Singer-songwriter John Prine painted a grim and honest picture of trauma associated with war in his song “Sam Stone.”

Sam Stone came home / To his wife and family / After serving in the conflict overseas / And the time that he served / Had shattered all his nerves / And left a little shrapnel in his knees / But the morphine eased the pain / And the grass grew round his brain / And gave him all the confidence he lacked / With a purple heart and a monkey on his back.

Many soldiers have experienced trauma brought on by their experiences in combat. During World War I, the soldiers called it shell shock. During World War II, it was labeled battle fatigue, and during the Vietnam War and after it was Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (what we now call PTSD). There are sometimes physical symptoms and always psychological ones; soldiers have a very difficult time reentering society, finding their place and their balance. Their bodies are always on high alert for possible danger, and many avoid contact with society, or lash out violently, dealing with a pain they can’t talk about because there are no words.

We have learned, through treating (or attempting to treat) our veterans that trauma is something that shuts down parts of the brain associated with language, learning and processing, and keeps the body on high alert, constantly flooding the system with crisis response chemicals. Talking out the pain is rarely effective because there are no words associated with that pain, and when the trauma is triggered it is not experienced as a past event, but as happening in the present.

We’ve learned that trauma is not only associated with war. Many of our children have been traumatized by experiences and are coming to school carrying that trauma, which compromises the learning they can do, the relationships they can have, and their health and well-being. Our increasing awareness has led us to develop trauma-informed school approaches, and a recognition that, in many ways, COVID has left an entire generation of children potentially traumatized, making it all the more important that we are aware of, trained in, and practicing trauma-informed teaching and emphasizing social emotional learning.

“Trauma results from exposure to an incident or series of events that are emotionally disturbing or life-threatening with lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, and/or spiritual well-being,” according to the Trauma Informed Care Implementation Resource Center website.

The resource center identifies many kinds of experience that may be traumatic, including physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, childhood neglect, living with family members who have mental illness or substance abuse disorders, sudden, unexplained separation from a loved one, poverty, racism, discrimination, or oppression, and violence, at home, in the community, or in war. The Trauma Informed website states that, “although trauma can occur at any age, it has particularly debilitating long-term effects on children’s developing brains.”

Reports from classrooms following a return to school post-COVID told consistent stories of children struggling to find their balance, to make sense of their time away from school, their friends, and their routines. Children are, in many ways, displaying symptoms similar to those of returning soldiers; difficulty adjusting to “normal” society, struggling to communicate with and be with others, withdrawing and/or violent behavior, and an inability to identify the source of their hurt and pain. It can show up in many different ways in a classroom.

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I spoke with teachers in Massachusetts and across the country and they reported that they were seeing more outburst, more physical confrontations, inappropriate language, and more students seemingly unable to simply stay in their seats. They seemed to have forgotten how to be in school.

Preschool teachers reported that many of their children had seemingly missed developmental milestones through their first years spent in isolation, living with overly stressed parents trying to survive. Many of their students came with intense needs, were delayed in their skill development and maturation, and there were so many students in crisis that the school counselors could not keep up. Rather than counseling, they were spending all their time in crisis management, running from one crisis to the next, and there was no time to address the many families who were experiencing crisis at home, which contributed to what the teachers and counselors were seeing at school.

With older students, the trauma was often of a different nature. Neighborhoods, particularly (though not exclusively) those of high poverty, were experiencing the worst levels of trauma and toxic stress, and teachers in those neighborhood schools would begin their days hearing about shootings, violence and abuse in homes and in the neighborhood, and a sense of hopelessness and depression that was the reality throughout their communities. And it wasn’t one or two children struggling to find balance and to survive; it was seemingly most of them. These teachers were clear that there was no way their students were going to be able to focus on their reading and math while they were living in the state of perpetual PTSD (as more than one of the teachers I spoke to labeled it).

Even as children returned to school post-lockdown, the adults working with them were facing their own challenges. They also had family and life stresses and tragedies and were being asked to respond to children experiencing trauma, having received little or no training, given inadequate resources, and not enough support (such as counselors, psychologists, or instructional assistants). The entire system was overwhelmed, and reentry was exceedingly rough in many schools and districts.

The situation has gotten somewhat better since then; students and teachers have been back at school and are feeling more comfortable and safer, and schools have learned more about offering trauma informed education, for their students and educators. I plan to share steps schools are taking to respond to this crisis, and what steps they would like to take if they can get the resources and personnel they need, in next month’s column.

Doug Selwyn taught at K-12 public schools from 1985 until 2000 and then at university as a professor of education until he retired in 2017. He is the chair of the Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution education task force. You can reach him at dougselwyn12@gmail.com.