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: Written by: Adia White; Published: 16 September 2019

Clinical social worker Laura Besser points to a mural outside the administration office at the new Paradise Elementary School. The students were relocated to this campus, which used to be the middle school, after their elementary school burned down in the Camp Fire. In the center of the mural is the school mascot, the tiger, colored-in with neon shades. Around the tiger, students have drawn pine trees and stars. They’ve also written down lists of what they lost in the Camp Fire. One paragraph reads, “ I miss my lizard, my big fat cat, my home”

“I never imagined that in one day, my whole caseload would have such severe trauma due to a natural disaster,” Besser said.

Besser has been counseling students in the Paradise Unified School District for about ten years. She works for a non-profit called Youth for Change, which sends counselors into schools to help students in need. She says her job has changed dramatically since the fire.

“Before we were working with kids that had depression or generalized anxiety, and a few might have trauma or complex trauma. But after the Camp Fire, the majority of my caseload had trauma, intense complex trauma,” she said.

For Besser, the changes in the students are obvious, especially in relation to somatic symptoms ⁠— emotional strains that are reflected in the body.

“Kid’s that I was seeing before who didn’t have behavioral issues or somatic issues, all of a sudden they have it,” she said. “Like intense tummy aches, they are wetting the bed, they are having nightmares, and so it really intensified my work.”

Health Care providers use the term Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACES to describe traumatic events. Research shows that the greater the number of adverse experiences one has during childhood, the more likely they are to experience health problems later in life.

Before the Camp Fire, Butte County residents experienced more traumatic childhood events on average than residents of any other county in the state. That’s according to a report by the San Francisco based non-profit, the Center for Youth Wellness. According to the organization, 76 percent of Butte County residents reported having more than one adverse childhood experience. High rates of poverty may account for these numbers. Mandy Kling, also a clinical social worker with Youth for Change, has noticed instability and poverty have made it harder for kids to recover from the Camp Fire.

"In working with kids that are still living in trailers since the fire, it's like a perpetual state of crisis, she said. “They haven’t been able to get out of crisis mode and get a sense of safety and stability, and in doing so they tend to be more escalated and tend to be more hyper-vigilant. The behaviors have still maintained, I haven’t seen a reduction in behaviors without that stability. “

Kling grew up in Paradise, the Camp Fire destroyed the home where she was raised. She believes that if the community had more resources and support before the fire, things could have been easier.

“Prior to the fire, it is my perspective that it was under-resourced and there was a higher need for therapeutic services that wasn’t met,” she said. “Following the fires, there was a lot of chaos and everybody was traumatized. The people who are trying to pick up the pieces have gone through hell and back.”

Kling hopes that other communities will learn from what Paradise has been through and build the support networks they need before a disaster happens.

: Written by: Adia White; Published: 14 September 2019

Kids at Schaefer Elementary write their poems. Credit: Margo Perin.

Third-grade teacher, Tracy Henry, points to an American flag hanging in her classroom at Schaefer Elementary. The flag is melted along the edges, it shows just how hot the classroom got when the Tubbs fire swept through Santa Rosa and miraculously missed the school.

“I have kids telling me still, oh Ms. Henry I lost my stuffed animals that were in the garage and I know that they burned in there and it makes me very sad,” she said. “You know, those little things were people to them.”

Half of Henry’s students lost their homes that year. This year, she has five students in her third-grade class who lost homes. This trauma is impossible to ignore in the classroom. Behavioral problems have spiked since the fires. According to 2018 data from First 5 Sonoma County, 84% of early childhood care providers noted increased aggression, impulsivity, and sadness among children. Henry has noticed this too.

“Last year we started noticing a whole lot of behavioral issues, and everyone was like what is going on, what is going on," she said. And we finally started to realize that the adults have been processing the fires since day one and they’ve been taking care of all of the things that need taken care of. The kids have really put themselves in the back seat. They don’t want to be in the way, they don’t want to bother, they don’t want to take away from the parents who need to do the things they do. But the problem there is they haven’t had the chance to process their own feelings.”

Perin writes instructions for the students on a whiteboard. Credit: Adia White.In addition to literacy, math and other school subjects, trauma recovery has been added to the list of things that Henry has to help her students learn. Thanks to the non-profit, California Poets in the Schools, she has some help. Poet Margo Perin is working with Henry’s third-grade class this year.

“Poetry is a really easy way to express yourself because you don’t have to worry about grammar or punctuation,” she said. “There’s a direct link between what you’re feeling and what you’re thinking and the printed word.”

Perin tells the students to write a poem about advice from an animal. The classroom is silent as the third-graders race to finish their poems. Then Perin tells them to put their pencils down. 8-year-old Delila Stone, who lost her home in the Tubb’s fire, is one of the first to volunteer to read hers aloud. It’s called, Advice from a Llama.

“From now and on, never give up and never be mean,” she reads. “But when some things are tough, be kind and enjoy the sunlight.”

After she finishes, I ask if writing the poem helped her to process what’s she’d been through. When she first started writing, it was sad, she tells me, but then she changed her mind and made sure it had a happy ending. At the end of the class, I ask the classroom teacher, Tracy Henry, how long she thinks it will take for her students to recover.

“When you lose like that, I don’t think it’s ever over, but I think we can heal and what we’re doing to get kids to communicate, I think they’ll be better," she said. “In a way, I think they’ll be stronger better people because they’ll have empathy that others don’t because they know where they’ve been”

This story was produced for the USC Annenberg Health Journalism Fellowship.

: Written by: Adia White; Published: 11 September 2019

At the end of August, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group hosted a forum in Mountain View to celebrate women leaders. In this excerpt from the event, Wendy Okolo, a NASA Aerospace Engineering Researcher and Hannah Gordon, a former journalist and now the Chief Administrative Officer of the San Francisco 49ers, share lessons they’ve had to teach — or learn. Wendy Okolo starts the conversation with a story about being a young, Nigerian-American woman in the workplace.

: Written by: Adia White; Published: 09 September 2019

Supervisor Lynda Hopkins is tired of being asked: “how can you do your job with kids.” She talked about why this question is problematic during a panel discussion about women in leadership at the Paradise Ridge Winery at the end of August. The panel was hosted by the non-profit California Human Development and moderated by Karen Demarest from Community Foundation of Sonoma County. In this excerpt from the panel, Demarest talks with Hopkins about how to overcome sexism in politics.

Lynda Hopkins and Karen Demarest will be joining us for our live TV show Connect the Bay: Erasing the Gap, Conversations with Women Leaders. Watch the show this Sunday at 5 p.m. on KRCB TV Channel 22.

(Photo: Sonoma County Supervisor Lynda Hopkins at the Paradise Ridge Winery. Credit: Steve Mencher)