Transcript: Welcome and Keynote: A Climate of Healing

Rebeca Cerna:

On behalf of the California Center for School Climate, I would like to welcome you to our event: Transforming School Climate Mindsets and Ecosystems. The day is being kicked off with our keynote session, A Climate of Healing. My name is Rebecca Cerna. I serve as a director of the California Center for School Climate, and I’m a senior associate at West End. I will serve as your moderator for the keynote, but first I want to take a moment to do a land acknowledgement. We have a history of diversity in the land that we now call California home to nearly 200 tribal nations, each with unique languages and histories and connections to land and to place.

I’m joining you from Southern California and I’m specifically located in the traditional lands of the Acjachemen Nation. The Acjachemen people are a vibrant community in my area, still practicing their culture in this region. And I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge First Nations people of wherever you are located in California or elsewhere to honor the original inhabitants of our various regions. We also invite you to explore more about your respective region. We provided a link in the resource tab where you can learn more.

The California Center for School Climate is hosting today’s event. We are an initiative funded by the California Department of Education and led by West End. We provide free supports and trainings on school climate and data use practices to local education agencies throughout the state. And we invite you to visit our website at ccsc.westend.org to learn more about the supports and so that you can access resources that have been created for the education community and previous recordings from past events. I’m here today as one voice, but with me as a whole team of individuals, including my colleagues and members of our youth advisory team, with them, they bring lived and professional expertise in the field of education, having served as former educators, social workers and administrators, and working at community, school, district, county, and state levels. We also have our expertise from our young people, from our youth advisory team who serve as reviewers and co-developers on products that we’ve created for the education community.

So we’ve been mentioning school climate and our theme today is transforming school climate mindsets and ecosystems, and the climate and culture of a school really determined the experiences of individuals in a school community. And when we think about school climate, we approach it under three domains: belonging and connections, environment and safety and wellness. So it’s about creating the conditions for these domains, which involves relationships, the partnerships, the physical environments, behavioral supports, psychological and physical safety, mental health supports among others. And today, sessions are going to be covering topics related to all three domains, and they’re designed to expand our understanding of school climate and explore the ways in which education systems operate and the way education systems we operate. within our design to support or to hinder our positive school climates. So today we have nine sessions and 17 speakers. On this slide, you’ll notice that at 10:30 we have three concurrent sessions that you can join, that cover from educator wellness, student health clubs, and why partnerships matter. At 12:30, we hope you can join us for a 20-minute guided wellness break led by the Los Angeles County Office of Education. At 1:00, we will shift to another three concurrent sessions on reducing stress and trauma by normalizing safety practices, participatory leadership, or looking beyond numbers to support the whole child. We are ending our day with a session at 2:15. It’s an educator panel that will feature four educators who will share their perspectives on healing and restorative ecosystems.

And all you have to do to join any of these sessions is go back to the event lobby, which is how you enter today, and you can move from one room to another. In the lobby, you can also bookmark sessions you want to join. We recommend that you keep a tab open of the event lobby so that you can easily join sessions quickly throughout the day. And all sessions will be open two minutes before start time. So to get started, I would like to pass it to Dr. Tom Herman, administrator of the School of Health and Safety Office at the California Department of Education for a brief welcome. Tom.

Tom Herman:

Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you so much. I am so excited to welcome you to this virtual event today to discuss school climate. At the Whole Child division we are really committed to strategies addressing the whole child and we say strategies, but they really go beyond mere technical strategies to really speak to the mindsets of people that want to transform education and transform school climate so that it is born of the humanistic sensitivity that’s required in addressing the changes that need to happen in schools. And so I am just so excited to be here and to welcome you. The lineup today really reflects a complexity and multifaceted nature of school climate. It will be linked to such things as mental health, school safety, staff wellness, and other initiatives including MTSS, SEL, restorative practices and trauma-informed practices. And so, I wish you the best day and hope that you’re inspired today and to change education for the better. Thank you.

Rebeca Cerna:

Thank you, Dr. Herman. And now I’m excited to get us started with our keynote, A Climate of Healing, as part of today’s event. All of us, including young people, families, educators, administrators and other partners, we all carry our life experiences with us. And to transform our educational systems, we need to create spaces to rethink practices, to generate opportunities, and to be more human-centered and healing is a significant part of this. So with us today, we have Dr. Lee Porscha Moore from the Flourish Agenda. Dr. Lee Porscha Moore provides tools and training to education and youth development organizations to enact healing-centered engagement approaches so that all humans in the systems flourish. Dr. Porscha is a licensed clinical social worker who provides individual and group therapy and is also very active as an instructor at various Bay Area universities and colleges.

She’s a proud first-generation college graduate who has earned a master’s degree in both social work and communication and a doctorate in education, all from California public universities. Dr. Porscha is a fun-loving, lifelong learner, committed to walking with children, youth and families as a reconnect to their inner superhero, and I’m excited to be here to listen and learn from her as well. So with that, I would like to welcome and pass it over to Dr. Porscha Moore.

Dr. Lee Porscha Moore:

Hello, hello, Sunshine. It’s so wonderful to be in Cyberspace with all of you. My name is Dr. Porscha and I am here with you on the beautiful Ohlone land, in what is now called Oakland, California. As we engage in community together, family, as we connect in community together, as we name all of our land acknowledgements and making sure that we’re doing it for more than just demonstration purposes, it’s also important to me as on this February 29th and happy Black History Month to situate myself in a land and labor affirmation. And so I remind ourselves that we pay homage to those who were stolen from, placed in bondage and falsely named chattel. And as we think about this acknowledgement and this land and labor that you see on the screen, I remind you that today to both of our indigenous and African forbearers, we commit to the continued struggle for liberation and reparations, for its only through freedom and justice that we truly give honor. Ashe.

So I say as we continue onward in community, I’m going to let you know in advance I talk really, really fast. My mother says it’s the Cuban in all of us. However, if I begin to get too fast, don’t hesitate to be like, “Slow down, sis. I got you.” However, today I invite you to step into what I’ve learned is called ugly beauty. For those of you who were like me in middle school and elementary school staying up super late night with my grandma to watch Deaf Poetry Jam, it was hosted by Yasiin Bey, or Mos Def as people know him and one night he shared what ugly beauty is, and ugly beauty is the truth when you needed to hear it most and wanted to hear it the least. Some words you hear from me today will not be pretty, but they will all be beautiful.

And so as we situate ourselves in welcoming the ugly beauty of the reality that we all live in, I’ll situate myself in Mbuntu I am because we are. We are because I am. And in that situation in Mbuntu, I remind myself of every school that I’ve gone to, that has shaped my educational experience, that has shaped my educational journey. And so on the screen right now, you’re seeing some of my old mascots from Victoriano Elementary School to Vista de Lago High School, and the different places that I situated myself in that taught me a variety of different things and helped me become the adult I am today. I give thanks to every school I’ve ever attended, because with every school I attended, I learned something new. For example, I had my very first adverse childhood experience in preschool and it didn’t come from my family, it didn’t come from my community, it came from my preschool teacher, the first person to tell me I would amount to nothing, the first person to also expel me from school.

In that same regards, I also give lots of love and thanks and appreciation to the four black educators I had throughout my educational experience. And so thank you Ms. Faulkner, my third grade teacher, Ms. Brown and Mr. Lovett, my sixth grade teachers and the Beeson, my 12th grade history teacher. I will always remember your melanin and your representation. In that same regards. I’d be remiss if I did not acknowledge a name that in the land of BIPOC educators, I was privileged to have two other BIPOC educators, two Latinx educators and two Asian-American educators. And so thank you Ms. Pineda and Mr. Alvarez and Mr. Seesod and Ms. Galassi and from my folks from Reno Valley, I see you boo-boo.

And as we connect together in community, and I recognize that I had eight BIPOC educators, out of 13, 14 years of education from preschool to 12th grade, I almost had 50% representation, and that’s not something that everyone can say. And as I think about the representation I was given throughout my educational experience, I then think about how I’m going to talk to y’all today about the climate of healing and how we can explore healing our school climates. I think each of these different environments and all the different mascots on these screens because these are the different spaces that have shaped me, that have helped me grow. These are also the different spaces that taught me what safety is and what safety isn’t.

I’m going to launch a poll for you right now, and on the screen I want you to think about where were you during these different time periods of your life? Were you like me where you might’ve been in the fifth grade during 9/11? Maybe you were one of those amazing high school students during the Vietnam War that got so far in their rebellion that they got sent to the Supreme Court. Maybe you were part of the Long Beach earthquake that made us change our school foundation rules. Maybe you were part of the great Recession, so when you graduated from high school, you were thinking about buying a house because they were really cheap that time period. And as you fill out this poll, you have time, I know there are like 300 of y’all up in this space, and so take your time, answer the questions.

What is the educational climate that you went to school in? Because you think about the educational climate that you went to school in that shaped how you learned that shaped how you engaged. I remind all of us that we are all different types of students, that in every classroom we’ve ever sat in, every classroom we’ve ever had a chance to teach in, there was a different type of student present. And we all respond to students in different ways, whether it’s their behaviors or their academic needs. And as you think about the different types of students that you serve and the different type of student that you had the privilege to be, I invite you to think about what type of student are you going to be right now in cyberspace together in community with over 300 people as we talk about healing our climate of schools.

Will you be the volunteer person? Will you be the vacationer? Will you be the eager learner? However you choose to show up in the here and now, that is fine. I see you. I will connect with you either way and we’re here to attend to your needs. I’m going to give folks a little another moment in there. I know that poll is going. Before I close off that poll, this is what we’re going to talk about today, because I view keynotes as conversations and so today is a conversation that I want to invite you to be curious. I want you to step into a little bit of critical self-reflection and unpack and explore the possibilities, because today I’m going to explain to you how my P-12 or preschool to 12th grade experience may be the same different from your P-12 experience, and it’s definitely going to be very different from our current P-12 experience.

In that same regards, we’re going to talk about how PTSD and the student experience exists today and how we can explore those three C’s. We’re going to get into problem and possibilities and see how we can as a community, heal our school climate. And so as that poll has been launched and finished, I’m looking at the results and we’ll share it with you briefly. Thank you, Amanda. I’m seeing that I got a lot of people who were in the great Recession. I got oh, 22% of y’all was living through that Vietnam War, okay? Paradise Falls fires. Wow, okay, the Cedar Fires, COVID-19, 7%. Okay, right. Ooh, the 11% of us that were in school when we elected the first African American president. Okay. The dot-com boom era children, okay, the September 11 people, the Iraq War folks, the Brown v. Board of Education individual. And so seeing these results as it scrolls through the screen for y’all, I want you to think about how different it was for someone to be in school during the Great Depression compared to the Vietnam War, compared to the dot-com boom era, compared to every fire that we’ve had in the state of California and right now compared to what our students are experiencing.

All of us have been in schools at different time periods, and it’s okay that our experiences are not similar, because what we have to do is learn from all of our experience because our past shapes us. What we have to consider though for our young people today is that their current school climate is nothing like anything we’ve ever experienced. Yes, thank you for naming some things that were missing in there. That Columbine shooting, that era from 1977 to 1990. Yes, the lockdown that’s happening at your school right now, the Challenger explosion, there were so many heavy and big events that were happening, and so you only got a glimpse of just a few of them, but I appreciate you bringing them up in the chat section to bring your experience into this room. And so thank you.

As we think about all of our experiences that have shaped us, that have changed us, that have dictated how we learned, how we grew, how education was seen, and also given, I bring us back to the now of our current school climate and what our young people in the classrooms are experiencing. And so every clipping that I’m going to flip through right now, are all just news clippings and as you think about all those news clippings that you see, I want you to think about each headline that comes up for you, from teacher shortages and youth opioid crisis, from having substitute teachers removed from a West Covina school for allegedly viewing inappropriate material in class. From former school administrators putting guilty to theft from the school districts of millions of dollars, from being in a space and an environment where now folks are actually highlighting and naming over-scheduling kids’ lives, causes depression and anxiety.

I’m seeing you on the chat, second, so I appreciate you there dealing with implicit bias and microaggressions, anti-poverty experiences, all beautiful things and all beautiful things because all these things shaped you into the amazing adult that you are today. But all of these things, similar to what you experienced and similar to these headlines you see here on the screen are all things that our young people are experiencing in alignment with a variety of other things that no one else may have the lens or the purview to, the understanding to. For example, when thinking about our current local climate, I flew in last night from Boston Massachusetts, and while I was in Massachusetts, they were sharing with me about a school conflict that was happening, particularly in a part of Massachusetts, there’s a high school that’s currently experiencing high volume of school fights.

The school happens to be from what they share with me, predominantly black and brown students. And so what the school administrators and board were saying was, “You know what? Tell the principal that I need you to bring in the National Guard to help support my students.” And people had different responses. The National Guard to police children’s bodies. And when I think about that response, I think about our current school climate. I think about how we talk about healing. I think about every time a school shooting has happened from when you were in school, from when I was in school and less than 20 days ago, when our students were in school at Fairfield High School. I think about how we respond to the traumas and the crises and the pain that happens in our school contexts. But in that same regards, I think about the different ways we all acknowledge and look at the different people coming into our schools, the different current events going across our screens.

Because as we tiptoe ourselves out of that pandemic era, and I still feel like we’re in it, but it’s all good, we know that we’ve been saying this lovely word of learning loss. And when we think about learning loss, we also have been saying things that are not fully connected to the students that we serve. And so when we think about connecting to our students and supporting our teachers and things that our past teachers didn’t have to deal with, like how to deal with cell phones in a classroom, I introduce you to the concept of HCE, or Healing-Centered Engagement. And healing-centered engagement is super important because as one of your peers in this chat section has named, heavy militarization in schools is not the appropriate response to students fighting. HCE is telling you in this moment that we want to look at the individual practices that help us advance our interpersonal connections and improve our institutional culture in order to create healthy outcomes for the youth and the adults who serve them.

Because today as we talk about healing school climate, I want to hear about what’s right with you. What is going amazing at the Palo Alto schools? What’s happening wonderfully in Porterville? What’s going on in Moreno Valley? Because we talk about this as a community, as we engage in this process to together. I would like everyone to situate themselves in the reminder, that HCE is political rather than clinical. And as you heard earlier, I am a licensed clinical therapist, mental health and the field of mental health is my first love at all times as a professional. But I also recognize that in the work that I do, that asset-driven approach and that asset-driven focus can sometimes become secondary to other things going on, because it’s secondary when I have to tell you every deficit about my student in order to get them the support they need to succeed in schools.

When we talk about healing together, I want us to think about the supports of healing that not only support our young people, but every adult in this space right now. So all 346 of y’all, I want you to think about how can you situate yourself in your healing? And then when you think about situating yourself in your healing, I’m asking you to think about this because every day, you do something that directly or indirectly affects students. Our students make up 23% of our population according to the US Census, but they are 100% of our future, which means that every time we make a decision directly or indirectly that influences students and our school climate, we have to begin to think about; how am I responding to this? Which one of my past experiences are informing the decision I’m making right now?

And so I want us to think about what is the culture of your school climate? Your classroom, your district, your county? What does that culture look like for you? And as you think about that culture of your classroom, your school district, your school climate, I invite you to think about everything that makes you smile about the culture of your school climate, about the culture of your classrooms, your district, your county, the students and the community members that you are privileged to be in community with. The heart and the beginning of HCE is culture. And culture reminds us of all the values and norms that connects in the community. And our schools are a part of our community. Our schools are connected to our growth and our schools become our secondary parents to a certain extent, because for eight hours a day, my parent is leaving me with you.

You become that role model, you become that person. And so what is the culture you’re giving them in that space? Are you showing them they are meant to be seen and not heard? Or are you telling them that their voice matters? Are you supporting them and fulfilling a promise or reminding them that pinky promises can be broken? The culture of our schools and school climate has changed so heavily since the COVID-19 pandemic and the COVID-19 lockdown, particularly when the world locked down during COVID, the first thing that many of us had to do was figure out how do we get to our students? How do we support them in their learning needs and just being able to say hi, and making sure they feel connected and belonging.

For me, working as a community mental health professional within many schools in my area, I remember supporting schools and being like, you know what? Every student needs to have a laptop or a tablet or a Chromebook, because you sending one household home with one tech device equals one big fight amongst all those students in that household. That didn’t make sense at first, but COVID taught us that. COVID taught us that not everybody has WiFi. And that first world problem is a real problem in our own backyard. COVID taught us that you can actually learn a lot even if you’re not on the screen. And just because you can’t see me, I’m still listening. COVID taught us to be creative and to think about the possibilities. COVID taught us to be mindful about what we can access and what we can’t access, because COVID also taught us as we come back into classrooms full-blown now and we situate students. Is that we don’t have that many teachers. We don’t have that many school nurses.

COVID taught a lot of young people that if I cough at school, I might scare someone so much so that they may send me home and I don’t want to be at home again, and so I’m going to learn how to hold in all my coughs. I’m going to learn how to hold everything to myself. COVID gave us some good behaviors and it also gave us some negative ones. During our COVID-19 pandemic, according to data collected by the McKinsey and company from 2019 to 2022, they said that the average American K-12 student was five months behind in math and four months behind in reading. Depending on how you view those numbers, that could be really high or that could be a gap that we can get through.

And so to think that students were only five months behind in math and four months behind in reading, and to think about that learning loss, I always want to think about what was the learning gained during that time period? What were things that our students were able to do and understand, that maybe they couldn’t do in the classroom? I know as a college professor, many of my students who were actually good at online school thrived completely and my students who are not good at online school and are not fans of online learning needed that classroom, that connection, that building, that school and peer environment to feel connected.

I bring up COVID because it’s a part of our history now. It’s a part of our lives, it’s a part of our schooling that none of us can say, “We went to Zoom school.” We can say we taught in Zoom school, but you don’t know what it’s like to have a Zoom prom, a zoom graduation, a Zoom final. You don’t know what it’s like to be in front of a screen as you meet your kindergarten friends for the very first time. So how is that going to shape them into the future adults they will be?

We asked this question because we think about our medical model and how we responded to COVID, as well as our social ecological model. HCE is inviting you to take the social ecological route, inviting you to go up the hill. And as we go up the hill, I want us to look at all of the social inequities that became more fore-faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. We went through a period that’s still going on of the abuse and abuse of black bodies, of creating a deeper foundation for Asian hate. We’ve gone through moments where schools are closing due to lack of funding and lack of resources, and so now we have students who go to big meetings to tell people, “Please don’t close my school. Please don’t bus me halfway across town to go to a different school that’s not near my friends.”

We think about the living conditions in which our students are going through school in. Every time, in the pandemic when the sky was burning red, I thought about Armageddon and then I thought about fires. And I sat with the idea of what would it feel like to have to be the student who’s worried about their house burning down and their school burning down at the same time. The student that’s out there inhaling all of that smoke and those toxins into their bodies. In that social-ecological model that shows trauma, it also reminds us that it’s going to work with us on a social institutional level. It’s going to help us challenge those inequities that we exist in, but that also exist in our school settings.

It exists in our school setting so much that we have this term that wasn’t from Florence Jennings, it’s actually from research, but it’s called persistent traumatic stress environments, and similar to toxic stress and adverse childhood experiences, this is when trauma is so commonplace that we just learn to live with it. For example, in the United States, we have almost a mass shooting every day. And so, if I said there was a mass shooting yesterday, you wouldn’t be surprised. When I showed you that news clipping that on February 8th of this year there was a mass shooting at a Fairfield High School here in California, you may not have been surprised because mass shootings have become a commonplace environment that unlike when I was in school and I had to do so many earthquake drills and fire drills, the young people I now support in schools have active shooter drills.

That’s not something that I ever thought about having to learn through, having to sit in a classroom and think about, “Well, maybe I could read this book fully and maybe just maybe that bells going to ring again and someone’s going to be on my campus trying to hurt me.” How does that impact learning? How does that impact our connection and our sense of belonging and our feelings of safety? I remember the first time I was held at a school during a school lockdown, and I was supporting one of my young students that was in the second grade. And during this lockdown, I was informed that all the students go inside of the back classroom, which is not that big. I’m going to let you know that in advance. It was not that big. So I’m going to call it a cubby hole. And so inside this cubby hole, me, the teacher, the aide, and about 28 students were crammed in there and told to be quiet.

And we were in this room for over 30 minutes. And the young student that I worked with at this time as a therapist, I had supported him in some behavior regulation and some body regulation in his classroom environment. And so when he was in there, and this wasn’t for the first time, he finally screamed and said, “Ms. Porscha, I want to die.” And I’m looking at my young person as this teacher gets ready to reprimand him and be like, “Be quiet, don’t say anything,” and he is like, “I’m tired of being afraid. I’m tired of having to hide. This is why I can’t sit still in class.”

And when he finally confessed that feeling and he got it off his chest. He turned in the corner and he cried. He would not talk to anyone else after that, and he just let the tears roll out. And in that moment as a therapist, I’m sure the teacher that was in that room, I could feel his helplessness. I could feel him wanting help, support and feeling so tired and pent-up around how we respond to what’s going on in our schools. But this commonplace environment is now where we have to teach in. This commonplace environment is now where students have to learn in. This commonplace environment is a persistent traumatic stressor that is allowing someone to feel like every day could be the last, and that the harm is just something that’s normal. It’s something that’s commonplace. That shouldn’t be something in our schools. That shouldn’t be something you have to think about as you’re trying to move the needle on the academic achievement gap.

But with these persistent traumatic stress environments, I invite us to think about how do we bring our students back in? How do we change our perspectives into the wonderful world of systems thinking? And I bring up systems thinking, especially in a room full of folks in higher ed and education, K-12 and P-12 and all of my early ed learners, because the systems thinking model reminds us that we can understand the complex educational system in a more holistic way, that we as a community can come together and ask questions that how might banning books with LGBTQ characters or books that remind us of our history, like the stories of Ruby Bridges make a student feel like they don’t belong and that their culture and their identity is banned? How might cuts to arts and education impact students’ performance in math? How can policies linking teacher salaries to standardized test scores affect the low achieving school’s ability to attract accomplished teachers?

The goal of systems thinking is to consider the several possible scenarios to find solutions to our interconnected challenges. And so I want us to think about can we change our perspective? Can we change how we think about school? Because we know that the past is going to be repeated and we know that the past shapes us, but what we don’t know right now is how this generation of students experience is nothing like anything we’ve ever experienced before. Because some of us didn’t have cell phones in high school or middle school or elementary school. Some of us didn’t have to think about AI writing their paper, because you had turnitin.com. Some of us did not have to go into schools thinking about their safety. And some of us still continue to live in school environments where you are judged by the color of your skin, the curl pattern of your hair, the accent that you hold.

And so I invite us to step into some of that systems thinking, because as we step into that systems thinking, it gives us space and a reminder to think about the power of human investment. As we think about healing our school climate, I want you to think about investing in your students as humans because you are humans, and I want you to be willing to take that emotional risk. And that emotional risk may seem like a faux pas right now in this Zoom land space, but that emotional risk is an investment of your time is an investment of yourself. It is an investment of the possible resources that you can be giving to other people because that power of human investment is so strong, y’all, that it really can shape and change the student experience, the student feeling of belonging.

Because I know as a therapist, when Donald Trump got elected as president, I went into not one, not two, but 12 different schools in crisis who had students breaking down and crying because half of them thought that their parents were going to move to Canada and the other half was worried about coming home and their parents not being there, they might get deported. I would then go back to a college environment and see students exploring like, is this actually the decision I should be making with my life right now? I think about the here and now and today and how students are so open to being connected with you if you’re willing to give them that investment.

And so I want you to think about for a second, I want you to think about your favorite teacher throughout your K-12 experience, your P-12 experience. Who was that teacher? And as you think about that favorite teacher, we’re going to share another poll for you. Because I also want you to think about your favorite class when you were in school, and some classes may not be listed on this poll, but I just want you to think about what was your favorite class in school? Because as you think about that favorite teacher and that favorite class, I’m going to let you know right now, your girl sucks at math.

I am not a mathematician, but maybe, just maybe, if more of my educators taught me about more than white mathematicians and math scholars, I might view myself as a mathematician or a scientist. However, what I do know about my dislike and love for math is that my first teacher in high school to actually pause and stop and help me, his name was Mr. Paul McMorrow, and every day at lunchtime, McMorrow will let me come into the class and take my math test because he figured out something that no other teacher could figure out. I get anxious on math test, so anxious at the moment someone else stands up, I immediately plead the fifth and assume that I am doing something wrong and I know nothing at all. So I took all my tests at lunchtime.

He’d come in the room or I’d take my test and he’d let me write on the giant whiteboard because for whatever reason, I like the bigger board over the small piece of paper in doing math. He playfully talked about sports and I complain about his favorite football team all the time because he was a Vikings fan and I was a Cowboys fan. But that very brief moment of human investment helped me pass math. It helped me pass college math. It helped me be in a space where I felt comfortable enough asking someone else for help. And so I see y’all here sharing in this poll. I got a lot of math lovers in this room. Okay, 14%, 27% English and language arts, 19% social studies history. I’m loving my 10% math people, my 5% of PE people, 18% electives and 8% science. Art allows for all the expression, yes, and that’s why we got to keep funding those art classes.

And so when you think about taking that emotional risk, I want you to think about these three C’s. These three C’s for a transformative relationship that can pivot how we explore healing our school climate, because if we want students to feel like they belong, we want students to feel like they too can learn, then we have to stop treating all of our students the same. Because if you tell a fish to climb a tree, it’ll go through its entire life thinking that it’s stupid, knowing good and well that fish was not made to climb trees. And we can do this and we can make that pivot to stop treating fish like tree climbers, and tree climbers like Olympic swimmers, by stepping into care, commitment and connection.

That first face of care, if your students see that you care, they’re going to want your commitment. If you can give them your commitment, they’re going to want your connection. I like to view the three C’s as one of my favorite books as a child, which was If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, if you’ve never read that book, go out and read it. It’s wonderful. But if you give a mouse a cookie, it’s going to want some milk. And so I like to tell people, if you show students that you care, they’re going to want your commitment. If you can give students your commitment, they’re going to want your connection. And if you can connect with your students, all they’re going to ask you for is the secret fourth C. Consistency. Care, commitment, connection, consistency.

Four things to reshape our relationship with our students, our relationships with our students’ parents, because maybe I start sending letters home, calls home, emails home, that says, “I want you to know how brave your young person is because they stood up today in class for somebody when they were sad and crying and told that other student, “You know what? I cry sometimes too, and it’s okay to cry right now.” I want parents to see that dope individual just as much as they hear about like, “Oh, your student didn’t turn in their homework again.” And it’s like, “Bet. Cool. We’ll get to that.” Because as we think about those three C’s about if you can give that mouse a cookie, right? I see you in the chat section, how you learn to solve problems through dance choreography, then we’re going to get to the space of belonging and connection. And belonging and connection is truly the heart of what we need to help us shift and heal our school climates and our school connections.

Belonging and connection remind us that it’s more than school spirit week. It’s more than being like, oh, we got all going to wear pajamas on Tuesday. It’s truly feeling like somebody is willing to be vulnerable with you, but also accept your vulnerability, that somebody is sharing with you and listening to you in return. That feeling of belonging is acknowledging what mascots we pick for our schools, because to this day, Victorian Elementary School has now changed their mascot and now they’re a Grizzly Bear. I found that out in my Google hunt. But what I also realized that when I was in middle school and I was a Badger Baby as we were called, I don’t think my middle school fully understood the mascot that they picked out to talk about puberty children. Badgers, as you may know, are some of the most ferocious critters in the world.

I call them ferocious because badgers don’t back down. And that perseverance is an amazing trait. But that perseverance is also connected to some very strong stubbornness. And so when you think about that mascot, are you only celebrating me when I succeed and I show you the perseverance, are you also celebrating me every time that I show you that I will stand my ground? There are two sides to every mascot, and we have to make sure that when we’re showing students they belong and they have connection in our school environments, we’re connecting to the good, the bad of the ugly of our students and not just the parts that sound pretty.

Because belonging in our schools means that our students have the opportunity to show up as their true authentic selves that no one is questioning why they’re in the classroom with their hood over their head, that no one is saying, everyone must wear clear backpacks because we don’t trust you. Belonging in our schools helps to ensure that no student is leaving feeling like they don’t belong because feeling like you don’t belong hurts. If you can ever think back to that moment in school where maybe you were the new person or maybe you did that weird thing that got you some weird nickname, or maybe you didn’t see yourself in the curriculum, you didn’t know about all the phenomenal and amazing mathematicians of color, you did not know about all the phenomenal and amazing scientists of color, you knew about them only during your assigned month. Maybe just maybe every time you gave homework, you didn’t think about the language barrier that was going to happen at home when I needed help.

Maybe just maybe, in that space of belonging, we didn’t think about recess toys that were ADA-compliant. We all know the needs to belong is not new, is not a new psychology trend. It’s something that we all feel and we all need, because we all were watching some weird videos on YouTube during the COVID pandemic asking us, “Can I please leave the house? Can I go talk to somebody?” We all want belonging and we all want connection. And if we all want these things, then we need to be asking our students how can we cultivate this space? And so as we lean in to problems to possibilities, I give lots of kudos and shout out to the high school students from the California Center for School Climate’s Youth Advisory team, because they did just that. They sat down together and they answered the question, what would make a learning space feel more healing? And these answers you see on the screen are their responses.

And so I want you to take a moment to just peruse through these answers, peruse through these responses because it would feel like having no fear because of my identity. What does that look like in our schools that a student can have no fear about their identity, whether they identify as Palestinian or Jewish, that they’re still seen, that they’re still welcomed, that you’re still willing to understand the conflict that is happening? What does it look like to have less stigma surrounding low scores versus high scores? Because maybe I am not a good test taker, but I am a good oral reporter. It would feel like welcoming and having less intense pressure to perform the very best, because I know I hate Mondays and I’ve hated Mondays for a long time. And maybe Mondays become the day that we’re just going to be mindful and acknowledge that stuff happens.

And as you peruse through these other statements that these beautiful students have shared with you, I want you to think about how could you take any of these and bring them into your learning space to help it feel more healing? How can you take any of these and bring them into your school, your district, your county, your office of education to help it be a little bit more healing? And I’ll zoom out from here. Maybe we as teachers, as educators, administrators can give students time to reflect kind of like journaling, and that sounds really cute coming from student. And so if we’re going to make this pivot family, if we’re going to be able to explore these three I’s, if we’re going to be able to talk about healing, how do we talk about healing our climate? How do we name that you are probably doing so many things right and we just want to amplify the things you are doing right? But also, how do we name, where do we show up in the situation?

Where do we show up in the situation when our students want to talk about what’s happening on the Gaza Strip? Where does this problem show up at an institutional level when our students want to know why every American classic has the N-word in it? How do we support our students when they think about where does a problem show up in our relationship when they don’t trust certain teachers, they don’t feel safe in certain classrooms because maybe that’s the one that always kicks them out before they even have an opportunity to speak? When you think about the individual, the interpersonal and the institutional, we have so many possibility questions we can be asking ourselves. We have so many different routes and steps we can be taking to help us unpack and explore how we can create a better healing environment, a better school climate shaped and rooted in healing for our young people.

Because what would it take for us to participate in change? How can I dive deeper into healing school climate. Today, that first baby step I want you to take is belonging. And that’s because belonging must be institutionalized. Belonging is not just spirit because we already know. Belonging is thinking about what are my policies and practices that tell students at the jump, “You do not belong in this school, in this educational system and this field?” What does belonging look like in curriculum to policy? What does belonging look like with the class offerings and choices that students get? Students are out here protesting for ethnic studies and all they’re doing is protesting and asking you to share their history too, because their history is our history. But for whatever reason, our systems are choosing not to highlight it.

And so when we think about the conditions of systems change for healing and healing our school climate, we have a few steps here. This is part of the theory of change steps. And so we think about how we react to every problem that happens at our school. How do we look and assess those patterns? How do we influence that design structure and how do we transform our mental models? Because if we think back to my example earlier about being in Massachusetts and them sharing with me that they wanted to bring the National Guard in to support students as violence at school, I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel any more policed than I would if you told me the National Guard in the San Jose High School because you are not to be trusted, that your body deserves to be policed and watched. Because my first thought if I was that child would be when they fought down the street at that other school that has more money than my school does, did you call the police? Did you call the National Guard in?

Has anyone stopped to ask these young people why they’re fighting? That baseline of our mental models, what assumptions, beliefs, and values do people hold? What are your assumptions and beliefs and values about our educational system? What are your assumptions, beliefs, and values about the ability of our students? Because I heard y’all naming, we’re not giving them problems, we’re giving them promises. And so what does that promise model look like at a base level? Because if I want to take one of those student comments from earlier and say, “You know what, I want to give students time to reflect because not every student is an oral learner,” well, that means I got to go back down the basis of my mental model and think about how do I value other learning styles? How can I shift the trends and patterns of say, “You know what? My students with learning disabilities may struggle every time I say read aloud.”

And so maybe I can give them other options. Maybe I can build in other tools and methods to help them. Maybe just maybe, I can think about the trends over time within my school setting. Every time we celebrate and honor someone’s culture, someone’s birthday, someone’s history, and every trend and pattern of the people that we do not acknowledge. And so as you explore for yourself bringing HCE, healing-centered engagement into healing your school climate, this approach is going to be strength-based family. So go ahead and throw out everything that says what happened to you out the window and start asking the question of what’s right with you.

I want you to think about this holistic view that allows you to recenter culture and identity because a student should not come to school fearing for their identity, fearing for their safety. We say that we are this many years from 9/11 and this many years from slavery. But if a student is still telling you right now so many years later, that they are worried about their safety in the classroom, we have the same problem we had in the past. But it’s time for us to fix that problem today. I need us to acknowledge how trauma is experienced collectively and not individually because some of the different spaces we live in and exist in want us to feel like it’s only your experience when it’s mine plus 12 other people’s experience. But maybe you only listen to the student’s voice of the student who internalizes their behavior instead of externalizes their behavior and has the rhetoric skills to articulate to you what the problem is.

I want you to consider how the root cause of trauma exists in the environment and not the individual, because no student comes to school saying that they’re stupid, but school and school climates can sometimes secretly give students that message. I want us to think about how can we as a community of educators and administrators think about the restoration and healing rather than the coping with symptoms? Because as we cope with those symptoms, we’re just putting a band-aid on what’s going on, and that band-aid is going to be 100 % of your future. So let’s take a moment right now and start ripping off with those band-aids and start healing those wounds. We’re going to come together as a larger community for some Q&A, but I thank you so much for taking some time to talk about and listen to school climate and our culture of healing.

Rebeca Cerna:

Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Porscha, that was riveting. So many moments. I got chills from what you were mentioning, and I was, I’m sure you noticed in the chat was so active, I myself was also taking notes while you were sharing, so we appreciate it. So we have some time for some questions, and I’m going to start with the first one. So as part of a healing-centered engagement approach, you mentioned the need to support the healing of the adult providers. How can someone make a pivot and take more emotional risks?

Dr. Lee Porscha Moore:

Yeah, that’s a beautiful question. And thinking about making that pivot, it can be something small. And so for example, for me in the school setting, my first pivot was my hair. I was told at an early age that, “Your hair is unprofessional, Porscha.” I usually like to dye purple. It’s always purple. And it took a while to be like, let me not project that harm onto someone else. And so I started telling my students, “I have some concerns about my hair because people told me that it’s unprofessional and I’m starting to reclaim that.” It’s not. That I’m so professional without that. And inviting my students into that conversation actually have them open up even more in that space. And so I would say that first baby step you can take is saying what you want to change or what emotional thing you’re sitting with in the here and now, whether that is to your students, it’s to your bestie, it’s to your family. Let’s speak it up into existence.

Rebeca Cerna:

Great, thank you. So the questions are coming in, so we have time for a couple. So I think we have time for several more. So what do you think are… we all work in different spaces and different organizations. What are some approaches that you might recommend to help an organization reduce defensiveness when there’s valid concerns for safety or even minor suggestions for growth? When are presented, what are some approaches that you might recommend.

Dr. Lee Porscha Moore:

Recommend? Yes, I know that y’all would get a PDF copy of the slide deck. But going back to that theory of change model, that little ladders were mental models at the bottom. When we get defensive, that’s our mental model responding in that moment in time. Because something down there is saying like, “Oh, cover up yourself. What’s going on here?” And so how we can make those small pivots is going back through that constantly… oh, thank you Amanda. So that we can think about what are my assumptions right now and my beliefs and my values that are happening that are being triggered in this moment? This will require us to do some mirror work and some self-reflection, which means you have to then be open enough to think about, okay, what are my biases I’m coming in the room with?

And that could become a group activity. Let’s stop for a moment and pause and think about what are our biases coming into this space? What are our concerns coming into this space? So that way we know how to address one another and communicate in a way that we’re not all trying to fight each other at the same time.

Rebeca Cerna:

Great, thank you. One participant asked a question in the Q&A, I believe it was Trisha. She asked; what advice can you give to those abolitionists working in education, fighting against systems that have caused us trauma and continue to cause ourselves and our students trauma to keep hope?

Dr. Lee Porscha Moore:

Yeah, I love that. And thank you for the work that you do, Trisha. Trisha, the first thing I would highlight is bringing your students into that conversation. I feel like a lot of the times in some of the work that we do, we want to hide certain stressors from our students, kind of normalize it for them. Let them know, “You know what? Today I’m at 80% y’all. I’m going to get to 100, maybe I might go down to 60 and this is why.” This is what I’m unpacking in my own mind, because then it normalizes that every day isn’t going to be sunshine and rainbows, but it also helps them to see what is happening in real time to people that they care about. With that other space, everyone feels the word of self-care in there, but I would do more than just self-care in that space for you, Fam. I would invite you to think about how right now your culture of healing and your culture of sustainability for your students in abolition work is pushing you to keep doing what you’re doing.

And so whether that is an affirmation that you do before you start things off, whether that is bringing in all your students together to have deeper conversations and journaling time, but allow space for self-reflection, I invite you to allow space and opportunity to say, “You know what? I fell down and this is what made me fall down, and this is why I’m going to get back up.” But it may make me a little bit longer. And normalize that. That is okay.

Rebeca Cerna:

Thank you. So there was another question from… an anonymous question that was submitted. I think it came in right after you were sharing about the focus on restoration and healing rather than the coping and the band-aid as focusing on the symptoms. So the question is, “Do I continue using the coping skills phrase due to the coping word and being a band-aid?”

Dr. Lee Porscha Moore:

Yeah. You don’t have to throw out coping skills. Coping skills is truly just a word by itself that helps us regulate our bodies. And so it’s then having the conversation of, am I requiring you to always fall back on this tool or am I taking some time to address the leaky faucet? And so that could mean things like, okay, so when I am dysregulated in the classroom setting, I pace back and forth. Okay, student of mine, please go pace if you need to go pace, and I’m going to have a check-in with you to see what’s going on right now, what was happening for you. Can I tap into the school mental health support system or cost team to support you in this moment?

As well as… is this effective for you now? Are there better tools we can get to? Because every tool has a better tool. That makes sense for folks. So self-regulation tools, coping tools, all great, but they can’t be the end all be all. I don’t want to go into a school and be like, “Here’s 45 coping strategies.” You’ll do great because then when tool number one stops working, I go to tool two and tool three and so on and so forth. And when I run out of tools, I panic and now I have to address that problem.

Rebeca Cerna:

One of the things you really focused on today were the C’s, the care, commitment, connection, and the secret fourth C of consistency. And one question that’s coming in from Denise is how do we share but not overburden our students with our needs?

Dr. Lee Porscha Moore:

Yeah, that’s a beautiful question. I love that one because everyone has that space of; I’m overburdening people, even other therapists hear a lot. But what I would highlight in that space of is thinking about what am I sharing with my students? Am I giving them the full play by play about my divorce, or am I saying things like, “Right now I am struggling and teacher, admin, insert person here, I may not be 100% today, but I’m going to give you 60. Can we talk about as a class how you can help me fill in the extra 40?” That creates a collaborative environment in that space. I always remind people to think about what you’re sharing and how someone’s going to hold it in that area. One of my close friends is an educator up in Sacramento Unified School District, and her father passed away recently and her school told her kindergartners.

And so every two seconds of kindergartners, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about your dad. Where is your dad going?” And that was a lot for her to hold in that moment. And so she pivoted and got a book and was like, “We’re all going to read this book together. And then we’ll send this book home with your parents and they can hold this book with you,” and she’ll a note with the parents to be like, “It’s okay. I am fine. Help ground your child.” And so bring in the parents, bring in the other people who support this child like you support this child.

Rebeca Cerna:

I think we have time for one final question. As you were sharing, you mentioned something, maybe partially paraphrasing that everybody in here is… every day you do something directly or indirectly to influence students. And one question that came in was, how do we stay in such dysfunction and harm without harming ourselves spiritually, emotionally? So what thoughts do you have around that?

Dr. Lee Porscha Moore:

Yeah. How do we get out of the dysfunction is what I’m hearing you say, Rebecca?

Rebeca Cerna:

Yeah. How do we stay in such dysfunction and harm without harming ourselves spiritually, emotionally, holistically?

Dr. Lee Porscha Moore:

Yeah. I honestly would go back to what your practices are, what your self-care routine is, what your feeling whole routine is. And so for example, as a therapist, it is my responsibility to hold people’s pain. And with that, when I come home, I have what I call the bookshelf and I have a routine of how I put that back onto the bookshelf and remind myself, I don’t have to keep carrying this. You can let go of it. And so thinking about what could be that routine for you, this is something that I also invite people to think about how you can bring it into your school settings. And so for example, when I was supporting my preschoolers in reading a book about death and dying, one of the things that we did in that moment was anytime we felt uncomfortable, we talked about like, I need to get up and do a flower dance.

And so everyone would get up and flower dance with you. And so everyone was going to acknowledge that you’re uncomfortable. Let me support you right now. And so that’s a small way of making that pivot, of stepping out of that dysfunction. But it does require a big pivot for ourselves to just be like, this is what’s going on and I’m going to step back. And in stepping back, I typically affirm myself and say, just because I’m stepping back doesn’t mean that I view this problem or the situation as any less than, but in order to attain to it and to support it or change it, I have to pivot how I’m holding it.

Rebeca Cerna:

Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Porscha. As you can tell by the chat and the questions coming in, also in the Q&A, folks are just very… we’re very engaged with your session and I just want to thank you for your insights and we thank you for your wisdom in the context that you’ve shared on how we can create a healing environment for our students and for ourselves. Thank you again, Dr. Porscha for sharing your insights. We really thank you for your wisdom, for providing additional context. And we also thank everyone who joined. We know that you’re committed to the field. As Dr. Porscha mentioned, we know why you’re here. You’re impacting students directly or indirectly, and we hope that by attending this keynote, I’m sure it reinforced what you maybe already know or perhaps you came for some inspiration to learn something new. So thank you for joining us for your session, and we hope that you’re able to join us at 10:30 for one of our other sessions. Thank you.