![]() Think of it, she said, like “a big old wall of love.” Instead, Moreno said, educators at all levels should offer students consistency and acceptance. And though she believes strongly in early interventions, she said they aren’t an inoculation against the rest of a tough childhood. That wouldn’t have removed the kids entirely from their toxic environments, said Amanda Moreno of the Erickson Institute, a graduate school for early educators in Chicago. Reporters asked if early childhood education would have helped the students. The discussion following the screening was far-ranging. (Aaron, who could hardly maintain eye contact with teachers at the beginning of his senior year, made it to college and is doing great there, according to Redford.) “This is the first place that I’ve ever been to that I felt they cared about me as an individual,” said Aaron, 17, and one of the film’s stars. These teachers did not take the easy route. “It would be easy to let them fight, get suspended and get them out of here,” a voice – it was hard to tell if it was the principal or the science teacher – says at one point in the film. It manages to tell the detailed and heartbreaking stories of six students while weaving in findings from the research on adverse childhood experiences, the importance of accessible mental and physical health care, and the challenge of getting students from disadvantaged backgrounds out of high school and into college. “Paper Tigers” is worth seeing for reporters who cover traumatized student communities, especially rural ones like the town highlighted in the film. They acknowledged the kids’ hardships and asked them to work to move past those things, but not to ignore the effects of their circumstances. Instead, they fundamentally changed the way they taught and interacted with children. To build resilience among their students, the Lincoln team didn’t focus on increasing rigor or bringing up test scores. ![]() “There’s this myth that we all have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps,” Redford said after the screening, held at the Education Writers Association’s 2016 National Seminar in Boston. “Resilience, on a whole, has to be built.” In the early 2010’s, Principal Jim Sporleder, along with a dedicated team of teachers, took the chaotic mess that was Lincoln and made it a healthy place for students.ĭirector James Redford (yes, that Redford, son of Robert) spent a year capturing the turnaround school on tape to make “Paper Tigers,” a poignant two-hour documentary on how the Lincoln team was able to treat the toxic stress of their students through unswerving dedication. Lincoln Alternative High School, in Walla Walla, Washington, is where all the bad kids went. The voiceover is a patchwork of voices saying things like: “This place is absolute chaos.” And: “All the kids were forced to be here.” And: “That’s where the bad kids went.”
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