MCC staff learns about trauma.

By Kate Krieger. Senior Correspondent.

SCOTTVILLE – Mason County Central’s Scottville Elementary and Upper Elementary schools hosted a trauma training for staff members this morning. Jill Lynch, Mason-Lake ESD Emotionally Impaired Consultant came to discuss how trauma can affect students in and out of the educational environment.

“It went great,” Upper Elementary Principal Kevin Kimes said. “Some trainings were done in pockets in the past with staff, but we basically covered it all this time.”

Kimes stated that the key reason behind the training is to get a better fundamental understanding about where the students are coming from and how to better support them educationally and otherwise.

“We have to get to know the students’ different backgrounds,” he said. “We really need to know where they are coming in order to serve them the best we can.”

Kimes stated that Lynch discussed a number of different ideas pertaining to trauma and how it can affect students’ abilities to learn new concepts and function in a school setting, but he stated that she touched on how the lack of proper brain development and brain functioning can really affect students as well.

“She showed a lot of interesting slideshows on brain functioning,” Kimes stated. “It’s really that fight or flight mentality for some students. If they have experienced some type of trauma, a lot of times that frontal lobe part of the brain is under developed and it cannot process things as well.”

Kimes said the staff really enjoyed the training and they hope to be able to use a lot of what they learned in everyday experiences in the classroom.

“We really need to make sure we are meeting the basic needs of all of our students,” he said. “We need to ask ourselves, ‘How can we help to take care of them?’”

With bringing real life experiences to help better explain some of the content to staff, Lynch really drove home the idea of “What can we do better to serve our students?”

Kimes stated that it is always good to learn new skills when working with students who have been through difficult or traumatic situations and he stated that in order to understand them better, the staff needs to be able to understand where those students are coming from and why they behave the way they do.