Why we must recognize that school can be a child’s sanctuary

• 7 December 2017
• Jane Evans
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School can be a place to exhale and feel safe

Many children have complex home lives. Parents and carers doing their best in most cases but often juggling too much for too long with their emotional and physical needs unmet, sometimes since birth. Trying to function and raise children in a time of scarce resources and with multiple fears of unseen threats such as unemployment, homelessness, lack of money, terrorism, sexual assault, loneliness, imperfection, rejection and so much more.

For children living with domestic abuse, violence, sexual abuse, harsh parenting and high unpredictability in the adults around them from things like mental illness and substance dependency, a school can represent a sanctuary. A place where they physically and emotionally exhale. Even if the adults there do shout a bit and aren’t perfect there are enough kind words, some humour, friends, and a similar routine.

Where a body feels safe a brain can relax and engage

Over time a child who otherwise only knows tension, drama, randomness, and fear can learn to feel safe in a school building if the people, environment, and routines are fairly predictable. This happens more at a body-based level than from being told as the brain is only as good as the body is calm. However, if there is a physical experience during the school day that triggers the body and brains survival mechanisms this can dismantle the incremental safety previously created and integrated into a child’s system.

For example, an abuser turning up at the school premises, being shamed by an adult at school, being bullied by adults or children, an unexpectedly frightening event. The recent decision by a Dundee School to spring a terrorist drill on a school is a prime example of this and I am left wondering at the level of fear all the children experienced, and their parents and carers and the long-term implications!

Dundee school kids cower in fear under desk during terrorism drill

A spokesman for Dundee City Council said: “In common with other schools across the city, Craigie High School periodically tests the resilience of its procedures.

Clearly, it is important that any drill is as realistic as possible, but as soon as the procedures had been tested, the school community was informed that it was an exercise.”

I can see how some may have felt real was best but…

Would it have felt safer if they had told everyone it was going to happen and what it would look like? After all, we don’t light a fire every time we have a fire practice. In fact, everyone knows the time and day it happens in most workplaces.

In such uncertain times, many children are bathed in the latest attacks and violence in our world which often increase their anxiety. Many are without much-needed access to emotionally available adults they can poke and prod such incomprehensible acts with imaginary feelings shaped sticks to gain perspective and inner resources.

Pause – reflect – learn

Let’s hope for the children of Dundee, and elsewhere, that someone will be reflective enough to imagine how terrifying it was and the way it may have demolished the only sense of safety some children had built with the caring adults in their school setting. For some children, their bodies will now associate the school building with possible threat, fear, and unpredictability which won’t just fade away, and will get in the way of their learning, friendships, and health. How tragically ironic that trying to create safety from possible threat has robbed some children of just that for a long, long time.