The city wants to find the next Adam Lanza before it’s too late.
The NYPD and Department of Education have hired a prominent psychologist to train school-safety agents, teachers and administrators how to handle troubled students following Lanza’s Newtown school massacre.
Dr. Stuart Ablon, of Massachusetts General Hospital, held seminars for 3,000 school-safety agents and uniformed police officers, teaching them how to talk with troublemakers and get to the root of the problem rather than just throw them out of school or have them arrested.
Ablon will train a total of 5,000 officers by the school year’s end.
“It’s neuroscience. It’s not like they’re bad kids,” Janine Francolini, founder of the Flawless Foundation, an advocacy group for children with behavioral problems, who connected Ablon to the DOE, told the Post.
She said Lanza — who gunned down 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School last year — “was sick since he was 5 years old.
“He had no care, no education, because the system failed the kid,” Francolini said.
Four months after the attack, the NYPD hired Ablon to instruct every school-safety agent in the city in his “collaborative problem-solving” program.
He focuses on “mindfulness,” talking about feelings and walking the student through solutions instead of traditional discipline and punishment.
The training cost the NYPD around $50,000, Ablon said.
Pleased with his techniques, DOE officials hired him to also instruct administrators and teachers at the 10 elementary, middle and high schools with the most severe disciple problems.
The DOE program costs around $100,000, about what it costs to put two teens through the system and house them at a facility like Rikers Island, Ablon said.
Eventually, Ablon’s training will be “going systemwide” in city schools, he said. It would ultimately cost the DOE between $1 million and $2 million.
Ablon sees behavioral problems as a learning disability caused by chronic stress and trauma that arrests brain development. Kids who experience trauma or live in extreme poverty are most prone to the disorder.
“Kids with trauma histories have the flight-or-fight response hard-wired into their brain, and this process is to create new pathways in the brain,” he said.
“Not long ago, kids who had trouble reading were thought of as lazy or dumb. Today, people recognize that these kids have a learning disability that simply requires a different method of teaching.”
Instead of punishing kids with suspensions, detentions or expulsions, Ablon’s practice involves problem-solving, flexibility and frustration tolerance.
“Our approach avoids the use of power, control and motivational procedures,” he said.
Joshua Laub, director of the DOE’s Youth Development program, which handles behavioral issues, called Ablon’s work a “new day” for the school system.
“Things can and will get better if we continue to make this kind of effort and commit ourselves to evidence-based practices like Collaborative Problem Solving,” Laub said in a letter to Francolini.
Francolini had connected Ablon to the DOE.
Ablon and Francolini’s work has included offering yoga classes for schoolkids who are in and out of jail and psychiatric hospitals.
The NYPD didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Doctor’s Orders
Educators and school-safety agents are being taught how to better deal with troubled students
- Rather than threaten punishment, they are told to discuss with students the best solution
- Agents are taught to reassure students they are not simply looking to impose their will on them
- They are told to ask students about their concerns
- In some cases, students are given yoga classes