Handle with Care program shows Yakima kids are affected by domestic violence
YAKIMA – More than 1,600 Yakima children were present during incidents of intimate partner domestic violence over the past 10 months.
Each of those children was identified through Handle with Care, a notification program implemented by the Yakima School District and Yakima Police Department to alert school administrators and counselors when a student has experienced a trauma.
Yakima School District Safety and Security Director Sara Cordova gave an update on the program and shared total numbers at a Domestic Violence Coalition meeting Tuesday in Yakima.
Equipped with nearly a year’s worth of data, the school district and other coalition members are looking for ways to support affected children and families.
About Handle with Care
The Yakima School District began the pilot Handle with Care program in September 2021 to look at how domestic violence was impacting families and children, Cordova said at the meeting.
Experiencing or witnessing violence in the home is a type of adverse childhood experience, or ACE: a potentially traumatic experience that occurs in childhood.
ACEs are linked to chronic health problems, mental illness and substance use problems in adolescence and adulthood, and they can also negatively affect education, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Combined with other social determinants of health, such as experiencing poverty, systemic racism or food insecurity, ACEs can cause prolonged stress, and also affect brain development and stress response. Those changes can then affect children’s attention, relationships, decision making and learning, according to the CDC.
The pilot program covered all age groups in a handful of schools: Ridgeview and Martin Luther King Jr. elementary schools, Wilson Middle School and Davis High School. The Yakima School District is the county’s largest with about 16,000 total students.
Each morning, Cordova would sort through a list of children present during domestic incidents over the previous 24 hours to find the children – and any siblings not listed – attending the YSD pilot schools.
“I made sure all the kids in the family were accounted for and I sent emails out to each of the schools,” Cordova said.
The notification sheet, sent to administrators, counselors and nurses, includes the student’s ID number, address, birthday, school, student status (active or inactive) and the date of the incident. The sheet also says school staff aren’t asked to do anything with the information – it’s just given as a heads up, Cordova said.
“We just want (the staff) to be aware,” Cordova said, providing an example using an imaginary student. “If Hope keeps coming into the nurse’s room, or Hope gets in trouble, or Hope puts her head down instead of taking the test, the teacher or administrator can show a little bit of understanding and give her some time, maybe let her try again later that day or later in the week.”
Feedback
Cordova said the Handle with Care program received positive feedback from school staff because it wasn’t a drain on resources and it produced useful information. She included comments from other administrators in her presentation Tuesday:
“Having knowledge that kids were dealing with some kind of trauma the night before, even though we didn’t know what it was, was beneficial to teachers and administrators,” Lewis and Clark Middle School Assistant Principal Jennifer Norman said.
Discovery Lab Principal Anna Marie Dufault agreed, saying the Handle with Care notification was helpful information to have in the classroom.
“Sometimes the children exhibited behaviors, but most of the time, they did not,” Dufault said in her statement. “A program such as this can be really beneficial because otherwise you might miss something.”
She said the program also strengthened communication between schools and law enforcement.
In another statement, Yakima Online Principal Lois Menard said the program is a great step, but she asked about other ways school staff can help, like sending supplies to the home.
“If there is something we can do on our end, I hope there is outreach to us,” Menard said.
After the one-month trial, which turned up 46 total impacted children with 20 attending YSD schools and three attending the pilot schools, the program was expanded to other schools in the district.
Throughout the 2021-22 school year, 1,007 YSD students were flagged in the Handle with Care notification system: 448 in elementary, 238 in middle school and 321 in high school.
An additional 640 kids were present for domestic violence incidents at home but were outside the district. These kids may have been younger than school age, attending schools in other districts throughout the Valley, dropouts or never enrolled in school, Cordova said.
Attendance
As Cordova delivered Handle with Care notifications to each of the schools, a pattern emerged in the data. The impacted kids overlapped with another group of concern for the district: kids who weren’t attending school.
Cordova said attendance and participation changed with the switch to online classes during the pandemic, and the district had a noticeable decline in attendance at the start of the most recent school year in August 2021. When kids were logged in for online learning, many had their cameras off and the classroom connections overall weren’t as strong, she said.
“We lost track of our kids, kids lost track of teachers,” Cordova said. “The relationships were not there, and kids totally lost interest in school.”
Throughout the school year, Cordova paid close attention to the inactive or active student status on the Handle with Care notifications. She also began to notice the names of kids ages 6, 7 or 8 that had never been enrolled in school.
“A lot of these kids just never started,” she said. “These are our kids, but nobody ever got them into the school building.”
In October 2021, the district decided to train home visitors to speak with parents about enrollment and attendance. The schools put on a training session and gathered resources to share with parents, but Cordova said the effort had mixed results.
“We weren’t getting as many kids back as we thought we were going to get,” Cordova said.
She said the district then looped in other community partners to communicate with families: the YWCA, Comprehensive Health, the faith community and others. The re-engagement task force, as it was called, was started in January.
By then, the district was seeing more and more connections between Handle with Care and attendance issues, Cordova said. The program was also alerting the district to other issues impacting its students’ well-being, like substance abuse, overdoses and violence.
“The extreme needs of our kids may not have been noticed or met if it wasn’t for our Handle with Care program,” Cordova said.
The priority has now become forming strong community partnerships and finding more ways to connect with families, Cordova said.
“Our children are all of our responsibility,” she said. “If we don’t work together now to meet their needs – and we know they exist – they’re going to continue to struggle. They’re going to drain our resources in our community, make it unsafe for themselves and everybody else around them and their future kids.”
What to do with the data
A big piece of the discussion at the coalition meeting Tuesday was a look at next steps for supporting students and families.
Yakima Police Lt. Chad Janis said the Handle with Care program was an illuminating first step showing that domestic violence is impacting kids, but he posed a question to the group: “Now that we know this, what do we do?”
He said the numbers don’t bring on a sense of hopelessness.
“Most of those kids on that list are going to do just fine,” he said. “It’s the ones that we’re talking about that are rising to the level of concern that we have, where we’re seeing them seven times and there’s nothing available for them in our community or they’re not engaging in voluntary services.”
Another area of concern falls with the children who are too young to start school and already being exposed to violence at home, Janis said. He described one example with a 4-year-old and 2-year-old being present during intimate partner altercations in the home with increased frequency.
“What can we do with this family, knowing that by the time this kid gets to school, their brain is going to be rewired?” Janis said. “(It’ll be) very different than the kid that has not had the same experiences, and then we’re going to expect this kid to proceed through the educational system at the same rate as the person next to them, and it’s just simply unfair.”
He said the issue is that there is no way to effectively engage with those children outside of the home.
The community programs that could offer valuable support are all voluntary, he said, might not be a priority for families struggling financially or coping with other issues.
“Realistically, right now, what would happen is one of those parents is held accountable in the criminal justice system, and they’re just jailed,” Janis said. “If that’s the stop, I guess that’s the stop, but I bet there’s a better way.”
Yakima Police Chief Matt Murray said the group should formalize a list of services available to provide to officers on patrol and other partners, like the school district, who have direct contact with the families.
The plan has to include ways to identify and help the impacted kids, he said.
“I know there’s commitment,” Murray said. “Somehow we’re missing the ability to just make a call and get these kids connected with whoever it is that may really be able to try or have the experiences or the resources or the plan to address it.”
Janis said the next step should be expanding outreach and expanding the notification program to other school districts. He said the police department wants to engage with Educational Services District 105 to see if the program can be implemented in schools throughout the Yakima Valley.
He said there’s also room for intervention or preventative strategies.
“The reality is, in a couple of years’ time for some of these kids, we’re going to see them on the offender list with our prosecutors,” Janis said. “Unless we do something different to change the behavior, that’s the next step for some of them.”
In the meantime, the notification program continues in Yakima schools. Even during summer break, Cordova sends daily emails to school administrators about students present during an incident, and the administrators can reach out to them by email to connect, she said.