Schools Put on Alert to Child Abuse Indications

In its attempts to recognize and prevent child abuse, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Child Abuse Prevention Office resorts to a kind of trickle-down process of education.

The process starts with training a team of teachers and administrators, mostly from the district’s elementary schools. The team, in turn, passes on the expertise to other teachers.

And eventually parents and their children get involved too.

One of a Kind

“As far as we know, it’s the only one of its kind in the country,” said Shayla Lever, the director of the child abuse office who oversaw the development of the training program known as CARE, which stands for Child Abuse--Recognize and Eliminate.

The CARE program started eight years ago on the premise that training and early intervention were essential to preventing child abuse, Lever said.

The program was designed to train staff members how to spot signs indicating possible child abuse and how to take steps to report suspected cases, she said.

Los Angeles schools get involved in the program by selecting several teachers for specialized training in the area of child abuse. The team must include an administrator from the school, usually the principal or an assistant principal.

Team Size Varies

The teams range in size from three to six teachers plus their administrators, depending on the size of the school, Lever said.

Once selected, team members go through an intensive 32-hour training program, held once a week for four weeks. The sessions include training in the identification and characteristics of various types of abuse and neglect, the history of child-rearing methods, domestic violence, child protection strategies and steps required for reporting suspected child abuse.

“It’s a tough four days,” Lever said.

Back in the schools, the team and a member of Lever’s seven-member staff set up eight hours of training sessions for all school staff members. The team also conducts a series of separate workshops for parents and children.

Lever estimated that about 115,000 district students will go through the workshops by the end of the school year in June.

Parents were once reluctant to participate in the workshops because they believed that participation was tantamount to confessing that they abused their children, Lever said.

But that has changed as parents have found that two two-hour sessions provide useful information about how to handle their children without resorting to abusive behavior, she said.

Reporting Crucial

One of the most crucial functions of the team is to report suspected cases of child abuse--cases they know about and those brought to them by other teachers, Lever said.

“Classroom teachers are in the best position to observe the signs and report suspected child abuse because they interact with children daily and get to know them well,” Lever said.

Each of the schools participating in the CARE program average about 18 such reports a year, she said, with about 95% of them turning out to be actual instances of child abuse.

The statistics point to the need for trained teachers who can properly identify which cases are--and which are not--cause for alarm. In times of highly publicized child abuse cases, schools with untrained teachers are sometimes apt to experience sudden upsurges in child abuse reports, many of which prove to be nothing, she said.

Currently, 142 of the district’s 413 elementary schools and one junior high participate in the CARE program, Lever said.