Illinois will seek to address student trauma under measure signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker

Illinois will attempt to quantify the level of adversity faced by children in communities across the state under a measure Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed into law Thursday that aims to improve the way schools address student trauma.

The plan calls for the Illinois State Board of Education to develop a publicly reported “Children’s Adversity Index” at the community or school district level that will “measure community childhood trauma exposure across the population of children 3 through 18 years.”

The index, which must be created by May 31, 2025, will draw on data reflecting issues such as the prevalence of homelessness, contacts with the child welfare system, community violence and other factors.

Beginning in October 2024, the state school report card, will include data on the number of counselors, social workers, nurses and psychologists in each school and district and the student ratio for each category.

“There’s an old saying, ‘What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done,’ ” Pritzker said during a bill-signing event held at the headquarters of Habilitative Systems Inc., a human services organization in Chicago’s West Side Austin community. “And measuring our resources, measuring the trauma ... that students are experiencing in our schools is an important first step to knowing what schools need.”

The new law is an outgrowth of the wide-ranging social justice agenda the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus successfully pushed through the General Assembly in early 2021 after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis the previous spring. While a sweeping criminal justice overhaul that will abolish cash bail beginning next month has gotten most of the attention, the Black Caucus agenda also included measures seeking to address systemic inequities in education, economic development and health care.

In addition to creating a new standard assessment for children entering kindergarten, attempting to increase the number of Black teachers in Illinois and seeking to improve the teaching of Black history in the state’s schools, the Black Caucus’ education agenda created a Whole Child Task Force. Recommendations from that group, comprising child psychologists, teachers, school administrators and state officials, among others, led to the measure Pritzker signed Thursday, which also extends the life of the task force through 2027.

Floyd’s death, which coincided with the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, put a spotlight on long-standing racial inequities not just in the criminal justice system but in all aspects of life, including education, said state Rep. Carol Ammons, an Urbana Democrat who leads the Black Caucus.

“Our schools had been functioning on a 1954 model that hadn’t caught up with the current needs of the children and the families,” Ammons said. “And so we saw this systemic thing not just in criminal justice, but we saw it in economics, we saw it in education, we saw it in health care, and COVID pulled back all these layers. And we needed to respond. And we did.”

In addition to collecting new data, the new law also requires training for teachers on “trauma-informed practices” prior to the start of the each school year beginning in 2024 and codifies definitions of trauma and other related terms.

Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, a Maywood Democrat who sponsored both the 2021 education legislation and the measure Pritzker signed Thursday, said one of the most important aspects of the latest effort is it acknowledges the varied experiences of children in different communities.

“We all know that all things aren’t equal, and we have to stop treating them as though they are,” Lightford said.

While praising the state’s efforts to date, Colleen Cicchetti, executive director of the Center for Childhood Resilience at Lurie Children’s Hospital and a member of the state task force, acknowledged, “Today is the beginning.”

“What we’re asking for is, as we move forward, that it’s not going to be a one-off grant here and a one-off grant there, but it’s going to be a sustainable intervention that looks at, How do we train educators to help kids to be the best that they can be and give them the tools that they need and the time that they need to learn it and to deliver it well?” said Cicchetti, a pediatric psychologist.

Pritzker has made improving education a central theme of his tenure despite signing a series of budgets that haven’t increased spending to the level advocates say is necessary to meet goals established in a 2017 overhaul of the state’s school funding formula. The governor acknowledged the state will have to provide more financial support for schools if they are to continue hiring more mental health professionals.

“We need to keep funding our schools better,” Pritzker said, though he pointed to additional money in this year’s budget to help high-need districts hire more teachers.

Robin Steans of Advance Illinois, an education advocacy organization that has pushed for larger increases in school funding, said it’s also important to acknowledge the progress that has been made over the past several years.

While schools statewide still don’t have enough counselors, social workers or psychologists, the ratios of students to mental health professionals has improved in recent years as the state has increased annual spending on K-12 education by nearly $2 billion, Steans said.

dpetrella@chicagotribune.com