As Archbishop Hanna High School welcomed new students last week, it also announced the launch of two new programs to improve student academic outcome and college readiness, officials said.
The programs are Mindprint and the STAR assessment. Mindprint collects cognitive data to help determine cognitive, social and emotional needs, and assist with the assessing students’ strengths and needs.
The STAR assessment is used to screen students’ math and reading skills, helping administrators place students in the appropriate class and determine their teaching needs.
Two weeks ago students and their families gathered at Hanna to meet one another and get acquainted with the school and center.
“We know that starting at a new school can be traumatizing for some of our youth, so to try to smooth out the transition period, we welcomed the students, let them meet their peers ahead of time and made sure they were emotionally ready for school to start,” said James Thompson, admissions coordinator at Hanna.
“We want them to assimilate into the Hanna community as quickly and easily as possible,” he said.
The high school has 82 resident students and six “day” students who don’t live at the center. Of them 21 are new students with 15 of those are freshmen. They come from all over the Bay Area and self-selected to attend Hanna.
“These students are part of the ‘New Hanna,’” said CEO Brian Farragher. “We welcome them to our campus family, and will be working closely with them to achieve academic success and to move beyond the trauma that has informed their life experiences.”
By “New Hanna,” Farragher is referencing what he and the board are calling a new strategic plan. As part of that plan Hanna said it will place a greater emphasis on the practice known as trauma-informed care (TIC), a delivery of services that involves understanding, recognizing and responding to the effects of trauma, while creating an environment of physical, psychological and emotional safety.
The Hanna Boys Center has been in a period of staff turmoil recently, with two rounds of layoffs, and some staff members speculating there may be more to come. Trauma-informed care, now a centerpiece of the way staff and officials interact with the boys, is also at the center of some of the unrest.
Staff members, some whom were part of the layoffs, claim that TIC does not work with their population of students. Farragher contends that TIC requires more patience than do other methods of behavior modification, which he said are too punitive. Some staff who spoke with the Index-Tribune on the condition of anonymity last spring said that TIC puts kids and staff at risk because if a student is acting up or behaving violently, staff is not allowed to do anything because that would be seen as punitive.
Farragher said there is science behind TIC and that if a student is behaving in a violent manner, they need to self-regulate before any kind of action can be taken with them.
Contact Anne at anne.ernst@sonomanews.com.
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