Hello, I am Tova Fairshot. I am an education and behavioral consultant. I work all throughout Washington State in the Puget Sound area, central and Eastern Washington as well as in California. And specifically, I support staff members and school districts and superintendents to support students that are impacted by trauma, impacted by challenges with their own social, emotional, learning and mental health.

Anytime I am working specifically with parents that feel like their child maybe is not being treated fairly is not being treated with equity in a school system, the first thing I do is I validate the parent. I tell them that what they are feeling is right because it’s what they are feeling in that moment. I talk to them about their kid. I learn about the strength of the kid. What are the interests that the child has? What does the child do at home? What’s their favorite subject when they come home from school? What do they talk about?

This is the very beginning of my process of relationship building with the family, because before anything else, we have to build a relationship and oftentimes within a school system, when a family and school relationship is broken, it’s because the school did not enforce or try to build a relationship to begin with. And so my support is almost like a mediator between the school and the family to make sure that the family feels heard, feels seen, and knows that their child is loved.

If you are a parent and you feel alone in this process of supporting your child and maybe your child has been getting labeled at school, maybe getting in trouble for their behavior. The first thing that I would do is I would talk to the teacher and I would find out what happened beforehand and then what happened afterwards. Because when we look at a child’s behavior, really, what we’re looking at is that all behavior serves a purpose and all behavior is for a reason, it’s for communication.

So when we see a child engage in a behavior that maybe is not expected in a school setting, we want to know the why behind that. Why did the child engage in that behavior?

And so as a parent, that’s the first thing that I would look at is understanding what happened beforehand so that I can support my child to make sure that next time this situation happens, they can have a better response to the situation. So at home for families, it’s really important to validate our children to make sure that whatever our child is feeling in the moment is true because it’s how they’re feeling in the moment. And the best thing that we can do at home for our child if they come home and maybe have had a challenging day at school is to hear them out, to hear what happened and help them practice with them and role play with them.

So that the next time that an incident like this happens because we know at school that happens to make sure that our child has already practiced what to do so that when they get back to school, they’re able to go back into that memory of theirs and support themselves and advocate for themselves in a way that is expected in school.