More than 100,000 students in the NYC school system experience housing instability.
How do we best support the teams that serve this population?
See Advocates for Children report here for more information
This student population is referred to as Students in Temporary Housing (STH). The NYC Department of Education’s Office of Community Schools have a team dedicated specifically to supporting schools with particularly high rates of students in temporary housing, called the STH Team. This team is comprised of Family Assistants, Community Coordinators, Bridging the Gap Social Workers, and Regional Managers.
Around 2018-2019 the Office of Community Schools was undergoing massive reorganization, leading to restructuring of these roles and this team. All this in addition to the immense compassion fatigue and burnout of these incredibly challenging roles that operate within one of the most complex service systems in the country.
To help address the changing team structures and the continual need for trauma sensitivity training and support, I worked with clinical psychologist Dr. Jacob Ham to design team building training sessions for all levels of STH staff, including with team leadership.
Skills employed
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My primary responsibility was to extend Dr. Ham’s trauma sensitivity content into activity-based workshops and worksheets, based on observations of his sessions with the STH team, conversations with team leadership, and feedback gathered from workshop participants.
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We conducted four sessions: one with team leadership, one with the regional managers, and one each with the entire Bronx-based and Manhattan-based STH staff cohorts. Each session focused on surfacing the needs of these teams, pinpointing the motivating forces and the barriers, understanding the experience of these roles, and facilitating conversations to deepen empathy and trust.
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Learnings from each respective session were synthesized and analyzed to provide improvements for the following sessions and to inform changes to training content.
