Trauma-Informed Resources in Maine

A trauma-informed school incorporates curriculum, procedures and policies that support all students despite trauma histories. As school counselors, we are experts at understanding the whole student and we know that we can increase academic success for students by also meeting the social/emotional and behavior needs. School counselors are often leaders in a school’s journey to being more trauma informed. This newsletter’s theme, trauma-informed schools, is a timely and important topic. Awareness of trauma helps our students to be healthy, safe and engaged, and ultimately it supports learning. I’d like to put some trauma-informed resources on your radar.

For Your Students: SEL4Me
This resource, brought to us by the Maine DOE, is trauma informed and aligned with CASEL. If your school needs a free curriculum resource, this one fits the bill. SEL4Me continues to expand and change, so if you haven’t looked at it lately, you may consider going back to it. It offers more than 450 modules for pre-K–12. This is a resource from Maine.

For Your School or District: SHAPE
This resource is an evaluation system that can help you best understand how your school or district supports mental health. The School Health Assessment and Performance Evaluation (SHAPE) system is a public-access, web-based platform that offers schools, districts and states/territories a work space and targeted resources to support school mental health quality improvement. This is a national resource.

For Your Own Professional Development: Maine Resilience Building Network
MRBN is a public health organization and network that promotes change in systemic inequities. MRBN looks at ACEs scores and has recently pushed out training on mattering. This is a resource from Maine.

Trauma-sensitive environments allow school counselors to collaborate with stakeholders to ensure that true learning is happening. Giving our students the tools to manage traumatic stress, while at the same time implementing traum- informed policy and procedures, will help all Maine students grow and prosper on a global scale.

Contact Kelly Weaver, chair, Maine School Counselor Association Board of Directors, at kweaver@rsu22.us.