the work of many projects and programs across Illinois and beyond, and you’ll notice that the resources can be filtered by different terms that you may not be familiar with. You can check out the Resilience-Supportive Schools Illinois and Resilience Education to Advance Community Healing pages to find out more about these statewide programs that the Learning & Resource Hub supports. Read on for a bit more context on why we use the terms we do.

Resilient-Supportive Schools Illinois (RSSI) Terms

The RSSI helps schools on their trauma-responsive journey by providing a framework of these pillars necessary to support this work.

A trauma-responsive school is one where all students feel safe and supported, and where the school’s educational mission focuses on addressing the impact of trauma on learning.

A school or district is healing-centered when it acknowledges its role and responsibility to the community, fully responds to trauma, and promotes resilience and healing through genuine, trusting, and creative relationships.

A school providing social emotional learning support is one focussing on every student’s emotional well-being in addition to academic and extracurricular pursuits.

A school providing mental health support provides services and interventions to strengthen every student’s mental health.

A school that includes students’, families’ and educators’ cultures in all aspects of schools, including supports and services that promote well-being and mental health and anti-racist policies and practices that promote equity.

Resilience Education to Advance Community Healing (REACH) Terms

REACH uses the Trauma-Responsive Schools Implementation Assessment (TRS-IA) to help schools and districts create action plans to move this work forward. Click on each term below for more information about resources that might fall under each of these TRS domains. 

Includes programs and policies to support students affected by trauma, professional development around trauma, trauma-responsive  discipline policies, schoolwide policies and strategies around restorative practices, educating all staff about trauma and its effect on students.

Includes activities for monitoring and maintaining physical safety on a school campus, safety assessments for whole school

Includes preventing the occurrence of a traumatic event on a school campus, building and sustaining positive school climate, trauma-responsive emergency drills and crisis planning, clearly defined and articulated behavioral expectations.

Includes clinical strategies to identify and treat students affected by trauma, policies and strategies for connecting students with social and clinical resources, trauma-exposure screening and mental health assessments, trauma interventions.

Includes school and community programming targeting students experiencing significant trauma, routine multidisciplinary meetings, relationships with community mental health agencies.

Includes in-class procedures to accommodate students dealing with trauma, socio-emotional learning curriculum and strategies. calm and safe classroom climate, trauma-responsive behavioral supports for students affected by trauma.

Includes schoolwide policies and strategies that encourage staff self-care and promote management of secondary traumatic stress and compassion fatigue.

Includes incorporating community priorities and resources into support services, authentic family engagement that is culturally responsive and includes cultural humility, racially and ethnically sensitive resources and services, partnerships with community organizations serving racial and ethnically diverse groups.

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