Peekskill Developing Sanctuary for Traumatized Students

Peekskill schools are embarking on a three-year program designed to help youngsters whose academic performance is compromised by a wide range of diversity including trauma and stress.

An overview of the grant-funded program was presented to the Board of Education Tuesday night by Sarah Yanosy, director of the Sanctuary Institute of the Andrus Center for Learning and Innovation in Yonkers. The program, which she described as a “districtwide cultural intervention,” acknowledges that problems exist and skips finger pointing in favor of figuring out what is happening and how to deal with it. The program is based on scientific understanding of how the brain functions under stress.

“Most school districts are not equipped to manage multiple internal and external stressors, yet they are charged with managing adversity faced by the children and families they serve,” according to a packet of information Yanosy distributed. “Sanctuary develops the capacity of the school district, its staff, parents and students to understand, manage and mitigate the effects of adversity.” She emphasized the importance of engaging children’s families to prevent accomplishments in school from being undermined by an unsupportive home environment.

Sanctuary utilizes a framework called SELF – safety, emotion management, loss and future – as it seeks to help children overcome difficulties with emotions, thinking, change and social skills. The Sanctuary process changes the thought process about the challenges facing students, which in turn changes behavior, which changes the organization, which helps students do better in and out of the classroom.

Sanctuary defines trauma broadly, according to Yanosy’s packet, “including exposure to experiences like abuse as well as exposure to more intangible forms of adversity, like poverty, racism and neglect.” To counter these negative experiences, Sanctuary focuses on seven commitments – nonviolence, emotional intelligence, social learning, democracy, open communication, social responsibility and growth/change.

Sanctuary’s Web site describes the program as “a blueprint for clinical and organizational change which, at its core, promotes safety and recovery from adversity through the active creation of a trauma-informed community.”