Physical Education Interventions to Address Childhood Trauma

Adelina Bronescu, Fall 2019 2Gen Scholar

This semester, I explored the effects of different interventions on academic outcomes for students exposed to Adverse Childhood Experiences. ACEs are a form of toxic stress linked to severe, detrimental effects on physical, emotional, and mental health. The documentary Resilience noted, for example, an incredibly strong link between childhood sexual trauma and obesity. My project specifically focused on the effects ACEs have on educational outcomes for children in Orange County, New York. The negative effects are widely known and a plethora of general solutions to ameliorating the issue exist. However, more specific approaches need further research. My partner and I worked closely with the Port Jervis school district and looked into what specific approaches would fit their school system.

We noticed that a lot of literature pointed to the necessity of “trauma-informed teaching” for students exposed to ACEs. Research highlighting the benefits was more than plenty, and we found around a hundred different guidelines explaining how schools and teachers should approach children exposed to toxic stress. This ranged anywhere from changing punishments to increasing communication with parents. However, there was a lack of uniformity and consistency in the literature published; there was no “official” framework for trauma-informed teaching. Additionally, most guidelines increased the already heavy burden on teachers and lacked policy suggestions. The aim of our project was to look into an effective policy change that could be implemented at a structural level.

As our research continued, we began to concentrate our project on more specific solutions that didn’t require a heavier burden on individual teachers, but rather structural changes that would require smaller amounts of work from all aspects of a school district. We found approaches that would fit in Port Jervis, which can be summarized into two general concepts: training teachers to respond to ACEs with subtle changes in response to student rule-breaking, and fostering more acceptance of diversity. We planned to include these in our final presentation, however, when talking to people in the Port Jervis school district, we found that they were already planning to implement similar practices. It was challenging because it felt like we had to start over. However, we learned that our past findings were still relevant, useful, and applicable to our project moving forward. It was definitely a good moment in learning to adapt to an evolving, real-life project.

We began to work with Mr. Pantaleone, the Vice Superintendent of the Port Jervis school district, and he requested that we look into “Zero-Hour Physical Education”. Our advisors knew about Zero-Hour PE, which had been implemented in an upper-middle class, predominantly white school district in Naperville, Illinois a few years prior. It is a popular project that has garnered public attention over the years. Unfortunately, a lot of key characteristics in that particular school district did not line up with Port Jervis, from size to median income, which was about three times larger in Naperville than in Port Jervis. And, most notably, the prevalence and types of ACEs were not comparable. This presented challenges: how can we infer that Zero-Hour PE is a useful allocation of limited resources in a town that does not mimic the one it succeeded in?

We were able to find a case-study that closely studied Zero-Hour PE in a school district larger but closer to Port Jervis in ACE composition. We also took information from similar studies, not on Zero-Hour PE, but on the outcomes of morning exercise and exercise before important classes for struggling students, and created a final summary on the potential effects of Zero-Hour PE. We cannot definitively say that Zero-Hour PE is the best intervention for Port Jervis. The cost of implementation must be analyzed and compared to the risks before a decision is made.