Schools as Resilient Communities Building Resilience in Children

Abstract

This chapter describes how resilience is fostered in an elementary school whose student population has multiple risk factors and has experienced a high degree of trauma. As Oklahoma, Payne County, and the school district have recently become engaged and educated about adverse childhood experiences and resilience, they are moving towards garnering support systems, developing programs, and enacting a new way of seeing students through a trauma-informed lens that emphasizes the importance of relationships and emotional regulation. Here we propose and illustrate a two-pronged approach to building resilience at both the school and child level, one that focuses on the school climate and one that focuses on skill building among the students.