By Jack Orloff

A world-renowned brain expert specializing in children impacted by trauma had a message for Austin ISD as it looks to address its students’ and teachers’ mental health: "If we want to go far, we have to go slow.”

Dr. Bruce Perry spoke to the events of the last year and the importance of community healing during an Austin Ed Fund Zoom event open to the community Monday. The event was a way to help parents, educators and students begin to start addressing the mental health needs of the school community following the pandemic. 

Perry began the conversation with the Biology of stress in the brain, why stress is potentially positive for a child's learning, and how stress can be a challenge in life. He elaborated on resiliency, explaining that stressful challenges in small doses provide a healthy education for children.

"A healthy educational environment provides an opportunity that is stressful for children, but they are moderate stress that is controllable," he said. "The challenges must be dosed so there is adequate space between the challenges for children to get back into the state of regulation. Resilience-building experience will ultimately help students learn."

Perry said the challenges educational workers have faced would take time to heal socially and emotionally, and districts must move back to normal slowly or face the consequences in the educational system.

"I can guarantee if we push our educators too fast, too soon, we will have people burn out and quit education," he said. "All of our healthcare professionals or mental health professionals and educators are no longer able to demonstrate resilience the same way they could at the beginning of the pandemic and the needs that they will be facing as they come back into the clinics and the classrooms are going to be greater."

Perry stressed healing will take time and could be a two to three year process.

"I am concerned that we don't make the mistake of going too fast, too soon,” he said. “It's going to take a year or two for our educators to get back to their super hero status because of the prolonged stress of this last year, we have all lost our superpowers."

However, Perry said that with small doses of controllable stress, educators will be able to get their “superhero powers” back, and people must be patient.

"We have to be patient with ourselves and with our educators," he said. "With sufficient opportunity for small doses of controllable, predictable challenges, educators will get back to where they were.”

Perry was born in 1955 in Bismarck, North Dakota. He received his Ph.D. at Northwestern University and took residency at Yale University School of Medicine. Perry has worked on national incidents with traumatized children, including the Oklahoma City bombing, the Waco siege, and the Columbine High School shootings.

He is currently a senior fellow of The Child Trauma Academy and a psychiatry and behavioral sciences professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. 

He recently co-wrote the book "What Happened To You?" with Oprah Winfrey. The book focuses on trauma, resilience and healing. 

The Austin Ed Fund hosted the zoom event, which featured an introduction video by the Austin Ed fund praising the importance of social, emotional and mental health. Superintendent Stephanie Elizalde spoke on the importance of mental health and how it is the foundation of academic learning.