Virtual Summit Archive: How to Support Students and Educators Dealing With Trauma
In 2021, the Cross-State Collaborative to Support Schools in the Opioid Crisis (CCSSOC) hosted a free two-day virtual summit for school teams: how to support students and educators dealing with trauma. This page preserves the summit's themes, session topics, and resources as an archive.
About the summit
The summit brought together teachers, school counsellors, administrators, and state education staff from across the Appalachian states to work on a shared problem: large numbers of students were arriving at school carrying the effects of trauma, much of it connected to the opioid crisis in their families and communities, and school staff were carrying secondary effects of their own. Sessions were practical rather than academic, built around what school teams could change on Monday morning.
The event was promoted at the time through state education channels, including a Virginia Department of Education bulletin, and its resources were written up by SRI Education, which supported the collaborative through the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Appalachia programme.
Session themes
- Recognising trauma in students. Common symptoms by age group, and the difference between trauma responses and wilful behaviour. The summit's companion article is preserved on this site: Common Trauma Symptoms in Students and Helpful Strategies for Educators.
- Trauma-informed classroom strategies. Routines, regulation supports, and de-escalation. Developed in our guide to classroom strategies.
- Educator wellbeing. Compassion fatigue and professional quality of life among staff. Developed in our guide to staff wellbeing.
- Identifying students and using data. Screening, warning signs, and referral pathways. Developed in our guide to screening and referral.
- Families, opioids, and schools. Supporting students whose families are affected by substance use. Developed in our guide to family trauma and the opioid crisis.
- Connecting to community care. School and community mental health partnerships. Developed in our guide to community partnerships.
Summit resources
The summit's reading and resource list is preserved at Additional Resources, updated with current links. The history of the collaborative that organised the summit is at The Cross-State Collaborative.
A note on provenance: session descriptions are summarised from the summit's own published materials. Where the original materials are unclear, we say so rather than reconstruct them.