New Buckeye Ranch program at South-Western schools helps tackle trauma in preschoolers

South-Western City Schools is partnering with the Buckeye Ranch on a program to help pre-K students and their families in the district proactively tackle childhood trauma before kindergarten.

The program by Buckeye Ranch, a nonprofit behavioral and mental health services facility, is now being offered in two schools in the South-Western district — Finland and Stiles elementary schools. Andrea Weisberger, Buckeye Ranch director of education and early childhood mental health, said the program aims to close a gap in mental health services for young children in a proactive way.

"Oftentimes, when our students are struggling — our preschoolers are struggling — that's because our families are struggling, right?" Weisberger said. "We need to not look at kids in a vacuum, (and) look at what everybody has going on."

The program, called the PRESCHOOL program, seeks to equip Black students and their families with the tools they need to thrive in the kindergarten environment and beyond, and possibly avoid making existing mental health problems worse by over-disciplining children.

Black children are disproportionately affected by disciplining and expulsions from the youngest levels of education, research shows. According to The Scientific American , Black preschool boys are involved in more than half of the preschool expulsions each day in the United States. While Black preschool students accounted for 18.2% of the total preschool enrollment, they were involved in 43.3% of one or more out-of-school suspensions, according to U.S. Department of Education research .

The trauma responses that lead to discipline often come from what experts call "Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)," which can be the result of generational family trauma. A 2019 report published in the Child Abuse and Neglect journal found that ACEs are a strong indicator of preschool suspensions or expulsions.

A substantial part of the program is working with parents or caregivers who may have trauma responses themselves in how they are raising their children, Weisberger said. Buckeye Ranch works directly with caregivers, giving them the parenting tools and tips they need to manage things like temper tantrums or problems at school.

"We see that oftentimes parents will be triggered by their child's behaviors because it's bringing up some kind of trauma from them, because we know trauma is generational," Weisberger said. "Maybe they weren't parented in a good way themselves, so when they then have their own children they're kind of at a loss of what to do."

While trauma responses in young children can often materialize in physical or emotional outbursts, Weisberger also said that there is an unseen level where some children have the opposite response to trauma and emotionally shut down or are reclusive.

"The children who are so anxious, they're afraid to even do anything in school, and sometimes those children are said that they're the most well-behaved because they just stand up, sit down, do what they're told, and you have no problem with them," Weisberger said. "But because they are at this heightened level constantly of anxiety, because of the trauma that's happening for them, they're not learning."

The program launched in SWCSD because Buckeye Ranch has been embedded in the district for many years and "they work very hard to make sure that they meet the needs of their families," Weisberger said.

"We wanted to start more slowly, because we knew once we opened those floodgates, it would have the potential of growing so large that we wouldn't be able to meet the need," Weisberger said.

Nicole Tyo, special education director at SWCSD, said she is excited to see the benefits of the program years down the line as students and families receiving help now will be better equipped as the students get older.

"The district will start to see the benefits of this when kids, when they start to age into school," Tyo said. "It's hard today to parent and live life, and not have the right tools."

Weisberger said insufficient funding remains the core challeng with expanding programs that benefit young children before their trauma and mental health problems become extreme. The current funding for the program is provided in part by the Ohio Children's Alliance, a network of agencies aimed at improving children's lives alongside other organizations.

"We focus a lot of our funding on problems that have already gotten so large that they're almost too large for us to address," Weisberger said. "Obviously, I do not believe anyone is too far gone. And wouldn't it be such a more economically savvy thing to do to address things before they spiral out of control?"

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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: New Buckeye Ranch program at South-Western schools helps tackle trauma in preschoolers