The Cross-State Collaborative to Support Schools in the Opioid Crisis

This page records, factually and briefly, the Cross-State Collaborative to Support Schools in the Opioid Crisis (CCSSOC): what the initiative was, and what it produced. The collaborative's work has concluded, and its materials are preserved in this site's archive.

Trauma Support for Schools · Historical record, compiled from the initiative's own published materials

What the collaborative was

The Cross-State Collaborative to Support Schools in the Opioid Crisis brought together education agencies, schools, and support organisations from several Appalachian states, the region served by the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Appalachia programme: Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. Its premise was that the opioid crisis was, among other things, an education problem. Students were arriving at school grieving parents lost to overdose, living with grandparents or in foster care because of a parent's addiction, or carrying the instability that addiction brings into a household. Schools in neighbouring states faced the same problems, and the collaborative existed so they could work on them together instead of separately.

The collaborative was supported through REL Appalachia, a federal regional laboratory programme administered with SRI Education as a lead partner. Its work was written up at the time in SRI Education's newsletters and project pages, which is how many educators first found this website.

What it produced

• A two-day virtual summit in 2021, "How to Support Students and Educators Dealing With Trauma", free to school teams and promoted through state education channels including a Virginia Department of Education bulletin. Its themes and materials are preserved in our summit archive.
• Practical guidance for educators, including the article Common Trauma Symptoms in Students and Helpful Strategies for Educators, which this site has preserved and updated at its original address.
• A resource collection on school and community partnerships, trauma-informed practice, and educator wellbeing, the core of which is maintained in our additional resources list.
• Coverage in federal education channels: the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) blogs cited this site's classroom-strategies work for educators.

Why this page exists

Educators and researchers still arrive at this address from citations in those newsletters, bulletins, and blog posts, so the record is kept here and the materials those citations point to are preserved in the archive. For what this site publishes today, see the About page.