Social-emotional learning (SEL) by definition is a process for learning life skills, including how to deal with oneself, others, and relationships, and work in an effective manner.
Although there are many great SEL programs, SEL can also be incorporated into each lesson as a way of teaching students to understand how to action the skills in a variety of situations and form positive habits. All students start school with some level of social and emotional skills, and all will develop their social and emotional skills at different rates.
Parents and teachers are both responsible for teaching students life skills, and certainly, much of what they learn will be by watching our actions. The five strategies below are will not only benefit students’ social-emotional learning, but can also be beneficial to teachers’ well-being, too.
5 Strategies For Incorporating Social-Emotional Learning Into Your Classroom
1. Through mindfulness
Mindfulness is: paying attention, in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.
We are hearing more and more about the benefits of mindfulness for children. Increased attention leads to better performance academically and increased emotional and social intelligence. Children are better able to learn, nurture themselves, and be aware of their own emotional needs.
Mindfulness practices help students focus on their breath, body, thoughts, feelings, and the world around them. When they can observe their thoughts and feelings, they have the freedom to choose how they will speak and act–which can lead to a happier, more harmonious classroom.
There are many mindfulness activities available for free–on YouTube, for example. Further, there are mindfulness and meditation apps that can provide frameworks for getting started. Why not start each lesson with a different mindfulness activity?
2. Clarify that thoughts lead to feelings
Research shows that students who are more resilient are more academically successful. Resilient students bounce back quicker, are mindful of their thinking, understand their beliefs, and, importantly are able to challenge their beliefs and thoughts to create more positive outcomes.
This is an important concept because we may not always be able to influence what happens to us, but we do have a powerful influence on how we interpret what happens to us and how we deal with it. Many students are unaware that their thoughts play a large role in influencing how they feel.
No matter what happens to you, nobody can take this away from you. It is an empowering lesson to teach whenever you hear a student express frustration, anger, and other negative emotions. As a teacher, you can help by listening for the emotion, then helping your student understand where that emotion came from and how to adjust their thinking in a way that contributes to their social-emotional well-being.
3. Model persistence and determination
A really important aspect of well-being and SEL is the ability to accomplish things in life. Many students naturally strive to better themselves in some way, whether they are seeking to master a skill, achieve a valuable goal, or win in some competitive event.
Other students need some coaching in this area. Teaching students each and every lesson that accomplishes things takes effort, patience, and perseverance are important. Praise for effort is critical in this area of SEL. Each student will need to be encouraged to set stretch goals during lessons to feel a sense of accomplishment.
By being mindful and challenging negative thoughts, students can be encouraged to dig deep to find the determination to succeed.
4. Listen with empathy
Put another way, listen to be surprised.
Part of SEL is an understanding of the importance of positive relationships. To have these relationships, we need to have and teach empathy. Teachers have a wonderful ability to model empathy. Encourage students to listen to others, then ask them to listen to be surprised and understand how other students might be feeling. What opportunities do you have each class to find ways for students to help each other and learn something new about other people’s ideas?
Use the opportunity in class to teach students to ask questions framed to encourage response, not encourage defensiveness. For example, when John says, “Sam, why can’t you just follow the instructions?” encourage John to re-frame his question for a better understanding of what Sam is seeking “Sam, can we work through these instructions together to ensure they make sense?
Once again, research is showing us that a really important aspect of well-being is gratitude. This research indicates those who regularly express gratitude have more energy and enthusiasm, less stress, and better physical well-being. There are some very simple ways to increase your experience and expression of gratitude; however, this may require that we train ourselves to think differently.
For students, this can be done by incorporating some simple exercises into each lesson. At the end of each class, ask students to reflect on the class using these three questions:
– What aspects of this class did you enjoy today?
– Who did you enjoy working with today?
– What areas of this topic would you like to learn more about?
Most importantly, above all have fun in each and every class; learning should be fun and play is a really important part of Social-Emotional Learning!
Almost every day at the public elementary school she attended in Montgomery County, Maryland, Stephanie heard comments about her weight. Kids in her fifth grade class called her “fatty” instead of her name, she recalled; others whispered, “Do you want a cupcake?” as she walked by. One classmate spread a rumor that she had diabetes. Stephanie was so incensed by his teasing that she hit him and got suspended, she said.
But nothing the kids did upset her as much as the conduct of her teachers.
For years teachers ignored her in class, even when she was the only one raising her hand, said Stephanie, whose surname is being withheld to protect her privacy. “I was like, ‘Do you not like me or something?” she recalled.
She felt invisible. “They would sit me in the back. I couldn’t see the board,” she said. When Stephanie spoke up once in middle school, a teacher told her, “I can’t put you anywhere else because you’re going to block other students.” She burned with embarrassment when her classmates laughed.
Nearly 20 percent of children in the U.S. — almost 15 million kids — were considered obese as of the 2020 school year, a number that has likely increased since the pandemic (new data is expected next year). The medical conditions associated with obesity, such as asthma, diabetes and sleep apnea, are well known. Children with obesity are also more likely to have depression, anxiety and low self-esteem.
Researchers have suggested different reasons for this “obesity achievement gap,” including biological causes (such as reduced cortical thickness in the brain in children with obesity, which is linked to compromised executive functioning, and higher levels of the hormone cortisol, linked to poorer academic performance). Researchers have also examined indirect causes of poor performance, such as that kids with obesity might miss school more often because of medical appointments or bullying.
But a relatively new area of research has shifted attention to educator bias. Studies have found that teachers often perceive children with obesity as emotional, unmotivated, less competent and non-compliant. That can lead to teachers giving these students fewer opportunities to participate in class, less positive feedback and lower grades.
Weight bias is part of American culture, said Rebecca Puhl,deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut, who has studied childhood obesity and bias. “Teachers are not immune to those attitudes,” she said. While many school districts have tried in the last 20 years to reduce childhood obesity through more nutritious meals and increased exercise, Puhl and other experts say schools also need to train teachers and students to recognize and confront the weight bias they say is hampering the education of an increasing number of children.
Some advocates argue that childhood obesity, which has steadily risen over the last 40 years, should be seen as an “academic risk factor” because of its lasting effects on educational and economic mobility. “There’s certainly been a big push for racial and ethnic diversity, for gender identity diversity, that’s so important,” said Puhl. “But weight is often left off the radar, it’s often not getting addressed.”
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Stephanie, now 18, has struggled with obesity her whole life. Within her family, being overweight never felt like a problem. But school was different.
Beginning in kindergarten, her classmates told her she looked like a Teletubby, she said. Even teachers made comments related to her weight. “If someone brought pastries for a birthday, they would ask, ‘Are you sure you want to eat that? Why don’t you try carrots and hummus?’” Stephanie recalled. Once Stephanie listened as an educator told her mother to put her on a diet. She stopped eating lunch at school after that. “When I was home, I ran to food because it was like the only place I would feel comfortable eating,” she said.
There were a handful of occasions teachers noticed her for something besides her weight. Stephanie smiled as she recalled a time when an English teacher praised an essay she wrote; when she won second place prize in a coding camp; when she was named ‘cadet of the year’ in JROTC during remote school during the pandemic. In elementary school, she received the President’s Award for Educational Achievement, designed to reward students who work hard, often in the face of obstacles to learning.
Stephanie, 18, holds an old photo of her taken in the sixth grade. Credit: Moriah Ratner for The Hechinger Report
It wasn’t enough to make her feel like she had educators on her side. “In school, they want you to confide in teachers, they made us believe that we can go to teachers for anything,” she said. “If you have no friends or if there’s no one to trust — you can always find a teacher who you can feel safe with, you can always trust them. So, I would try, but they always pushed me away.”
One interaction in particular shattered her confidence. Toward the end of seventh grade, Stephanie stayed to ask a question after class. Her teacher asked if she was a new student. “‘How did you not notice I was in your class and the entire year I turned in work?” Stephanie wondered. “That’s when I started to feel like I’m a shadow.” From that point on she stopped caring about getting good grades.
Liliana López, a spokesperson for Montgomery County Public Schools, said that teachers are not “expressly trained on weight bias,” but they “elevate all the identities individuals hold as valuable and we work with staff to identify ways they can create spaces full of affirmation, validation and significance for those identities.” Celeste Fernandez, spokesperson for the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, said her organization does not offer specific training or information on weight bias.
Researchers are increasingly identifying links between poor outcomes for students with obesity and teacher’s attitudes toward kids. In 2015, Erica Kenney, an associate professor of public health nutrition at Harvard University, helped lead a team that analyzed data from a representative sample of children from across the nation. The researchers examined, among other things, whether the kids’ weight gain influenced teachers’ perceptions of their abilities and their standardized test scores.
Gaining weight didn’t change a child’s test scores, the researchers found, but, based on surveys, it was significantly linked to teachers having lower perceptions of students’ ability, for both girls and boys. In other words, kids who gained weight faced a small but significant“academic penalty” from their teachers, Kenney said.
A separate study, involving 130 teachers, found that educators were more likely to give lower grades to essays if they believed a child who was obese had written them. For the study, Kristin Finn, a professor in the school of education at Canisius University, in Buffalo, New York, took four essays written at a sixth grade level and paired them with stock photographs of students who looked similar but some had been digitally altered to appear overweight. The overweight students received moderately lower scores.
As an elementary schooler, Stephanie heard comments about her weight almost every day. Credit: Moriah Ratner for The Hechinger Report
Finn found that the teachers were more likely to view the students with obesity as academically inferior, “messy” and more likely to need tutoring. In surveys, teachers also predicted that students with obesity weren’t good in other subjects such as math and social studies.
“To be able to make a judgment about somebody’s mathematical abilities based on a short essay seemed pretty remarkable,” said Finn. Yet, teachers maintained that they were personally unbiased in their evaluations. “They all think that they’re treating these children fairly,” she said.
Teachers’ perceptions of children’s academic potential matters: Their recommendations can affect not only students’ grades, but also their access to higher level courses, competitive programs, specialized camps and post-secondary opportunities including college.
Girls are at particular risk of being stigmatized for being obese, research has found. In one study, nearly a third of women who were overweight said they had had a teacher who was biased against them because of their weight. Students who face other barriers including poverty are also more likely to be penalized for being overweight, what is called a “double disadvantage.”
Covid, which hit during the spring of Stephanie’s eighth grade year, was a welcome interruption. She loved learning in the privacy of her home and not being “judged for my body,” she said.
When schools reopened in the fall of 10th grade, Stephanie couldn’t bear the thought of returning. She had gained weight during remote learning, some 100 pounds. Citing her asthma and her father’s diabetes, she applied for a waiver that would permit her to attend classes virtually. But “the real reason was because I was ashamed of what I look like,” she said.
She received the waiver and continued her high school studies at home.
After a 2022 diagnosis of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, which had made her body resistant to insulin, Stephanie decided to undergo bariatric surgery. Following the operation, Stephanie lost more than half her body weight. When she returned to her high school to take exams, people were suddenly nice to her, she said. It frustrated her, she said: “I’m the same person.”
Negative perceptions of people with obesity start early. In one study, children as young as 3 who were shown drawings of people of varying weights perceived the obese people as “mean” more often than “nice.” In another study, when 5- and 6-year-olds were shown images of children of different body sizes, most said they did not want to invite the heavier children to their birthday party.
Experts argue that administrators and teachers must become more sensitive to and knowledgeable about the challenges facing children with obesity. Yolandra Hancock, a pediatrician who specializes in patients with obesity and a former teacher, said she frequently intervenes with educators on behalf of her patients with obesity. One 7-year-old boy was often late to class because he found it difficult to climb the three flights of stairs to get there.
“The assistant principal actually told him if he wasn’t so fat, he would be able to get up the stairs faster,” Hancock said. She explained that the student wasn’t walking slowly because of “laziness” but because obesity can cause a bowing of the leg bones, making it hard to navigate steps. Giving the student more time between classes or arranging for his classes to be on the same floor would have been simple fixes, she said.
In another case, an elementary school student with obesity was getting into trouble for requesting frequent bathroom breaks, a result of his large abdomen putting pressure on his bladder, similar to what happens during pregnancy. “He came close to having an accident,” Hancock said. “His teachers wouldn’t allow him to go to the restroom and would call his mother to complain that he wasn’t focusing.” She wrote to the school requesting that he be allowed to go to the restroom whenever he needed. “If you don’t allow them to do what it is that their body needs,” Hancock said, “you’re creating more barriers to them being able to learn.”
Research has found that teachers can play an important “buffering role” in reducing bullying for children with obesity. In one study, children who believed educators would step in to prevent future bullying did better in school than those who didn’t share this conviction.
But often teachers don’t intervene, said Puhl, the University of Connecticut researcher, because they believe that if students “want the teasing to stop, they need to lose weight.” Yet “body weight is not a simple issue of eating less and exercising more,” she added, but is instead a highly complex condition influenced by genetics, hormones, culture, environment and economics.Bullying and mistreatment don’t motivate people to lose weight, Puhl said, but often contribute to binge eating, reduced physical activity and weight gain.
One way to help, would be for schools to include body weight in their anti-bullying policies, Puhl said. At present, most schools’ anti-bullying policies protect children on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender identity, disability and religious beliefs, “but very few mention body weight.” That lack is really shocking, she added, “because body weight is one of the most prevalent reasons that kids are bullied today.”
This spring, Stephanie went back to school to attend her graduation ceremony and receive her diploma. She still struggles with body image but is determined to put her negative experiences behind her and start fresh in college this fall, she says.
She plans to study psychology. “I want to understand people better, because I didn’t feel heard and there were a lot of things I didn’t speak about,” she said. “I just want to help people.”
This story about childhood obesity awareness was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
SPOKANE, Wash. — Before giving birth to her daughter, Kaleeya Baldwin, 19, had given up on education.
She’d dropped out of school as a seventh grader, after behavior problems had banished her to alternative schools. Growing up in foster homes and later landing in juvenile court had convinced her to disappear from every system that claimed responsibility for her.
“I was just really angry with everything,” said Kaleeya.
But in early 2020, during what would have been her freshman year in high school, Kaleeya discovered she was pregnant. At her first ultrasound appointment, a nurse handed her a stack of pamphlets. One, advertising a new school for pregnant and parenting teens, caught her attention.
“Something switched when Akylah got here,” Kaleeya said, referring to her daughter. “I was a whole different person. Now it’s high school that matters. It’s a legacy — and it’s hope for her.”
Kaleeya Baldwin, 19, holds her daughter,3-and-a-half-year-old Aklyah.
Four years ago, and two months pregnant, Kaleeya enrolled as one of the first students at Lumen High School. The Spokane charter school — its name, which means a unit of light, was selected by young parents who wished someone had shone a light on education for them — today enrolls about five dozen expectant and parenting teens, including fathers. Inside a three-story office building in the city’s downtown business core, Lumen provides full-day child care, baby supplies, mental health counseling and other support as students work toward graduation based on customized education plans.
When the Spokane school district authorized the charter school, it acknowledged that these students had been underserved in traditional high schools and that alternatives were needed. Nationwide, only about half of teen mothers receive a high school degree by the age of 22. Researchers say common school policies like strict attendance rules and dress codes often contribute to young parents deciding to drop out. In April, the U.S. Department of Education issued new regulations to strengthen protections for pregnant and parenting students, though it’s unclear whether the revisions, which also include protections for LGBTQ+ youth, will survive legal challenges.
Lumen High School enrolls about five dozen pregnant and parenting teens, including fathers, at its downtown Spokane campus. Executive assistant Lindsay Ainley works the front desk. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Solutions for these young parents have become even more urgent after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling overturning the constitutional right to an abortion. Lumen is located about 20 miles from the Idaho border, which has one of the country’s strictest abortion bans. Recently, representatives from a network of charter schools in the state toured Lumen to evaluate whether they might bring a similar program to the Boise area. Researchers have also visited the school to study how educators elsewhere might replicate its supportive services, not only for pregnant students, but those facing crises like substance use.
“There are some bright spots. Lumen is one,” said Jeannette Pai-Espinosa, president of the Justice + Joy National Collaborative, which advocates for young women, including teen mothers, referring to support in K-12 schools for pregnant and parenting teens. “By and large it’s just not really a priority on the list of many, many things schools are challenged with and facing now.”
Nationally, teenage birth rates have fallen for the past three decades, reaching an all-time low in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That same year, the decline in teen births skidded to a halt in Texas, one year after the state’s Republican lawmakers had enacted a six-week abortion ban. Experts fear Texas’ change in direction could foreshadow a national uptick in teen pregnancy now that adolescents face more hurdles to abortion access in red states.
Decades of research have revealed the long-term effects of adolescent pregnancy and childbearing: The CDC reports children of teen mothers tend to have lower performance in school and higher chances of dropping out of high school. They’re more likely to have health problems and give birth as teenagers themselves.
Shauna Edwards witnessed such outcomes as part of her work with pregnant and parenting teens for a religious nonprofit and in high schools along the Idaho-Washington border. She also learned the limits of trying to shoehorn services for those students into a school’s existing budget. At one campus, where Edwards helped as a counselor, she said the principal assigned just one teacher for all subjects and two classroom aides to handle child care for the babies of 60 students.
Principal Melissa Pettey, center right, meets with Lumen High School support staff to discuss current student needs. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Frustrated, she tried to convince the superintendent of another school district to offer a similar teen parent program, but with more funding. He couldn’t justify the costs, Edwards said. Instead, he suggested she open her own school.
“I could serve all of Spokane, ideally, and wouldn’t have the risk of getting shut down by a school district trying to balance its budget,” said Edwards, executive director for Lumen.
Every morning, students from across Spokane County — at 1,800 square miles, it’s a bit larger than Rhode Island — trek to the Lumen campus downtown. Many take public transit, which is free for youth under 18, and end their rides at a regional bus hub across the street from the school. Once their children reach six months, Lumen students can drop them off at an on-site child care and preschool center, operated by a nonprofit partner, before heading upstairs to start their day. Before then, parents can bring their babies to class.
The baby boutique at Lumen High School includes shelves stacked with baby formula, diapers, milk bottles, nasal sprays and other donated supplies.
Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Lumen High School stocks its on-site baby boutique with clothing and personal hygiene products for students and their children. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Funding for small schools in Washington state helps Lumen afford a full teaching staff — one adult each for English, history, math, science and special education. The charter also has a full-time principal, social worker and counselor. Other adults manage student internships or donations to the school’s food bank and “baby boutique,” where students can “shop” for a stroller, formula, diapers and clothes — all free of charge.
It’s common to see an infant cradled in a teacher’s arm, allowing students to focus on their classwork. On a recent afternoon, two couples traded cradling duties with their newborns during a parenting class on lactation.
“Delivering is something that happens to you. Not so with nursing. You have to do it,” said Megan Macy, a guest teacher, who introduced herself as “the official milk lady.”
Megan Macy, a guest teacher and lactation expert, leads a parenting class that students at Lumen High School attend every afternoon. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Kaleeya shared a bit about her daughter Akylah’s delivery: “I was so depleted. I was her chew toy, her crying shoulder, her feeding bag. Once we got home, she wouldn’t latch at all.”
Her friend Keelah, 17, rocked her newborn in a car seat. (The Hechinger Report is identifying the parents who are minors by first name only to protect their privacy.) “It’s hard, and it’s scary,” she said of the first week home with the baby. “She lost a pound between the hospital and pediatrician.”
Lumen contracts with the Shades of Motherhood Network, a Spokane-based nonprofit founded to support Black mothers, to run the parenting classes. The school reserves space for health officials to meet with mothers and babies for routine checkups and government food programs. And founding principal Melissa Pettey has pushed — and paid for — teachers to make home visits with each student.
For each student, Lumen staff develops an individual graduation plan based on earned and missing credits from previous high schools. The school uses an instructional approach, called mastery-based learning, that allows students to earn credits based on competency in academic skills, often applied in projects. The parenting class, for example, counts as a credit for career and technical education, depending on how the contracted teachers evaluate each student.
Parenting classes at Lumen High School include lessons on lactation. The classes count as a career and technical education credit. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
The learn-as-you-go approach also allows Lumen to work around the instability in the lives of their students, who are often coping with children’s illnesses, day care challenges, housing insecurity and other issues.
But the chaos in a young parent’s life can look like inconsistent attendance or even truancy on state accountability reports. Just a tenth of Lumen students attend school regularly, which the state defines as missing no more than two days of class each month.
Next year, the Spokane school district will review Lumen’s operations and performance to decide whether to renew the school’s charter. State data shows less than a fifth of Lumen’s students graduate on time, while a third dropped out. The state doesn’t publicly report testing data from Lumen, due to its size. But Edwards and Pettey said proficiency on state exams isn’t their main goal.
“One student attended 16 elementary schools. Six high schools before junior year,” Pettey said. “Think of the learning missed. How do we get that student to an 11th grade level?”
Payton, a senior, researches historical conflict around gold for her semester-long project with Trevor Bradley, history teacher at Lumen High School. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Added Edwards: “If you can grow them to read baby books to their kids, that’s a success.”
Lumen’s authorizer, Spokane Public Schools, will modify how it evaluates the charter’s performance to take its nontraditional students into account, according to Kristin Whiteaker, who oversees charter schools for the district.
She noted that about a third of Lumen’s incoming high schoolers test at an elementary level; another third test at middle school levels. But during the 2022-23 school year, 52 percent of students posted growth in math while at Lumen, and nearly two-thirds performed better on English language arts exams, according to the school. All of the students who make it to graduation have been accepted into college; 95 percent actually enrolled or started working six months after graduation.
“They’re serving such a unique population,” Whiteaker said. “If you can provide a pathway for students to the next stage of their lives, that’s accomplishing their goals.”
Lumen High School partners with GLOW Children to provide on-site child care for students on the first floor of the charter school’s three-story campus. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Lumen, she added, removes many of the barriers that pregnant and parenting teens face at Spokane’s traditional high schools. Some struggle to complete make-up work after missing weeks or months of classes for parental leave. Most have no access to child care, and regular schools don’t allow babies in the classroom.
Ideally, some experts say, expecting and parenting teens could remain in their original schools and receive these supports. That’s rarely the case, though, and the social stigma alone can keep young parents from finishing their education.
At the national level, a 2010 law that provided funding to help these students expired in 2019. Jessica Harding and Susan Zief, with the research firm Mathematica, studied the effectiveness of those federally-funded programs and found that successful ones work hard to provide flexibility, for excused absences or adding maternity clothes to dress codes. Others get creative, helping students navigate public transportation and modify their work schedules to meet with students after hours.
“Sometimes,” Harding said, “the solutions are not complicated.”
In 2022, when the Supreme Court upended abortion care nationwide, Edwards expected students without reproductive choice in Idaho to attempt to enroll in Lumen. A handful have inquired with the school, said Edwards, but to enroll they would have to move across the state border to Washington where housing costs are significantly higher.
In fact, Lumen recently lost one student whose father found a cheaper home in Idaho. Average rents across Spokane County have risen more than 50 percent over the past five years. And as of March, about half of Lumen students qualified as homeless. One young mother slept outside during winter break while her newborn stayed with a friend. Three students, asked what they would change about Lumen, cited affordable housing or temporary shelter that could help them.
Across Washington, pregnant and parenting teens account for 12 percent of all unaccompanied youth in the homeless system. But the state has a severe shortage of shelter beds available for youth under 18, with even fewer supportive housing options that allow young families to stay together, according to a February 2024 state report. Edwards, meanwhile, has talked with developers to see if they could reserve affordable units for students or loosen rules that prevent minors from signing a lease.
Rene, a senior at Lumen High School, holds his newborn son, RJ, during class. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
“We missed a whole month of class. It was a long month,” said Mena, a 17-year-old junior who convinced her boyfriend, Rene, to enroll before their son’s delivery, in January.
Rene Jr., or RJ, had already lived with the couple in several homes during his first few months. A restraining order with one set of RJ’s grandparents and guardianship battle with the other pushed Mena and Rene to couch-surf with friends.
“School was the only way we could see each other,” Rene said. “I’m surprised, honestly, they can get me to graduation,” he added, while burping RJ. “He’s going to have a future.”
Later, as Mena suctioned RJ’s stuffy nose in another classroom, Rene struggled to stay awake in math. He had forgotten what he’d learned in some earlier lessons on graphing linear equations, and retreated into social media on his phone. Another student badgered him to “put in some effort,” but Rene resisted.
His teacher, Trevor Bradley, intervened. “What’s special about today? Why don’t you want to try?” he said. “You told me you’re tired because the baby’s keeping you up at night.”
After drawing another set of equations on the whiteboard, Bradley asked Rene and the other student for help with finding the values of x and y. Rene barely whispered his answer.
“That’s it! You do remember,” Bradley said, as Rene yawned.
From the start, Lumen’s founders planned to include fathers in the school. Pai-Espinosa, with the National Collaborative, said it’s unusual for K-12 systems to focus on fathers, since mothers often have custodial rights. And at Lumen, the inclusion of “baby daddies” — as students and staff refer to them — sometimes adds teen drama to the mix of emotions and hormones already present at the school.
Lumen High School’s founder and executive director Shauna Edwards, right, meets with social worker Tracie Fowler. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Lumen’s lack of diversity among adults there has also bothered some students, including Kaleeya. Only 40 percent of her peers identify as white, and all of the school’s teachers and administrators are white. Edwards said it has been difficult to recruit a diverse staff. As a temporary solution the school contracted with the Shades of Motherhood Network for parenting classes.
“It’s hard being in a white space with no Black teachers,” Kaleeya said.
Still, she said she liked the school’s emphasis on engaging students in semester-long projects in different subjects and on real-world problems. Last year, confronted with drug-use problems near the downtown campus, students researched and presented options for the city to consider on safe needle disposal in public places. Each student’s individual graduation plan also includes an internship.
Payton, 17, has wanted to be a school counselor since before giving birth to her daughter in late 2022. Her internship at nearby Sacajawea Middle School convinced her to stay on that career path. Another mother, Alana, started an internship this spring with a local credit union and plans to use the marketing experience to help her advocate for children with disabilities in the future.
Kaleeya Baldwin and her daughter, Akylah, walk home after school. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Kaleeya recently turned her internship, with a downtown restaurant, into a part-time job. She planned to save for college, but no longer needs to. Gonzaga University notified her in March of a full-ride scholarship to study there this fall.
“Lumen didn’t change who I was,” Kaleeya said. “I did this for my daughter. I didn’t want to be that low-income family. So I got my ass up, got into this school and I got an education.”
This story about teen parents was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Every night before going to bed, Antonio would tuck in his three younger siblings. After school, he’d tinker with toy cars, or help his dad, a mechanic, fix things around the house.
“He’s quiet, but he’s caring in his own way,” said his mother, Yanelie Marquez. The Hechinger Report is using her son’s middle name to protect his privacy.
But four years ago, the then-12-year-old Antonio suddenly lost interest in everything and everyone. It started with school: He complained he couldn’t focus or understand the teacher’s instructions. “I’d open up his notebooks and they were completely empty,” Marquez said.
Then Antonio’s behavior began to change, too: He stopped showering and coming downstairs for dinner. Eventually, he refused to leave his room. And whenever Marquez would ask about his day, he would throw a tantrum.
“He’d say, ‘None of the teachers like me, I hate it,’ and then he’d take that anger out on himself,” she said.
Worried that Antonio was struggling with depression, his mother enrolled him in therapy at Yale Child Study Center in New Haven, Connecticut.
The children’s library at the Yale Child Study Center in New Haven, Connecticut. The center houses the first medical-legal partnership focused on children’s behavioral health. Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report
After ruling out stressors in Antonio’s family environment, the Yale team learned more about the challenges he was facing at school, including severe learning difficulties in the classroom and bullies outside of school. And though the clinicians did everything they could do to help address those behavioral health stressors on their own, they realized they needed another team member to help: a lawyer.
This teamwork comes through Yale Child Study Center’s Medical-Legal Partnership — a collaboration in which health and law professionals team up to address patients’ “health-harming legal needs” from food and housing to public benefits and school supports. Their unique partnership functions as a kind of legal prescription. To treat a child’s behavioral health symptoms, clinicians and lawyers target the root cause, which can sometimes be a school environment where the child’s legally enshrined academic and emotional needs aren’t being met.
Though the concept of medical-legal partnerships has existed since the 1990s, the Yale partnership, launched in November 2020, is the first in the nation focused exclusively on children’s behavioral health. Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services invested $1.6 million in the first federally funded demonstration program for medical-legal partnerships, including one at Yale, focused in primary health care.
Kathryn Meyer, left, attorney at the Center for Children’s Advocacy, and Christiana Mills, are part of the Yale Child Student Center in New Haven, Connecticut. Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report
“When families come in, they tell us about struggles that might be adding stress and impacting their functioning, which could result in anxiety or depression,” said Christy Mills, a licensed clinical social worker and an associate clinical director at the Yale center. Especially since COVID, she says those struggles have increasingly included “school climate issues,” like a student’s experience of bullying and classroom challenges, both of which could lead to school avoidance.
The post-COVID data shows that New Haven is far from alone. One study quoted in a White House report found that the number of chronically absent public school students nearly doubled, from around 15 percent in the 2018-19 school year to around 30 percent in 2021-22.
Another survey focused on students with disabilities experiencing “school refusal” — a behavioral pattern describing problems with attending or staying at school — revealed 57 percent of these students had no symptoms prior to the pandemic. And for students who do attend school, their behavior struggles have increased, too; a national report of public schools in 2021-22 found more than 80 percent agreed that the pandemic negatively affected their students’ socioemotional and behavioral development. A recent study found that depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts in teen girls has reached record highs, and that the number of mental health hospitalizations for children more than doubled between 2016 and 2022.
And teachers want more support, too. A recent survey of U.S. teachers found that 9 in 10 reported they need more resources to care for their students’ mental health.
Kathryn Meyer, an attorney at the Center for Children’s Advocacy at the Yale Child Study Center, said much of her role is explaining to families the legal options that exist to help them. Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report
“Educators are doing the very best they can, but most of the time, in advocating for our low-income families, the issue cited is due to school district resources,” said Kathryn Meyer, an attorney at the Center for Children’s Advocacy, the legal partner of the Yale center.
That’s where the medical-legal team can help, by letting the school know how a child’s experience is affecting their behavior — and to connect the child’s needs to their legal rights, Meyer said. “Sometimes we’re just trying to get the student an [individualized education program], and then, if we have the IEP, we’re trying to increase the service, or make sure that whatever is on the IEP is actually happening,” she said.
In Antonio’s case, after joining Marquez at school meetings, the medical-legal team pushed for the school to conduct another IEP evaluation, which revealed a key part of his story: Though an earlier evaluation diagnosed Antonio with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, the second evaluation found he had an intellectual disability as well. And once the team made the legal case that the current school couldn’t address the services his IEP mandated, Antonio was placed in a school that could.
“In moving him, our goal was to have his academic needs addressed, emotional support to keep him safe, and a smaller structure so people could really have the time to work with him,” Meyer explained.
Sure enough, that worked. According to his mother, the new school didn’t just help Antonio improve in the classroom; it improved his behavioral health, too. “Being in a place that understood him for his differences relieved a lot of his pressure and stress,” said Mills, the Yale center associate clinical director.
Antonio now spends his days outside of his room, riding bikes with his new friends, or hanging out with his new girlfriend, whom he just took to prom.
“Finally, it’s like, he’s free,” his mother said. “That was the Antonio I wanted to see all these years.”
As word of the medical-legal partnership model spreads in Connecticut, educators are taking note, too. “As a former Bridgeport public school superintendent, I know just how valuable educational advocates can be for our families,” said Fran Rabinowitz, the executive director of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents. “Despite districts doing our best with the limited resources we have, it’s important that we continue to elevate the voice of families, and advocacy can provide a vehicle for that voice.”
Dr. Barry Zuckerman, who created the first medical-legal partnership in Boston more than 30 years ago, saw the need for family advocacy first hand during his childhood, in the 1950s. He grew up with a younger brother with “significant disabilities.” But 60 years ago, Barry says, there were virtually no laws, resources or community services that could support him. His brother was eventually placed in an institution.
“Imagine a parent sending away their 8-year-old who’s never been on his own,” Zuckerman said. “It was extraordinarily traumatic for all of us.”
By the 1970s, the United States passed laws requiring schools to identify and evaluate students with disabilities, and provide them with “free, appropriate public education” tailored to their needs through individualized education programs. But Zuckerman, by then a pediatrician, realized that vulnerable families also needed support to enforce these protective laws.
In 1993, he discovered that need on the job, at Boston Medical Center, through a group of asthmatic patients. When the patients kept returning to the hospital with no improvement, Dr. Zuckerman learned that all of their homes had mold, which can trigger asthma attacks. The landlords didn’t respond to the families or to Dr. Zuckerman when they asked for mold remediation. But they did remove the mold after a lawyer friend of Dr. Zuckerman’s called.
A woman enters a building housing the offices of the Yale Child Study Center. Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report
That case would become the first of many medical-legal partnership success stories, in a model that’s expanded to over 450 health care organizations around the nation. One randomized trial found that families referred to legal support through the partnership had fewer emergency room visits six months later. Another found that patients given legal interventions had less asthma symptom severity and took fewer medications. A more recent study of a hospital in Cincinnati found that the medical-legal partnership reduced all-cause hospitalizations of children by 38 percent over five years.
Most evidence around medical-legal partnerships comes from models in primary health care. But those models have demonstrated behavioral health benefits, too. “When parents have concerns about their children’s mental health, the first place they turn is their pediatrician,” said Josh Greenberg, one of the founding medical-legal partnership lawyers in Boston.
One of Greenberg’s earliest success stories came while shadowing a 7-year-old boy during a well checkup. He learned that the boy had been out of school for six months, suspended after pushing his teacher. “The school just sent the child home and then never followed up, and never offered anything in the way of their legal rights around expulsions,” he said.
By “prescribing” legal support the same way they prescribe other kinds of medicine, health workers can see the benefits in their patients just the same. “When you have a life that’s full of stress, you can only do a few things as a doctor, but the lawyer was helping them achieve something they needed,” Dr. Zuckerman said. It also helps to level the playing field. Before, “if a child wasn’t getting their developmental needs met, many schools would blow them off, and well-to-do people got their own lawyers,” he said.
But even with the new federal funding and nationwide expansion, the number of patients who need legal support far outnumbers the supply of lawyers who can provide it, Greenberg cautioned.
That’s one reason why legal professionals are also spreading their knowledge through training and educational resources, and are reserving formal representation for extreme cases. Through the Yale partnership, for instance, of 120 patient referrals made in the program’s first year, just 20 cases went to full representation.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services invested $1.6 million in 2023 for a medical-legal partnership demonstration program.
Instead, most of the Yale legal team’s work is focused on educating clinicians, psychiatrists, social workers and families about legal options that exist for children, and that they can access on their own. “Sometimes it’s just like, ‘Go to this place,’ or ‘Call this hotline’ — it’s really as simple as that,” Meyer said.
Through those trainings, clinicians can ask the legal professionals questions, too. “Sometimes we need help knowing, is this a fair legal ask? Does a family or child actually have a right to this expectation, or do we need to think about this in a different lens?” said Mills, the Yale associate clinical director.
Outside of the formal medical-legal partnership model, other organizations, like the Council for Parent Attorneys and Advocates — a national nonprofit working to protect the legal and civil rights of students with disabilities — have been similarly addressing families about their options. Selene Almazan, their legal director, said that these kinds of trainings can help prevent behavioral health struggles before they develop, especially when a student has more than one disability.
“The more information you have, the more that you know how to take care of yourself and advocate for yourself in a school setting,” Almazan said.
In her organization’s work, training parents and students on their rights has been “transformative” for students’ mental health and self-esteem. And in cases where students would otherwise be punished, Almazan says, the advocacy can completely change the trajectory of a child’s health and life.
“When kids are traumatized by exclusionary discipline or restraint and seclusion in schools, that can cause them to act out and can exacerbate any kind of mental health issues that they may already have,” she said. “Getting students what they need in school can break a pattern of family trauma and generational trauma and prevent the school-to-prison pipeline.”
This story about medical-legal partnerships was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
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contributed by Beth Rush, Managing Edition at Body + Mind
The image of your 5-year-old sitting serenely on a yoga mat might calm your mind if you’re a harried parent, but does meditation benefit this age group?
What can teachers and parents expect, and how can schools reap the perks of teaching this practice at an early age?
Multiple studies confirm the power of meditation to help people cope with daily stressors and even affect physical disease progression. Does it work for all age groups? Is teaching children this healing practice without risks, and if they exist, do the benefits outweigh them, and can people overcome them?
Every teacher knows that behavioral issues interfere with education. You can’t teach anything, no matter how fascinating or important, if the pupils you hope to instruct are running around the classroom, engaging in bullying behaviors, or wallowing in anxiety or stress—anything but mindfully tuning into the lesson.
Teaching children to meditate when young can transform a classroom. It cultivates self-awareness and emotional intelligence in children. Best of all, it does so in a safe and nonpunishing manner. No adult sternly delivers lectures — meditation allows space for realization to arise from the inside.
Children can explore how their behaviors impact others and themselves when freed from the need to react defensively. They come to see how their actions create unintended consequences. Meditation allows space for mentally working through how they can do things differently. It does so while easing the tension and biological storm children experience as acutely as adults, even if they don’t understand their ‘big feelings.’
The Benefits of Teaching Meditation in Schools
Existing research and experts largely agree that teaching meditation to children delivers the following benefits.
1. Stress Reduction
Children can get every bit as stressed as adults. They’re also very perceptive and can overhear snippets of adult conversation that spur panic — and their fears aren’t always unjustified. For example, it may be true that the family could lose their home if a parent misses more work. Imagine the sheer terror a 5-year-old feels upon hearing their parents arguing about such matters late at night.
Worse, parents in stressful situations often lack the emotional energy to guide their children through managing these feelings — they’re juggling a triage situation. Kids arrive at school in a panicked state, unable to focus. However, according to Christine Carrig, M.S.Ed, Founding Director of Carrig Montessori School, teaching children to meditate on a simple mantra calms their minds and bodies, reducing stress levels. Doing so allows them to learn.
Erika Sandstrom, a Digital Learning Coach and Digital Media Teacher in Massachusetts, says, “In my experience, having students create their personalized breathing bubbles in Canva has been a game-changer. Adding a personalized touch to mindfulness practices enhances engagement and ownership. Its straightforward integration provides a seamless way to infuse moments of stress with opportunities for self-regulation.”
2. Improved Focus and Concentration
According to a research study conducted in 2021 at Asia University, meditation improves elementary school students’ ability to concentrate on subject matter for longer periods.
Researchers measured participants across five measures of attention:
Focused attention or the ability to continue prolonged activity
Selective attention or maintaining attention despite distractions
Alternating attention or switching between activities
Divided attention or multitasking
Tests confirmed improved attention in students who meditated for 10 to 15 minutes daily for 12 weeks, particularly in focused and selective attention. Over 50% of study participants reported focusing better in school, 29.1 improved their sleep ability, and a few mentioned stress reduction and decreased physical pain.
3. Emotional Regulation
Emotional regulation refers to a child’s ability to control their feelings. They can recognize their emotions and manage them appropriately so that they don’t cause unnecessary harm to others or interfere with the learning process.
“Meditation teaches children to be aware of their emotions without being overwhelmed. This can help them navigate and regulate emotions more effectively, improving emotional intelligence,” says Kim Feeney, LISW, a Play Therapist at Butterfly Beginnings Counseling.
4. Enhanced Self-Awareness
Self-awareness entails understanding how others perceive you and how your actions affect others. Children with poor self-awareness often misbehave, not out of a deliberate intent to be cruel or mischievous but because they don’t understand how their behaviors impact the classroom environment or why they should care.
5. Increased Empathy and Compassion
Meditation creates space for children to recognize that everyone else experiences the same emotions. Understanding the shared nature of the human experience drives home the meaning of the Golden Rule — children grasp why they should treat others as they want to be treated.
6. Improved Behavior and Self-Control
Children often behave impulsively. According to Carrig, meditation promotes impulse control by teaching children to respond thoughtfully to challenging situations instead of mindlessly reacting.
Meditation also improves sleep, which is crucial for a child’s physical and neurological development. It also teaches kids a healthy coping mechanism they can use throughout life to manage stressful situations and stay centered amid challenging circumstances.
Are There Any Negatives to Teaching Children to Meditate?
While meditation has impressive benefits for children, there are potential downsides that parents, teachers and schools should remain mindful of when implementing such practices.
Meditation and Developing Emotional Awareness: the Risk of Retraumatization
A significant risk of simply telling children ‘go meditate’ is that it can feel a lot like invalidation, dismissiveness or being asked to stuff feelings down without honoring what they are and what they mean. When not properly taught, meditation can feel like a “time out,” potentially retraumatizing a child, especially if lessons like “children should be seen and not heard” are frequently reinforced at home with physical or verbal abuse.
Remember, children aren’t born understanding their feelings. Therefore, schools should pair emotional education with meditation training. They must convey several things:
Emotions are a natural part of being human, and simply having them isn’t wrong or bad.
Your feelings are a part of you, but they are not you any more than your left leg or right eye is you.
How you choose to express and act on your feelings matters.
You ultimately control how you express and act on your emotions, and meditation is a tool to help you decide how to do so best.
You can sit quietly with your feelings without reacting to them.
While some experts question whether the school is responsible for teaching emotional regulation skills, little learning occurs without them. Therefore, it’s worthwhile to take classroom time to teach about emotions and how to manage them. This could be especially crucial to children who are neurodivergent and already struggle with normal human interaction, who might otherwise lack proper role models to teach them how to get along with others.
Religious Objections and Secular Use
Meditation is integral to many Eastern religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Some parents object to meditation in schools because of this association, and out of concern, the practice may conflict with their religious beliefs.
However, meditation can be entirely secular. Jon Kabat-Zinn pioneered the Western advance into mindfulness-based stress reduction or MSBR. This non-sectarian approach melds with any faith-based tradition or none at all. It’s equally inclusive to devout fundamentalists and atheists alike. Teaching children to meditate is, in reality, the opposite of indoctrination — it gives them practice in how to think for themselves.
Case Studies: Meditation in School, Methods and Results
What does it look like when schools teach children to meditate? The folks at Robert W. Coleman Elementary School rave about the results they receive from replacing traditional detention with meditation. The school did not have a single suspension during 2022 and 2023. The effects don’t stop at the elementary level. Nearby Patterson Park High School, which also uses the program, saw suspension rates drop and attendance increase, benefiting learning.
How Should Schools Teach Meditation to Children?
Robert W. Coleman Elementary School is a model for teaching meditation in schools. It partnered with outside experts, the Holistic Life Foundation, to offer yoga and meditation as a positive after-school activity, not a punishment. It teaches skills on the mat and ties them into daily life.
Children help clean up local parks, build gardens and visit farms as part of the experience. They also co-teach the yoga classes. They aren’t treated as problems to ‘manage’ or even blank slates to fill but as active learning partners.
The Magic of Teaching Meditation From Young Ages
Although some controversy lingers about teaching meditation in schools, institutions that have implemented such programs have experienced impressive results. Teaching this valuable life skill creates a positive classroom environment for true learning. It does so in a gentle, non-threatening manner to which most children respond well.
Teaching children to meditate does more than improve their classroom behavior. It imparts a valuable life skill to help kids manage life effectively after graduation.
LOS ANGELES — When Abram van der Fluit began teaching science more than two decades ago, he tried to ward off classroom disruption with the threat of suspension: “I had my consequences, and the third consequence was you get referred to the dean,” he recalled.
Suspending kids didn’t make them less defiant, he said, but getting them out of the school for a bit made his job easier. Now, suspensions for “willful defiance” are off the table at Maywood Academy High School, taking the bite out of van der Fluit’s threat.
Mikey Valladares, a 12th grader there, said when he last got into an argument with a teacher, a campus aide brought him to the school’s restorative justice coordinator, who offered Valladares a bottle of water and then asked what had happened. “He doesn’t come in … like a persecuting way,” Valladares said. “He’d just console you about it.”
Being listened to and treated with empathy, Valladares said, “makes me feel better.” Better enough to put himself in his teacher’s shoes, consider what he could have done differently — and offer an apology.
This new way of responding to disrespectful behavior doesn’t always work, according to van der Fluit. But “overall,” he said, “it’s a good thing.”
In 2013, the Los Angeles Unified School District banned suspensions for willfully defiant behavior, as part of a multi-year effort to move away from punitive discipline. The California legislature took note. Lawmakers argued that suspensions for relatively minor infractions, like talking back to a teacher, harmed kids, including by feeding the school-to-prison pipeline. Others noted that this ground for suspension was a subjective catch-all disproportionately applied to Black and Hispanic students.
A state law prohibiting willful defiance suspensions for grades K-3 went into effect in 2015; five years later, the ban was extended through eighth grade. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law adding high schoolers to the prohibition. It takes effect this July.
A Hechinger Report investigation reveals that the national picture is quite different. Across the 20 states that collect data on the reasons why students are suspended or expelled, school districts cited willful defiance, insubordination, disorderly conduct and similar categories as a justification for suspending or expelling students more than 2.8 million times from 2017-18 to 2021-22. That amounted to nearly a third of all punishments reported by those states.
As school districts search for ways to cope with the increase in student misbehavior that followed the pandemic, LAUSD’s experience offers insight into whether banning such suspensions is effective and under what conditions. In general, the district’s results have been positive: Data suggests that schools didn’t become less safe, more chaotic or less effective, as critics had warned.
From 2011-12 to 2021-22, as suspensions for willful defiance fell from 4,500 to near zero, suspensions across all categories fell too, to 1,633, a more than 90 percent drop, according to state data. Those numbers, plus in-depth research on the ban, show that educators in LAUSD didn’t simply find different justifications for suspending kids once willful defiance was off limits. Racial disparities in discipline remain, but they have been reduced.
Meanwhile, according to state survey data, students were less likely to report feeling unsafe in school. During the 2021-22 school year for example, 5 percent of LAUSD freshmen said they felt unsafe in school, compared with more than three times that nine years earlier. As for academics, state and federal data suggest that the district’s performance didn’t fall after the disciplinary shift, although the state switched tests over that decade, making precise comparison difficult.
Suspended for…what?
Students miss hundreds of thousands of school days each year for subjective infractions like defiance and disorderly conduct, a Hechinger investigation revealed.
“It really points out that we can do this differently, and do it better,” said Dan Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law.
A pile of research demonstrates that losing class time negatively affects students. Suspensions are tied to lower grades, lower odds of graduating high school and a higher risk of being arrested or unemployed as an adult. Losen said this is in part because students who are suspended not only miss out on educational opportunities, but also lose access to the web of services many schools offer, including mental health treatment and meals.
That harm is less justifiable for minor transgressions, he added. And “what makes it even less justifiable is that there are alternative responses that work better and involve more adult interface for the student, not less.”
In part because of this research, Los Angeles, and then California, increasingly focused on disciplinary alternatives as they eliminated or narrowed the use of suspensions for willful defiance.
A “restorative rounds” poster on the wall of Brooklyn Avenue School in East L.A. creates a protocol with steps and “sentence-starters” that teachers and students can use to process conflict, reconnect and be heard. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
LAUSD gradually scaled up its investment, rolling out training in 2015 for teachers and administrators in “restorative” practices like the ones Valladares described. Educators were also encouraged to implement an approach called positive behavioral interventions and supports. Together, these strategies seek to address the root causes of challenging behavior. That means both preventing it and, when some still inevitably occurs, responding in a way that strengthens the relationship between student and school rather than undermining it.
The district also created new positions, hiring school climate advocates to give campuses a warm, constructive tone, and “system of support advisors,” or SOSAs, to train current employees in the new way of doing discipline. From August to October 2023, SOSAs offered 380 such sessions; since July 2021 alone, more than 23,000 district staff members and 2,400 parents have participated in restorative practices training, according to LAUSD.
All that work has been expensive: The district budgeted more than $31 million for school climate advocates, $16 million for restorative justice teachers and nearly $9 million for the SOSAs for this school year. Combined with spending on psychiatric social workers, mental health coordinators and campus aides, the district’s allocation for “school climate personnel” totaled more than $300 million this year.
That’s money other districts don’t have. And it’s part of what prompted the California School Boards Association to support the recent legislation only if it were amended to include more cash for alternative approaches to behavior management.
At William Tell Aggeler High School, Robert Hill, the school’s dean, calmly shadows an angry, upset student, prepared to help restore calm rather than impose a punishment. His response is part of LAUSD’s transition to a more positive, relational form of discipline meant to keep students from losing educational minutes. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
Troy Flint, the organization’s chief communications officer, said administrators in many remote, rural districts in particular do not have the bandwidth, or the ability to hire consultants, to train staff on new methods. Their schools also often lack a space for disruptive students who have had to leave class but can’t be sent home, and lack the adults needed to supervise them, he said. “You often have situations in these districts where you have a superintendent or principal who’s also a teacher, and maybe they drive a bus – they don’t have the capacity to implement all these programs,” said Flint.
The state’s 2023 budget allocated just $7 million, parceled out in grants of up to $100,000, for districts to implement restorative justice practices. If each got the full amount, only approximately 70 districts would receive funding — when there are more than a thousand districts in the state. Even then, the grants would give each district only a small fraction of what LAUSD has needed to make the shift.
Even in LAUSD, the money only goes so far. The district of more than 1,000 schools employs nearly 120 restorative justice teachers, meaning only about a tenth of schools have one. Roughly a third of schools have a school climate advocate. SOSAs are stretched thin too, in some cases supporting as many as 25 schools each, and some budgeted SOSA positions haven’t been filled. There’s also the continual threat of lost funding: In recent years, the district has been using federal pandemic funding, which ends soon, to pay for some of the work. “School sites are having to make hard choices,” said Tanya Ortiz Franklin, an LAUSD school board member.
And money hasn’t been the district’s only challenge. Success requires buy-in, and buy-in requires a change in educators’ mindsets. Back in 2013, van der Fluit recalls, his colleagues’ perspective on the ban on willful defiance suspensions was often: “What is this hippie-dippie baloney?” Teachers also questioned the motives of district leaders, wondering if they wanted to avoid suspending kids because school funding is tied to average daily attendance.
LAUSD’s office of Positive Behavior Interventions & Support/Restorative Practices works with schools to develop and implement behavioral expectations. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
Now, most days, van der Fluit sees things differently — but not always.
Last year, for example, when he asked a student who was late to get a tardy slip, she refused. She also refused when a campus aide, and then the restorative justice coordinator and then the principal, asked her to go to the school’s office. The situation was eventually resolved after her basketball coach arrived, but van der Fluit said it had been “a 20-minute thing, and I’m trying to teach in between all of this stuff.”
That sort of scene is rare at Maywood, van der Fluit said, but it happens. There are students “who just want to disrupt, and they know how to manipulate and control and are gaslighting and deflecting.” He described seeing a student with his phone out. When van der Fluit said, “You had your phone out,” the student denied it. Van der Fluit said there are days he feels “the district doesn’t have my back” under this new system. Researchers, legislators and school board members, he said, wear “rose-colored glasses.”
Critics warned that eliminating suspensions for “willful defiance” would render schools more chaotic and less effective, but Maywood Academy High School is calmer than it used to be, according to teachers and principal Maricella Garcia. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
His concerns are not uncommon. But according to Losen, in LAUSD, “The main issue for teachers was that the teacher training was phased in while the policy change was not.”
In recent years there has been some parental pushback too: At a November 2023 meeting of the school district safety and climate committee, for example, a handful of parents described their kids’ schools as “out of control” and decried a “rampant lack of discipline.”
Ortiz Franklin acknowledged an uptick in behavioral incidents over the last three years, but attributed it to the pandemic and students’ isolation and loss, not the shift in disciplinary approach. Groups like Students Deserve, a youth-led, grassroots nonprofit, have urged LAUSD to hold the line on its positive, restorative approach.
“Our schools are not an uncontrollable, violent, off-the-wall place. They’re a place with kids who are dealing with an unprecedented level of trauma and need an unprecedented level of support,” said W. Joseph Williams, the group’s director.
District survey data presented at the same November meeting, meanwhile, suggests most teachers remain relatively committed to the policies: On a 1 to 4 scale, teachers rated their support for restorative practices at around a 3, on average, and principals rated it close to a 4.
Even van der Fluit, who maintains that the new way takes more work, said: “But is it the better thing for the student? For sure.”
When restorative justice coordinator Marcus Van approached a student who was out of class without permission, he led with curiosity rather than threatening suspension. Maywood is a calmer school more than a decade after LAUSD shifted to restorative practices and positive behavior interventions and supports, teachers and administrators say. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
At Maywood, Marcus Van, the restorative justice coordinator who met with Valladares after the teen argued with a teacher, said students have a chance to talk out their problems and grievances and resolve them. In contrast, Van said, “When you just suspend someone, you do not go through the process of reconciliation.”
Often, so-called defiant behavior is spurred by some larger issue, he said: “Maybe somebody has parents who are on drugs [or] abusive, maybe they have housing insecurity, maybe they have food insecurity, maybe they’re being bullied.” He added: “I think people want an easy fix for a complicated problem.”
Valladares, for his part, knows some people think suspensions breed school safety. But he said he feels safer — and behaves in a way that’s safer for others — when “I’m able to voice how I feel.”
Twelfth grader Yaretzy Ferreira said: “I feel like they actually hear us out, instead of just cutting us out.”
Her first year and a half at Maywood, she was “really hyper sassy,” according to Van. But, Ferreira recalled, that changed after Van invited her mom and a translator to a meeting: “He was like, ‘Your daughter did this, this, this, but we’re not here to get her in trouble. We’re here to help.’” Now, the only reason she ends up in Van’s office is for a water or a snack.
LAUSD’s office of Positive Behavior Interventions & Support/Restorative Practices falls under the “joy and wellness” pillar of the district’s strategic plan. Information pushed out by the PBIS/RP office aims to help students and staff connect in a positive, forward-looking manner. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
Van der Fluit said the new approach is better for all kids, not just those with a history of defiance. For example, the class that watched the tardy slip interaction unfold saw adults model how to successfully manage frustration and de-escalate a situation. “That’s incredibly valuable,” he said, “more valuable than learning photosynthesis.”
The Maywood campus is calmer than it used to be, educators at the school say. Students, for the most part, no longer roam the halls during class time. There’s less profanity, said history teacher Michael Melendez. Things are going “just fine” without willful defiance suspensions, he said.
Nationally, researchers have come to a similar conclusion: A 2023 report from the Learning Policy Institute, based on data for about 2 million California students, concluded that exposure to restorative practices improved academic achievement, behavior and school safety. A 2023 study on restorative programs in Chicago Public Schools, conducted by the University of Chicago Education Lab, found positive changes in how students viewed their schools, their in-school safety and their sense of belonging.
In Los Angeles, many students say the hard work of transitioning to a new disciplinary approach is worth it.
“We’re still kids in a way. We are growing, but there’s still corrections to be made,” said Valladares. “And what’s the point in a school if there’s no corrections, just instant punishment?”
This story about PBIS was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for theHechinger newsletter.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
JOHNSBURG, Ill. — A group of fifth grade boys trailed into the conference room in the front office of Johnsburg Elementary School and sat at the table, their feet dangling from the chairs.
“It was brought to my attention yesterday that there was an incident at football,” Principal Bridget Belcastro said to the group.
The students tried to explain: One boy pushed a kid, another jumped on the ball, and yet another jumped on the boy on the ball. It depended on who you asked.
“I tripped — if I did jump on him, I didn’t mean to,” one student said. “Then I got up and turned around and these two were going at each other.”
Belcastro, listening closely, had the unenviable job of making sense of the accounts and deciding on consequences.
In elementary schools across the country, an incident as common as a playground fracas over a football could result in kids being suspended.
A Hechinger analysis of school discipline data from 20 states found widespread use of suspensions for students of all ages for ill-defined, subjective categories of misbehavior, such as disorderly conduct, defiance and insubordination. From 2017 to 2022, state reports cited these categories as a reason for suspension or expulsion more than 2.8 million times.
Signage throughout Johnsburg Elementary School in Illinois encourages students to regulate their emotions. The school primarily uses social emotional learning interventions instead of exclusionary discipline. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
In many cases, young students were removed from their classes for behavior that is common for kids their age, according to additional discipline records from half a dozen school districts obtained through public records requests.
In Montana, students in K-5 made up almost 4,000 suspensions for disorderly conduct. In New Mexico, it was nearly 2,700.
Elementary school students are often punished for conduct that experts say is developmentally typical of children who are still learning how to behave and appropriately express themselves in school. Even severe behaviors, like kicking or punching peers and teachers, can be a function of young children still figuring out how to regulate their emotions.
In many other cases, the behavior does not appear serious. In Washington, a kindergarten student was suspended from school for two days for pulling his pants down at recess. A second grader in Rhode Island was suspended when he got mad and ran out of the school building. In Maryland, a third grader was suspended because she yelled when she wasn’t allowed to have cookies, disrupting class.
At Johnsburg Elementary School, which serves about 350 third through fifth grade students on the northern outskirts of Chicago’s suburbs, administrators are trying to limit the use of suspensions. Student conferences, like the one after the fight during football, are just one piece of a much larger effort aimed at preventing and addressing misbehavior. In the end, the boys didn’t lose time in the classroom, but they were no longer allowed to play football at recess.
Belcastro’s decision not to suspend the boys was based on research that consistently shows suspending students makes it more difficult for them to succeed academically and more likely they will enter the criminal justice system as adults.
Suspension can be particularly damaging when doled out to younger students, said Iheoma Iruka, a professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Being kicked out of the classroom can fracture kids’ trust in their teachers and the institution early on. Those early impressions can stay with students and cause long-lasting harm, Iruka said, particularly to students for whom school is the most consistent part of their lives.
“Over time, it erodes children’s sense of safety. It erodes their relationship with teachers,” said Iruka, who is also the founding director of the Equity Research Action Coalition at UNC, a group that researches and develops policies to address bias in the classroom.
Classroom posters and signs emphasize how students should behave at Johnsburg Elementary School in Illinois. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
In part because of concerns like these, advocates and policymakers across the country often focus on the early grades when pushing for discipline reform. At least 17 states and D.C. have passed laws to limit the use of suspension and expulsion for younger children, typically students in pre-K through third or fifth grade. In Illinois, where Johnsburg Elementary School is located, schools are allowed to suspend young students, but legislators passed a law in 2015 that encourages using suspension as a last resort.
Child development experts say that, ideally, suspensions should be used only in extremely rare circumstances, especially in elementary school.
Suspended for…what?
Students miss hundreds of thousands of school days each year for subjective infractions like defiance and disorderly conduct, a Hechinger investigation revealed.
Misbehavior at any age is often a symptom of deeper issues, experts say, but young children, especially, struggle to identify those issues and communicate them effectively. Students in the early grades are also still trying to figure out how to function in a school environment.
“We can hold older students accountable to know the rules of behavior in their schools,” said Maurice Elias, a professor of psychology who researches social emotional learning at Rutgers University. “We certainly can’t expect younger children to know all of those things and to anticipate the consequences of all their actions.”
And young students need to be specifically taught how to manage their emotions, added Sara Rimm-Kaufman, a professor of education at the University of Virginia.
“Helping kids understand what’s OK at home might not be OK at school, or making kids feel appreciated, respected, understood — that’s a really important issue and it keeps kids engaged,” she said.
Teachers at Johnsburg Elementary are trying to do just that.
The school adopted a new program this year called Character Strong, which is aimed at helping students with coping, emotional regulation, self-management and relationships. A few weeks into the school year, teachers filled out a screener to identify students struggling in those areas.
A booklet is flipped to a cartoon creature depicting “frustration,” the emotion of the day in school social worker Dawn Mendralla’s office at Johnsburg Elementary School in Illinois. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
On a Thursday morning in November, four third graders left class to meet with social worker Dawn Mendralla. Twinkling lights lined the ceiling of her office; a small flip book depicting various emotions was opened to a page with a purple creature gritting its teeth and holding up its fists in frustration. A poster on the cabinet said: All feelings are welcome here.
“Regulation means we’re controlling ourselves, we’re controlling our behaviors, we’re controlling our emotions,” Mendralla said to the students. “Do we have trouble sometimes controlling our behaviors in class? Sometimes we have the urge to talk to our neighbor, or we have the urge to look out the window, or to not pay attention or to fidget with something?”
Once a week, the identified students attend a group session with Mendralla focused on improving those skills. Children who need more help also briefly check in with Mendralla, individually, every day. Students who misbehave, like the group of boys who got into a fight at recess, are also sent to Belcastro’s office.
Like other schools throughout the country, Johnsburg Elementary has been dealing with the ongoing impact of the pandemic on children’s behavior.
“There’s an increase in emotional outbursts, frustration, and they don’t know how to manage their emotions effectively,” Belcastro said. “Secondly, would be social interaction changes, because they weren’t around other kids and other people for so long, they didn’t have that and now they’ve forgotten how or never learned how to make friends.”
During the 2022-23 school year, Johnsburg Elementary had 687 referrals, or disciplinary write-ups, involving a student misbehaving, up from 222 referrals in 2021-22 and 276 referrals in 2018-19.
Even with the rise in behavior challenges, the school has tried to limit student suspensions; Through February of this school year, only three students had been given an in-school suspension and one had been sent home.
Elsewhere, though, the post-pandemic rise in misbehavior has caused some states to backtrack on policies limiting exclusionary discipline and instead made it easier for schools to kick students out of class.
In Nevada last year, legislators lowered the age at which students can be suspended or expelled from 11 to 6 and made it easier for schools to suspend or expel students.
In 2023, Kentucky lawmakers gave principals the ability to permanently kick students out of school if they believe the student will “chronically disrupt the education process for other students” and if they have been removed from class three times for being disruptive.
“There’s just been more and more discipline problems across the nation, and definitely across the state. We’ve just gotta get things under control,” said Rep. Steve Rawlings, who was among the legislation’s sponsors. “We have to prioritize the safety of teachers in the classroom and fellow students so that the focus can be on academics and not be distracted by issues of discipline.”
Elias and other experts say suspension should act more as a rare safety measure in extreme cases, rather than a disciplinary measure.
A fourth grade student cuts out a paper turkey he colored in class at Johnsburg Elementary School in Illinois. Students at the school are almost never sent home from school for misbehavior. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
In the discipline records The Hechinger Report obtained, some school districts reported suspending young children under disruptive conduct for punching peers or throwing items at teachers.
In such cases, suspension may make sense, experts say, while allowing educators time to develop a longer-term response to the misconduct. But schools should not expect that removing kids from class will magically improve their behavior.
“When a child comes back into a classroom after a situation like this, it’s often that there’s just going to be a continuation of what was happening before, unless the child is brought back into the community in a way that changes the direction and nature of the relationships between the child and the people around them,” Rimm-Kaufman said
That’s something Belcastro has argued as well. Occasionally, there are tensions with parents who want to see other students punished when their own child has been harmed in some way. Belcastro doesn’t’t think that’s an effective approach.
“Punishments do not change behavior. No kid at this age level considers what the potential consequences might be before they do an action,” Belcastro recalled telling one parent who was upset about a student at the school. “So it really serves no purpose, it’s not helpful. But instead, working to prevent the behavior is what we need to do, so it doesn’t’t happen again.”
In Mendralla’s room, a small group of fourth grade boys showed up for a group session one day in November. The goal of this weekly session is for students to learn how to better regulate their emotions.
“What happens when we keep things all to ourselves, things build up, and we keep things bottled up inside us?” Mendralla asked.
“Then you explode,” a student said. “With emotions.”
Mendralla asked the students to think of rules they would like to have for these group sessions. A couple of students threw out suggestions: no running around the room, no interrupting, no blaming others, nobody is better than anybody else.
Another fourth grader raised his hand.
“If there’s another person making fun of another person because of the way they look and act, don’t join in,” he said. “We don’t know what they’re going through.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
I’m principal of a high school with a well-known name, only because it’s the site of one of the most devastating school shootings in recent American history: Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
I’m also a mother, a neighbor and a witness to the enduring scars left by gun violence in our schools.
I offered my assistance and my plea for something that is desperately needed in our country: concrete solutions to fight school shootings. Urgent, comprehensive action must be taken to prevent such tragedies and adequately support those who have already suffered through them.
Even as I advocate for change, the recent shooting in Perry, Iowa, and the death of the principal who tried to save children’s lives serve as stark reminders that our nation continues to grapple with the devastating toll of gun violence.
Almost six years ago, our school community in Parkland, Florida, was shattered. Seventeen lives were tragically cut short, with 17 others injured.
That horrific nightmare is my reality. At the time, I was a principal in a nearby school; my son was in eighth grade in Parkland. As I received the harrowing text from him about a “code red” at his school, I was engulfed in a terror that no parent, educator or student should ever experience.
It’s a fear that still lingers in the halls of Stoneman Douglas and in the hearts of our community.
In the aftermath of this national tragedy, I was tasked to take over leadership at Stoneman Douglas to guide the school in its recovery. Shortly after being appointed, I was contacted by and subsequently became a part of the Principal Recovery Network (PRN), consisting of educators who have faced school shootings. Our mission is to help schools through the healing process, a path we are still navigating at Stoneman Douglas.
The harsh reality is that school shootings have become alarmingly routine. As of mid-January, we’ve already had three school shooting deaths in 2024. The number of incidents has been rising dramatically since 2015. Last year alone, there were 136 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, with 66 students and educators killed and 158 more injured.
These numbers are not just statistics; they represent communities torn apart, futures lost and a growing need for resources to aid in recovery.
There are steps we can take right now to help. Federal programs like Project SERV, which provides critical support to schools affected by violence, are a lifeline. However, with a mere $5 million allocated last year amidst myriad shootings and other disasters, Project SERV’s funding is grossly insufficient.
An increase in these resources is imperative, not just for the immediate aftermath of violence but for the long-term healing and security of our schools.
The presence of school resource officers (SROs) trained specifically to work in educational environments is also crucial. At Stoneman Douglas, our SROs have been pivotal in both preventive measures and in aiding our recovery efforts.
SROs provide more than just security; they offer stability and guidance in an environment rife with threats and trauma.
Yet, as discussions in Congress on fiscal year 2024 appropriations unfold, it’s disheartening to witness proposals for drastic cuts in federal education funding. The House’s suggestion to slash that funding by 28 percent is not just disconcerting, it’s dangerous.
Such reductions would cripple our education system, exacerbate already alarming teacher shortages and compromise school safety. It’s crucial to maintain, if not increase, funding for programs that are vital for professional development, mental health support and school safety.
My ask to the members of Congress and to all stakeholders in our children’s futures is straightforward: prioritize the safety and well-being of our students and educators.
We must work together to ensure that no more school communities experience the horror that we did at Stoneman Douglas.
That means we must enact policies that prevent gun violence in schools and provide adequate resources for addressing trauma and fostering recovery and resilience.
As we continue to rebuild and strengthen our school community, we look to our leaders for action. The safety of our schools, our educators and the children who are the future of our nation depend on it.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
WAUKEGAN, Illinois — En una soleada pero animada tarde de noviembre dentro de la escuela secundaria Robert Abbott, seis niñas de octavo grado rápidamente entraron en un salón de clases pequeño pero colorido y se sientan en un círculo.
Yuli Paez-Naranjo, consejera de Working on Womanhood (WOW), tenía una camiseta violeta de WOW mientras dirigía al grupo en una discusión sobre cómo los valores pueden informar las decisiones.
“¿Alguna vez has sentido como si dos angelitos estuvieran sentados sobre cada uno de tus hombros, uno susurrándote cosas buenas y el otro susurrándote cosas malas?” preguntó Paez-Naranjo a las niñas. Las estudiantes asintieron y se rieron.
Durante la sesión de WOW de 50 minutos, las niñas tienen la oportunidad de dejar de lado las presiones del día en la escuela, reírse, escucharse unas a otras y resolver problemas personales. La reunión semanal es la pieza central de la terapia individual y grupal que WOW ofrece durante todo el año escolar a niñas afroamericanas e hispanas —y a estudiantes de todas las razas que se identifican como mujeres o no binarias— en los grados 6 al 12.
Creado en 2011 por trabajadores sociales negros e hispanos de la organización sin fines de lucro Youth Guidance, el objetivo de WOW es desarrollar un sentido saludable de autoconciencia, confianza y resiliencia en una población que a menudo no cuenta con programas de salud mental.
Youth Guidance ofrece WOW a unas 350 estudiantes en el Distrito Escolar 60 de la Unidad Comunitaria de Waukegan, que presta servicios a una ciudad industrial de unos 88,000 habitantes, situada a unas 30 millas al norte de Chicago. Un poco más del 93 por ciento de los 13,600 estudiantes del distrito son negros o hispanos, y alrededor del 67 por ciento provienen de familias clasificadas como de bajos ingresos.
El programa también atiende a estudiantes en Chicago, Boston, Kansas City y Dallas. Los consejeros de WOW trabajan con equipos de salud conductual, administradores y maestros de las escuelas para identificar a estudiantes con altos niveles de estrés que podrían beneficiarse del programa.
El programa Working on Womanhood opera en Waukegan, Illinois y en varios otros distritos escolares de todo el país. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Sin embargo, múltiples obstáculos como la financiación, el agotamiento de los consejeros y la desconfianza en los programas de salud mental, se interponen en el camino para hacer que WOW llegue a más estudiantes. Una forma en que el programa supera los impedimentos es llevándolo al lugar donde los estudiantes pasan la mayor parte de su tiempo: la escuela.
Paez-Naranjo es tan querida entre los estudiantes de Abbott, que incluso los niños que no están en el programa la buscan, le planteó una pregunta al grupo de estaudiantes.
“Hablemos de las consecuencias positivas y negativas de determinadas decisiones. ¿Qué tal pelear?” preguntó. “
El único resultado positivo es que descubrirás lo fuerte que eres”, dijo Deanna Palacio, una de las niñas.
“¿Por qué pelear cuando puedes hablarlo?” preguntó otra estudiante, Ka’Neya Lehn.
“¿Sí? ¿Cuál es el punto?” dijo una tercera niña, Ana Ortiz.
Yuli Paez-Naranjo, consejera de Working on Womanhood de la escuela secundaria Robert Abbott en Waukegan, Illinois, dijo que ha visto una disminución en la rabia y las peleas entre las niñas que participan en el programa de apoyo de salud mental. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Nacole Milbrook, directora del programa de Orientación Juvenil, dijo que WOW fue desarrollado para abordar necesidades que a menudo se pasan por alto entre las niñas hispanas y afroamericanas. “Las niñas han quedado excluidas [de las iniciativas de apoyo a la salud mental], principalmente porque no causan problemas”, afirmó.
Un estudio de referencia de más de 2,000 niñas en las escuelas públicas de Chicago, realizado por el equipo del Education Lab de la Universidad de Chicago, encontró tasas “asombrosamente altas” de exposición al trauma: casi un tercio de las mujeres jóvenes participantes habían sido testigos de cómo alguien era agredido o asesinado violentamente; y casi la mitad perdió a alguien cercano por muerte violenta o súbita. Alrededor del 38 por ciento de las niñas de este grupo mostraron signos de trastorno de estrés postraumático, el doble de la tasa de los miembros del servicio que regresaban de Irak y Afganistán.
Paez-Naranjo y su compañera consejera de WOW, Te’Ericka Kimbrough —quien trabaja en el Centro Educativo Opcional/Alternativo de Waukegan— han apoyado a estudiantes que han sufrido agresión sexual. Algunos participantes en sus círculos son padres adolescentes. Otros están tratando de resistir la presión negativa de sus compañeros. Otros pertenecen a familias que tienen dificultades económicas.
Aún más escaso es el apoyo a la salud mental por parte de proveedores que puedan brindar una atención culturalmente receptiva. Sólo el 5 por ciento de los proveedores de salud mental en Estados Unidos son hispanos. Sólo el 4 por ciento son negros.
Ana Ortiz, estudiante de octavo grado en la escuela secundaria Robert Abbott, dijo que el programa Working on Womanhood “me ayuda a comprenderme mejor a mí misma”. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
“Se les percibe como resilientes y con valor”, dijo Nuamah. “Esto oscurece las necesidades reales de salud mental de los estudiantes de color y perpetúa las políticas institucionalmente racistas porque no se percibe que estos estudiantes necesiten los mismos recursos”.
Servir a los estudiantes donde están físicamente presentes casi 200 días al año es una forma de satisfacer la necesidad de apoyo que con demasiada frecuencia no se satisface, dijo Nuamah.
“WOW es la única organización [escolar] que hace lo que hace en la medida en que lo hace”, dijo. “La mayoría de los servicios [de salud mental] se ofrecen fuera de la escuela”.
Laurel Crown, gerente senior de investigación y evaluación de Youth Guidance, dijo que la organización sin fines de lucro está trabajando para determinar qué partes del programa funcionan mejor. Las encuestas a las participantes al final del año escolar, que utilizan medidas similares a las utilizadas en el estudio del Education Lab, sugieren que las relaciones desarrolladas entre los consejeros de WOW y las participantes son una razón clave por la que el programa es efectivo.
“Nuestra teoría del cambio es que WOW funciona porque… [las estudiantes] asisten a este grupo de apoyo increíblemente poderoso todas las semanas y esta persona de apoyo está allí todos los días en la escuela para ellos”, dijo Crown.
Los consejeros de WOW están “comprometidos sistémicamente” en las escuelas donde trabajan, dijo Fabiola Rosiles-Duran, supervisora del programa WOW de Waukegan. Ellas se mantienen informados sobre la dinámica de toda la escuela al ser parte del equipo de salud conductual y de las reuniones de todo el personal.
Los consejeros Kimbrough y Paez-Naranjo agregaron que el acceso diario a los maestros y al personal brinda apoyo integral a sus estudiantes. La presencia de los consejeros también les ayuda a responder inmediatamente a situaciones agudas y hacer un seguimiento del progreso de las estudiantes cada día de escuela.
“Si necesito ayuda adicional con una estudiante, puedo apoyarme en el equipo de salud conductual de la escuela”, dijo Kimbrough. Ella agrega que si tiene una estudiante en crisis, poder verla regularmente la ayuda a saber si sus intervenciones están funcionando.
Brindar apoyo intensivo a las estudiantes todos los días de escuela puede ser emocionalmente agotador para los consejeros de WOW. Youth Guidance proporciona capacitación grupal y apoyo individual para ayudar a los consejeros a mantener su propia salud emocional.
Durante su primer año en el trabajo, los consejeros participan en tres horas de capacitación curricular cada mes más tres días de cursos de actualización. Muchas actividades de formación reflejan las que los consejeros utilizarán más adelante con sus alumnos.
Los líderes de WOW también se registran todos los días de la semana para ofrecer apoyo a los consejeros. Los nuevos en WOW también asisten a un retiro de dos días y tres noches que “ayuda a los consejeros y al personal a descubrir lo que está sucediendo dentro de nosotros mismos”, dijo Ngozi Harris, directora de programas y desarrollo del personal de Youth Guidance, “para que tengamos el combustible para hacer este trabajo”.
Un estudio encontró que los múltiples niveles de apoyo que WOW ofrece a las estudiantes y al personal, a un costo de aproximadamente $2,300 por participante, son rentables. Aún así, eso puede representar una parte importante del presupuesto anual de un distrito o escuela.
Pero Jason Nault, superintendente asociado de equidad, innovación y responsabilidad de Waukegan CUSD 60, dijo que WOW bien vale el costo. A principios de este año, la Junta de Educación del distrito aprobó una extensión de dos años de su contrato con WOW y su contraparte para estudiantes varones, Becoming a Man (Convirtiéndose en un Hombre), a un costo de $4,2 millones.
Nault dijo que los datos que Youth Guidance recopila al final de cada año escolar muestran que las estudiantes de WOW están menos deprimidas y ansiosas, más seguras de sí mismas y tienen menos estrés postraumático.
Una vez a la semana, las niñas de la escuela secundaria Robert Abbott y otras escuelas en el área de Waukegan, Illinois, se reúnen con sus compañeros y un consejero para resolver problemas personales. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Sin embargo, existen múltiples desafíos de implementación para WOW y otros programas de apoyo estudiantil en las escuelas. Una es que el trabajo de los consejeros es aislante y puede provocar agotamiento psicológico, dijo Inger Burnett-Zeigler, profesora asociada de psicología en la Facultad de Medicina Feinberg de Northwestern.
“Existe un estrés significativo, crónico y traumático que experimentan los consejeros de WOW”, dijo. Burnett-Zeigler está trabajando con WOW para desarrollar y probar una intervención de mindfulness basada en evidencia para apoyar a los consejeros.
“El bienestar del consejero es importante en sí mismo”, dijo Burnett-Zeigler. También puede respaldar los resultados de los jóvenes, afirmó.
Otra barrera que enfrentan programas como WOW es que, según algunas investigaciones, las familias hispanas y afroamericanas son más reacias a buscar apoyo y tratamiento de salud mental que otros grupos étnicos y raciales. El programa WOW trabaja para generar confianza no sólo con los estudiantes, sino con sus padres y familiares.
“Las familias de color tienden a no nombrar los problemas de salud mental como problemas de salud mental”, dijo Milbrook, directora de programas de la organización que supervisa WOW. “Buscar tratamiento sigue siendo un estigma, incluso para los niños”.
Milbrook dijo que el entorno escolar es clave para desestigmatizar tanto las afecciones como el tratamiento de salud mental.
Al estar integrados en escuelas como la secundaria Robert Abbott en Waukegan, Illinois, los consejeros de Working on Womanhood dicen que pueden construir vínculos más profundos con las estudiantes en su programa de apoyo de salud mental. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
“Estar en la escuela y participar en los grupos con otros estudiantes, comprender que no eres la única persona que enfrenta estos mismos problemas y hablar de ellos de maneras que no se parecen a su idea de terapia tradicional”, todo esto ayuda, dijo.
También es esencial, añadió Milbrook, fomentar el sentido de pertenencia. “Les damos a las participantes camisetas WOW y ahora pueden caminar por la escuela identificándose como niñas de Working on Womanhood”, dijo. “De repente, nadie se avergüenza de estar en este grupo”.
Deanna, alumna de octavo grado de Abbott, añadió que el sentido de pertenencia que fomenta WOW la ha ayudado a sentirse menos sola.
“Aquí te sientes escuchada y comprendida”, dijo.
Aunque el entorno escolar presenta ventajas para WOW, también puede implicar desafíos de implementación. Harris, de Youth Guidance, dijo que tanto el personal de WOW como el personal de la escuela quieren resultados positivos para las estudiantes de WOW, pero el enfoque centrado en la curación de WOW podría entrar en conflicto con la política disciplinaria de una escuela. Por lo tanto, el personal de la escuela podría inicialmente desconfiar del personal del programa y de los consejeros.
Las escuelas a veces también subestiman la experiencia de los consejeros y otras a veces incluso les piden que asuman tareas como hacer seguimiento de la cafetería, que no son su responsabilidad.
“Se necesita un año para construir relaciones y ser realmente intencional sobre cómo colaborar con la escuela”, dijo Harris. “Hasta que se genere esa confianza, eres un outsider”.
Pagar el programa es otro desafío. Aunque Waukegan CUSD 60 cubre todos los costos de WOW, la mayoría de los distritos no lo hacen. Youth Guidance depende principalmente del apoyo filantrópico para pagar sus programas.
Es menos probable que Youth Guidance aproveche fuentes de financiación pública como Medicaid porque los engorrosos procesos del programa de asistencia pública pueden generar costos más altos e incluso amenazar la confianza que WOW genera con los estudiantes y sus familias.
Por ejemplo, los consejeros de WOW suelen hacer numerosas llamadas telefónicas a los padres o visitarlos en casa. Es tiempo bien empleado, dijo Milbrook, pero no es financieramente productivo. Los consejeros sólo pueden facturar su tiempo a Medicaid después de que uno de los padres firme un formulario de consentimiento.
Deanna Palacio, estudiante de octavo grado de la escuela secundaria Robert Abbott en Waukegan, Illinois, dijo que se siente “escuchada y comprendida” por sus compañeras y su consejera en el programa Working on Womanhood. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
A pesar de algunos de estos desafíos de implementación, los líderes y consejeros de WOW consideran que el programa WOW de Waukegan es un éxito.
“Como un todo [en el grupo], he visto una disminución en la rabia y las peleas”, dijo Páez-Naranjo, consejera de Abbott Middle WOW.
Las lecciones de mindfulness durante los círculos WOW en la escuela secundaria Abbott han ayudado a Ana Ortiz a desarrollar confianza en su identidad emergente como mujer joven. Ella, al igual que sus otras compañeras del programa, regresó por segundo año después de comenzar WOW como estudiantes de séptimo grado.
“Antes de venir aquí, no me encontraba a mí misma en absoluto”, dijo Ana. “Quería saber ¿cómo es ser mujer? Quería saber cuáles eran las opiniones y perspectivas de otras chicas”.
Páez-Naranjo dijo que ha visto el crecimiento de Ana desde el año escolar pasado.
“Ana ha salido mucho más de su zona de confort. Se siente más segura para compartir detalles íntimos de su vida y está dispuesta a apoyar a cualquiera que lo necesite”, dijo Páez-Naranjo.
“Y está mucho más sonriente”, añadió Páez-Naranjo. “Se puede ver su sonrisa a una milla de distancia”.
Más tarde, al salir del círculo WOW de Abbott del miércoles, Ana volvió para ofrecer una visión final sobre cómo WOW la ha ayudado.
“Me hace sentir libre aquí”, dijo, mostrando una de esas sonrisas. “Me entiendo mejor a mí misma”.
Related articles
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
So much talk about empathy in education recently. Why? What’s the big idea?
The role of empathy in learning has to do with the flow of both information and creativity. A dialogic interaction with the world around us requires us to understand ourselves by understanding the needs and conditions of those around us. It also requires extended critical thinking and encourages us to take collective measurements rather than those singular, forcing us into an intellectual interdependence that catalyzes other subtle but powerful tools of learning.
If successful it should, by design, result in personal and social change through a combination of self-direction, reflection, and collaboration with ideas and the people who have them. This brings us to empathy.
The role of empathy in learning involves a dialogic interaction with the world around us. This emphasizes knowledge demands–what we need to know. It also encourages us to take collective measurements rather than those singular, forcing us into an intellectual interdependence that catalyzes other subtle but powerful tools of learning.
But where does it come from? What causes it? What are the authentic sources of empathy in a classroom?
Whether by close academic examination, more personal ‘evaluation,’ or some kind of analysis that’s in-between, ‘other’ lays the groundwork for empathy.
The act of an infant reaching out for your face as you hold, or making eye contact with someone during a conference, or even reading literature all are framed by empathy–or suffer tremendously without it. There is a moment when one ‘thing’ recognizes another, followed by some momentary burst of analysis. Who is this person? Are they a threat, an opportunity, or neither? What do I need from them, and them from me? What social contracts or etiquette are at work here that I need to be aware of and honor?
Literary study is probably the most iconic case for empathy in a traditional learning environment. A novel requires the reader to see the world through one (or more) of the character’s eyes–to understand their motives and draw close to their worldview so that can have a fictional-but-still-parallel experience.
Empathy Source: Your interactions with them
This is a powerful opportunity to model empathy. Reinforcement of desired behaviors. Socratic discussion. Grading writing. Evaluating projects. Missing homework. Behavior problems. All of the dozens of interactions you have with students on a daily basis are opportunities for them to see what empathy looks like.
This doesn’t mean they necessarily will, in turn, use it with others, but there’s no chance at all for that to happen if they don’t even know what they’re looking for. Your empathy with them may be the only empathy they’ve ever seen.
Empathy Source: Their interactions with one another
Another opportunity to see empathy in action is in working with one another—quick elbow-partner activities, group projects, peer response, group discussions, and more. Sharing sentence stems that promote empathetic dialogue can be helpful to students—like training wheels so they know where to start.
“I can tell you’ve…that must have…” as in, “I can tell you’ve worked hard on this writing. That must’ve taken self-determination, and even some courage.”
Empathy Source: How Content Is Framed
How content is framed is another opportunity for empathy. For example, using essential questions that require, reward, and promote empathy can turn a unit into a study on what other people think, why they think it, and what they feel?
Grant Wiggins often referred to “What’s wrong with Holden Caufield?” from The Catcher In The Rye as a powerful essential question, one that requires students to examine another person in an alien context, make deep inferences based on a schema that is (obviously) personal, and then—hopefully—empathize with a fictional character, not as a quick writing prompt or ‘higher-level question,’ but a 6-week study.
Studying fiction—or studying fiction well is an exercise in empathy as well. Studying history without empathy is like turning our shared human legacy, full of wonderful nuance and narrative and scandal and hope—into a dry, chronologically-based FAQ. Which sucks.
Empathy Source: Where Learning Goals Come From
The relationship between learning goals and empathy may not be clear, but what we choose to study and why we choose to study it are—ideally—primarily human pursuits. When these are handled outside of the classroom, e.g., in the form of curriculum standards, scopes-and-sequences, maps, units, power standards, and the lessons that promote their study, this places the institution immediately at odds with the student and sterilizes the learning experience.
When students are able to look to other schools, other classrooms, their own lives, or even non-academic ‘fields’ to see how experts and passionate creatives identify, value, and improve their own knowledge and skills, it can help to tilt the learning experience to something emotionally immediate and relevant and authentic—fertile ground for empathy.
Empathy Source: Transfer Of Knowledge
What do we do with what we know? What happens when I try to take what I learned here, and use it there? What are my thinking habits? What are the chances I’ll make this transfer unprompted, now and in the future?
These questions surrounding students’ transfer of knowledge can all benefit from empathy, and promote its growth. Understanding is a problematic word, but let’s consider for a moment two kinds of understanding—that which is demonstrated within the context of a lesson or unit, and that which is able to leave this fragile academic bubble and can survive on its own outside of it. (Or better yet, be useful in that outside world.) This kind of movement isn’t simple, or necessarily natural when they are learning content and goals are all academic.
In The Courage To Think Critically,I was theorized as much:
“To think critically about something is to claim to first circle its meaning entirely—to walk all the way around it so that you understand it in a way that’s uniquely you. That’s not academic vomit but fully human. After circling the meaning of whatever you’re thinking critically about—navigation necessarily done with bravado and purpose—you then analyze the thing.
See its parts, its form, its function, and its context. After this kind of survey and analysis, you can come to evaluate it–bring to bear your own distinctive cognition on the thing so that you can point out flaws, underscore bias, emphasize merit—to get inside the mind of the author, designer, creator, or clockmaker and critique his work.”
Empathy Source: Movement Within & Across Learning Taxonomies
6 Facets of Understanding–Peaking With Empathy & Self-Knowledge
“Facet 1: Explain
Provide thorough and justifiable accounts of phenomena, facts, and data.
Facet 2: Interpret
Examples: Tell meaningful stories, offer apt translations, provide a revealing historical or personal dimension to ideas and events; make subjects personal or accessible through images, anecdotes, analogies, and models.
Facet 2: Apply
Examples: Effectively use and adapt what they know in diverse contexts.
Facet 4: Have perspective
Examples: See and hear points of view through critical eyes and ears; see the big picture.
Facet 5: Empathize
Examples: Find value in what others might find odd, alien, or implausible; perceive sensitively on the basis of prior indirect experience.
Facet 6: Have self-knowledge
Examples: Perceive the personal style, prejudices, projections, and habits of mind that both shape and impede our own understanding; they are aware of what they do not understand and why understanding is so hard.”
The movement in the 6 Facets here is from outward patterns to inward patterns. Explaining, interpretation, and application are, in large part, outward. The facets then tend inward—perspective, empathize, and self-knowledge. The lesson here–or one lesson of many–is that understanding is a deeply personal process. It is a matter of knowledge, but also identity, perspective, and empathy.
Why Is Teaching Empathy Important?
The role of empathy in learning is significant because it helps students to understand and connect with the material they are learning. Empathy allows students to step into someone else’s shoes and see the world from their perspective. This can be helpful in subjects like history, where it is beneficial for students to understand the motivations behind historical events. Additionally, empathy can help students to connect with people from different cultures and backgrounds, which can be valuable in a global society.
In order to learn effectively, students must be able to understand and feel what it is like to be in another person’s shoes. This is where empathy comes in. Empathy allows students to see the world from another person’s perspective and develop compassion for others. It is a vital component of social-emotional learning and can help students build relationships, communicate better, and resolve conflicts.
Conclusion
Our TeachThought Learning Taxonomy includes domains of ‘Self,’ ‘Interdependence,’ ‘Function,’ and ‘Abstraction,’ implying the human, emotional, and connected nature of learning. Learning is about experimenting through, playing with, and otherwise coming to internalize new information and perspective. Knowledge-holding is only one part of ‘knowing.’
Empathy provides not only provides a common ground between people–and a human tone–but also an authentic need to know what we know and use that knowledge to improve the interactions we value the most.
Adapted image attribution flickr user flickeringbrad; The Opportunities For Empathy In The Classroom
WAUKEGAN, Ill. — On a sunny but brisk November afternoon inside Robert Abbott Middle School, six eighth grade girls quickly filed into a small but colorful classroom and seated themselves in a circle.
Yuli Paez-Naranjo, a Working on Womanhood counselor, sported a purple WOW T-shirt as she led the group in a discussion about how values can inform decisions.
“Do you ever feel like two little angels are sitting on each of your shoulders, one whispering good things to you, the other whispering bad things?” Paez-Naranjo asked the girls. The students nodded and giggled.
At the 50-minute WOW circle, girls have a chance to set aside the pressures of the school day, laugh with and listen to one another, and work through personal problems. The weekly meeting is the centerpiece of individual and group therapy that WOW offers throughout the school year to Black and Hispanic girls, and to students of all races who identify as female or nonbinary, in grades 6 to 12.
The Working on Womanhood program operates in Waukegan, Illinois, and several other school districts around the country. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Created in 2011 by Black and Hispanic social workers at the nonprofit organization Youth Guidance, WOW’s goal is to build a healthy sense of self-awareness, confidence and resilience in a population that is often underserved by mental health programs.
Youth Guidance offers WOW to about 350 students in Waukegan Community Unit School District 60, which serves an industrial town of about 88,000 located about 30 miles north of Chicago. Just over 93 percent of the district’s 13,600 students are Black or Hispanic, and about 67 percent come from families classified as low income.
The program also serves students in Chicago, Boston, Kansas City and Dallas. WOW counselors work with school-based behavioral health teams, administrators and teachers to identify students with high stress levels who might benefit from the program.
Multiple hurdles, including funding, counselor burnout and distrust of mental health programs stand in the way of getting WOW to more students. But one way the program overcomes impediments is by bringing the program to the place students spend most of their time — school.
Yuli Paez-Naranjo, the Working on Womanhood counselor based at Robert Abbott Middle School in Waukegan, Illinois, said she’s seen a decrease in anger and fights among the girls participating in the mental health support program. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Paez-Naranjo, who is so well-liked among Abbott students that even kids who aren’t in the program seek her out, posed a question to the group.
“Let’s talk about positive and negative consequences of certain decisions. How about fighting?” she asked.
“The only positive outcome is you may find out how strong you are,” said Deanna Palacio, one of the girls.
“Why fight when you can talk it out?” asked another student, Ka’Neya Lehn.
“Right? What’s the point?” said a third girl, Ana Ortiz.
Nacole Milbrook, Youth Guidance chief program officer, said WOW was developed to address often overlooked needs among Hispanic and Black girls. “Girls have been left out [of mental health support initiatives], mainly because they are not making trouble,” she said.
A baseline study of over 2,000 girls in Chicago’s public schools, conducted by the University of Chicago Education Lab team,found “staggeringly high” rates of trauma exposure: Nearly one third of the participating young women had witnessed someone being violently assaulted or killed, and almost half lost someone close to them through violent or sudden death. Some 38 percent of girls in this group showed signs of PTSD, double the rate of service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Once a week, girls at Robert Abbott Middle School and other schools in the Waukegan, Illinois, area meet with their peers and a counselor to work through personal problems. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Paez-Naranjo and fellow WOW counselor Te’Ericka Kimbrough, who works at Waukegan Alternative/Optional Educational Center, have supported students who have suffered sexual assault. Some participants in their circles are teen parents. Others are trying to resist negative peer pressure. Still others are in families that are struggling financially.
Ana Ortiz, an eighth grader at Robert Abbott Middle School, said the Working on Womanhood program “helps me understand better about myself.” Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
“They are perceived as resilient and possessing grit,” Nuamah said. “This obscures the real mental health needs of students of color and perpetuates institutionally racist policies because these students are not perceived as needing the same resources.”
Serving students where they are physically present nearly 200 days per year is one way to fill the too-often unmet need for support, Nuamah said.
“WOW is the only [school-based] organization that does what it does to the extent that it does,” she said. “Most [mental health] services are offered out of school.”
“Before I came here, I was not finding myself at all.”
Ana Ortiz, student, Robert Abbott Middle School
Laurel Crown, Youth Guidance senior research and evaluation manager, said the nonprofit is working to figure out just what parts of the program work best. End-of-school-year participant surveys, which use measures similar to those used in the Education Lab study, suggest that the relationships developed between WOW counselors and participants are a key reason the program is effective.
“Our theory of change is that WOW works because … [students] are attending this incredibly powerful support group every week and this support person is there every day in the school for them,” Crown said.
WOW counselors are “systemically engaged” in the schools where they are based, said Fabiola Rosiles-Duran, WOW program supervisor for Waukegan. They stay informed about whole-school dynamics by being part of behavioral health team and all-staff meetings.
Counselors Kimbrough and Paez-Naranjo added that daily access to teachers and staff provides wraparound support for their students. The counselors’ presence also helps them respond to acute situations immediately and follow up on student progress each school day.
“If I need extra support with a student, I can lean on the school behavioral health team,” Kimbrough said. She added that if she has a student in crisis, being able to see that student regularly helps her know if their interventions are working.
Providing intensive support to students every school day can be emotionally taxing for WOW counselors. Youth Guidance provides group training and individual support to help counselors maintain their own emotional health.
During their first year on the job, counselors participate in three hours of curriculum training each month plus three days of refresher courses. Many training activities mirror those the counselors will later use with their students.
WOW leaders also check in every weekday to offer support to the counselors. Those new to WOW also attend a two-day, three-night retreat that “helps counselors and staff figure out what’s happening within ourselves,” said Ngozi Harris, Youth Guidance director of program and staff development, “so we have the fuel to do this work.”
A baseline study of over 2,000 girls in the Chicago school district, which is served by WOW, found that 38 percent of girls in grades 9 to 11 exhibited signs of PTSD.
One study found that the multiple layers of support WOW offers students and staff, at a cost of about $2,300 per participant, are cost-effective. Still, that can amount to a significant portion of a district’s or school’s annual budget.
But Jason Nault, Waukegan CUSD 60’s associate superintendent of equity, innovation and accountability, said WOW is well worth the cost. Earlier this year, the district’s Board of Education approved a two-year extension of its contract with WOW and its counterpart for male students, Becoming a Man, at a cost of $4.2 million.
Nault said data Youth Guidance collects at the end of each school year shows WOW students are less depressed and anxious, more self-confident and have less post-traumatic stress.
Deanna Palacio, an eighth grader at Robert Abbott Middle School in Waukegan, Illinois, said she feels “heard and understood” by her peers and counselor in the Working on Womanhood program. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Yet multiple implementation challenges exist for WOW and other school-based student support programs. One is that the work of counselors is isolating and can lead to psychological burnout, said Inger Burnett-Zeigler, associate professor of psychology at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
“There is significant and chronic and traumatic stress the WOW counselors experience,” she said. Burnett-Zeigler is working with WOW to develop and test an evidence-based mindfulness intervention to support counselors.
“Counselor well-being is important in and of itself,” said Burnett-Zeigler. It also can support youth outcomes, she said.
Another barrier experienced by programs like WOW is that, according to research, Hispanic and Black families are more reluctant to seek out mental health support and treatment than other ethnic and racial groups. The WOW program works to build trust not only with the students, but with their parents and family members.
“You feel heard and understood here.”
Deanna Palacio, student, Robert Abbott Middle School
“Families of color have a tendency to not name mental health issues as mental health issues,” said Milbrook, the chief program officer for the organization that oversees WOW. “Seeking treatment still has a stigma, even for children.”
Milbrook said the school-based setting is key for destigmatizing both mental health conditions and treatment.
“Being in school and participating in the groups with other students, understanding that you’re not the only person dealing with these same problems, and talking about them in ways that don’t feel like their idea of traditional therapy” all help, she said.
Also essential, Milbrook added, is fostering a sense of belonging. “We give the participants WOW T-shirts, and now they can walk around the school identifying as Working on Womanhood girls,” she said. “All of a sudden, nobody is ashamed to be in this group.”
Deanna, the Abbott eighth grader, added that the sense of belonging WOW fosters has helped her feel less lonely.
Although the school setting presents advantages for WOW, it can also involve implementation challenges. Youth Guidance’s Harris said that both WOW staff and school staff want positive outcomes for WOW students, but WOW’s healing-centered approach might conflict with a school’s discipline policy. So, school staff might initially be wary of program staff and counselors.
Schools also sometimes underestimate the expertise of the counselors, and sometimes even ask them to take on tasks like cafeteria monitoring that are not their responsibility.
“It takes a year of building relationships, really being intentional about how to collaborate with the school,” said Harris. “Until that trust is built, you are an outsider.”
Paying for the program is another challenge. Although Waukegan CUSD 60 covers all program costs, most districts do not. Youth Guidance relies primarily on philanthropic support to pay for its programs.
Youth Guidance is less likely to tap into public funding sources like Medicaid because the public assistance program’s cumbersome processes can lead to higher program costs and even threaten the trust WOW builds with students and their families.
For example, WOW counselors often make numerous phone calls to parents, or visit them at home. It’s time well spent, Milbrook said, but it’s not financially productive. Counselors can only bill their time to Medicaid after a parent signs a consent form.
By being embedded in the schools such as Robert Abbott Middle School in Waukegan, Illinois, Working on Womanhood counselors say they can build deeper bonds with the students in their mental health support program. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Despite some of these implementation challenges, WOW leaders and counselors consider the Waukegan WOW program a success.
“As a whole [group], I’ve seen a decrease in anger and fights,” said Paez-Naranjo, the Abbott Middle WOW counselor.
The lessons on mindfulness during WOW Circles at Abbott Middle School have helped Ana Ortiz build confidence in her emerging identity as a young woman. She, like her other classmates in the program, returned for a second year after starting WOW as seventh graders.
“Before I came here, I was not finding myself at all,” Ana said. “I wanted to know, how is it, being a woman? I wanted to know what other girls’ opinions and perspectives were.”
Paez-Naranjo said she has seen Ana’s growth since last school year.
“Ana has stepped out of her comfort zone a lot more. She feels more confident to share intimate details about her life and is willing to support anyone in need,” said Paez-Naranjo.
“And she is so much more smiley,” Paez-Naranjo added. “You can see her smile from a mile away.”
Later, on her way out of the Wednesday Abbott WOW circle, Ana turned back to offer a final take on how WOW has helped her.
“It makes me feel free in here,” she said, flashing one of those smiles. “I understand better about myself.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
This story was produced by The Associated Press and EdSource and republished with permission.
CONCORD, Calif. – Aylah Levy had some catching up to do this fall when she started first grade.
After spending her kindergarten year at an alternative program that met exclusively outdoors, Aylah, 6, had to adjust to being inside a classroom. She knew only a handful of numbers and was not printing her letters clearly. To help her along, the teacher at her Bay Area elementary school has been showing her the right way to hold a pencil.
“It’s harder. Way, way harder,” Aylah said of the new grip.
Still, her mother, Hannah Levy, says it was the right decision to skip kindergarten. She wanted Aylah to enjoy being a kid. There is plenty of time, she reasoned, for her daughter to develop study skills.
Hannah Levy holds her daughter Aylah, 6, in Albany, Calif., Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2023. Credit: (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
The number of kindergartners in public school plunged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Concerned about the virus or wanting to avoid online school, hundreds of thousands of families delayed the start of school for their young children. Most have returned to schooling of some kind, but even three years after the pandemic school closures, kindergarten enrollment has continued to lag.
Some parents like Levy don’t see much value in traditional kindergarten. For others, it’s a matter of keeping children in other child care arrangements that better fit their lifestyles. And for many, kindergarten simply is no longer the assumed first step in a child’s formal education, another sign of the way the pandemic and online learning upended the U.S. school system.
Kindergarten enrollment remained down 5.2 percent in the 2022-2023 school year compared with the 2019-2020 school year, according to an Associated Press analysis of state-level data. Public school enrollment across all grades fell 2.2 percent.
Kindergarten is considered a crucial year for children to learn to follow directions, regulate behavior and get accustomed to learning. Missing that year of school can put kids at a disadvantage, especially those from low-income families and families whose first language is not English, said Deborah Stipek, a former dean of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Those children are sometimes behind in recognizing letters and counting to 10 even before starting school, she said.
But to some parents, that foundation seems less urgent post-pandemic. For many, kindergarten just doesn’t seem to work for their lives.
Students who disengaged during the pandemic school closures have been making their way back to schools. But kindergarten enrollment remained down 5.2 percent in the 2022-2023 school year compared with the 2019-2020 school year, according to an Associated Press analysis of state-level data. Public school enrollment across all grades fell 2.2 percent.
Kindergarten means a seismic change in some families’ lifestyles. After years of all-day child care, they suddenly must manage afternoon pickups with limited and expensive options for after-school care. Some worry their child isn’t ready for the structure and behavioral expectations of a public school classroom. And many think whatever their child misses at school can be quickly learned in first grade.
Christina Engram holds daughter, Neveah, left, 6, and son, Choncey, 4, while spending time together at home in Oakland, Calif., on Friday Nov. 24, 2023. Credit: (AP Photo/Loren Elliott)
Neveah, 6, makes art at home in Oakland, Calif., on Friday Nov. 24, 2023. Credit: (AP Photo/Loren Elliott)
Neveah, 6, makes art at home in Oakland, Calif., on Friday Nov. 24, 2023. Credit: (AP Photo/Loren Elliott)
Neveah, 6, pets her pet bearded dragon lizard, named Gizmo, at home in Oakland, Calif., on Friday Nov. 24, 2023. Credit: (AP Photo/Loren Elliott)
Christina Engram was set to send her daughter Nevaeh to kindergarten this fall at her neighborhood school in Oakland, until she learned her daughter would not have a spot in the after-school program there. That meant she would need to be picked up at 2:30 most afternoons.
“If I put her in public school, I would have to cut my hours, and I basically wouldn’t have a good income for me and my kids,” said Engram, a preschool teacher and a mother of two.
Engram decided to keep Nevaeh in a child care center for another year. Engram receives a state child care subsidy that helps her pay for full-time child care or preschool until her child is 6 and must enroll in first grade.
“If I put her in public school, I would have to cut my hours, and I basically wouldn’t have a good income for me and my kids.”
Christina Engram, a preschool teacher and a mother of two
Compared with kindergarten, she believed her daughter would be more likely to receive extra attention at the child care center, which has more adult staff per child.
“She knows her numbers. She knows her ABC’s. She knows how to spell her name,” Engram said. “But when she feels frustrated that she can’t do something, her frustration overtakes her. She needs extra attention and care. She has some shyness about her when she thinks she’s going to give the wrong answer.”
In California, where kindergarten is not mandatory, enrollment for that grade fell 10.1 percent from the 2019-20 to 2021-22 school year. Enrollment seemed to rebound in the next school year, growing by over 5 percent in fall 2022, but that may have been inflated by the state’s expansion of transitional kindergarten — a grade before kindergarten that is available to older 4-year-olds. The state Department of Education has not disclosed how many children last school year were regular kindergartners as opposed to transitional students.
Many would-be kindergartners are among the tens of thousands of families that have turned to homeschooling.
Some parents say they came to homeschooling almost accidentally. Convinced their family wasn’t ready for “school,” they kept their 5-year-old home, then found they needed more structure. They purchased some activities or a curriculum — and homeschooling stuck.
Hannah Levy, rear, follows with her daughter, Aylah, 6, at Codornices Park, a location Aylah attended as a Berkeley Forest School student, during an interview in Berkeley, Calif., Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2023. Credit: (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
Others chose homeschooling for kindergartners after watching older children in traditional school. Jenny Almazan is homeschooling Ezra, 6, after pulling his sister Emma, 9, from a school in Chino, California.
“She would rush home from school, eat dinner, do an hour or two of schoolwork, shower and go to bed. She wasn’t given time to be a kid,” Almazan said. Almazan also worried about school shootings and pressures her kids might face at school to act or dress a certain way.
To make it all work, Almazan quit her job as a preschool teacher. Most days, the children’s learning happens outside of the home, when they are playing at the park, visiting museums or even doing math while grocery shopping.
“She would rush home from school, eat dinner, do an hour or two of schoolwork, shower and go to bed. She wasn’t given time to be a kid.”
Jenny Almazan, who is homeschooling Ezra, 6, after pulling his sister Emma, 9, from a school in Chino, California
“My kids are not missing anything by not being in public school,” she said. “Every child has different needs. I’m not saying public school is bad. It’s not. But for us, this fits.”
Kindergarten is important for all children, but especially those who do not attend preschool or who haven’t had much exposure to math, reading and other subjects, said Steve Barnett, co-director for the National Institute for Early Education Research and a professor at Rutgers University.
“The question actually is: If you didn’t go to kindergarten, what did you do instead?” he said.
Hannah Levy chose the Berkeley Forest School to start her daughter’s education, in part because she valued how teachers infused subjects like science with lessons on nature. She pictured traditional kindergarten as a place where children sit inside at desks, do worksheets and have few play-based experiences.
“I learned about nature. We learned in a different way,” daughter Aylah said.
But the appeal of a suburban school system had brought the family from San Francisco, and when it came time for first grade, Aylah enrolled at Cornell Elementary in Albany.
Aylah Levy, 6, walks on rocks in a creek at Codornices Park, a location she attended as a Berkeley Forest School student, during an interview with her mother, Hannah, in Berkeley, Calif., Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2023. Credit: (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
Early this fall, Levy recalled Aylah coming home with a project where every first grader had a page in a book to write about who they were. Some pages had only scribbles and others had legible print. She said Aylah fell somewhere in the middle.
“It was interesting to me because it was the moment I thought, ‘What would it be like if she was in kindergarten?’” she said.
In a conference with Levy, Aylah’s teacher said she was working with the girl on her writing, but there were no other concerns. “She said anything Aylah was behind on, she has caught up to the point that she would never differentiate that Aylah didn’t go to Cornell for kindergarten as well,” Levy said.
Levy said she feels good about Aylah’s attitude toward school, though she misses knowing she was outside interacting with nature.
So does Aylah.
“I miss my friends and being outside,” she said. “I also miss my favorite teacher.”
Lurye reported from New Orleans and Stavely reported from Oakland. Daniel J. Willis of EdSource contributed from Concord.
This article was produced by The Associated Press and. EdSource is a nonprofit newsroom based in California that covers equity in education with in-depth analysis and data-driven journalism.
The Associated Press receives support from the Overdeck Family Foundation for reporting focused on early learning. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
As a former public-school teacher, I know that my students sometimes acted out when they didn’t receive the additional educational supports they needed. Too often they then faced a choice: Get your licks or go home.
“Licks” meant an assistant principal beat their backsides with a paddle. “Go home” meant suspension. Those who chose the former would come back to class dejected, disengaged and depressed.
Many people may assume that what I saw is an outlier, but the latest Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) shows that at least 19,395 students experienced corporal punishment during the 2020-21 school year. Every time the CRDC data is released, I am reminded that corporal punishment continues in our schools today, and I am convinced it can be put to an end tomorrow.
To make this change, advocates must demand that their education leaders end this inhumane practice.
Corporal punishment has been banned in a majority of states since the mid 1990s. Nevertheless, during the 2017-18 school year, the CRDC reported, 69,492 students received corporal punishment, on top of 92,479 students in 2015-16. The most recent number is much lower mainly because in-person instruction and data reporting were disrupted during the pandemic.
Corporal punishment remains expressly legal in 16 states. Banning the practice in just 10 of those states, including the one I taught in, Alabama, along with Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas, would reduce the number of schools using corporal punishment by over 99 percent. Despite the small number of cases in the remaining six states where it is legal — Arizona, Idaho, Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina and Wyoming — it is still important to ban corporal punishment there to prevent individual schools from continuing the practice.
Additionally, explicitly prohibiting corporal punishment in states that have not yet done so (Connecticut, Kansas, Indiana, Maine, New Hampshire, and South Dakota) would protect future generations.
Corporal punishment needs to end because there is no evidence that retaining it decreases misbehavior. In other words, in the states that allow it, corporal punishment is not helping students control their behavior.
Instead, corporal punishment is associated with unintended negative consequences. These include higher rates of mental health problems, more negative parent-child relationships, lower cognitive ability, lower academic achievement, lower self-esteem and higher risk for physical abuse.
While practicing corporal punishment has never made sense, it makes even less sense now.
Ending corporal punishment is also a civil rights issue: It is disproportionately used against Black students, students with disabilities and male students. News reports have highlighted that Black students receive physical punishment at twice the rate of white students nationwide; research shows that educators’ perceptions of student behavior are based on the students’ race — rather than the actual behavior — and that these perceptions contribute to the disproportionate rates in school discipline.
While practicing corporal punishment has never made sense, it makes even less sense now that millions of students have not returned or are continuing to miss school since pandemic-based disruptions.
While states revisit their discipline policies, they should also reduce the “go home” exclusionary discipline practices (suspensions and expulsions), which can undermine children’s attachment to school. Such harsh punishments increase the chances of students dropping out and feed the school-to-prison pipeline. In addition to those punishments increasing the number of school days students miss, research shows that exclusionary discipline can decrease students’ likelihood of accumulating course credits, reduce their likelihood of graduating and lower their chances of earning a postsecondary credential.
In my experience observing its impacts, corporal punishment has a similar distancing effect on students as suspensions and expulsions — making school feel like a place where they do not belong.
Schools still need to address misbehavior, of course, but there are better ways to do this. They can replace corporal punishment with evidence-based practices that help create safe and inclusive learning environments for all students. Such practices — including advisory systems, in which students meet regularly with a staff member about academic challenges, and “looping,” in which students have the same teacher for multiple years — build positive school-student relationships. These positive relationships can help prevent physical violence and bullying.
Restorative practices, also backed by research, typically foster dialogue in “circles” or “conferences” in which educators help students listen to each other and to teachers in order to resolve conflict and build community. For me, this often meant chatting with students in a hallway about why they acted out, giving them a chance to share their side of the story, regroup and refocus on school.
Recent research shows that investing in student supports, including social and emotional learning and mental health, is a better way to make schools truly safe, along with professional development for teachers and school staff. States should act quickly to make these alternatives more widely available and make schools less like prisons and more like everywhere else.
Corporal punishment is prohibited in almost every facet of life in the U.S. except schools. It is banned in military training centers, child care centers and juvenile detention facilities, and cannot be carried out as a sentence for a juvenile crime. The vast majority of children (76 percent) across the globe are protected by law from corporal punishment. Let’s use this current round of CRDC data to spur action to give our students better choices than the one my students faced.
Stephen Kostyo is an Impact Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists. Before working in education policy, Kostyo taught middle and high school math and science — and was recognized as a high school Teacher of the Year by his peers in 2015.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Four Ways to Support Grieving Students Through Writing
contributed by Brittany R. Collins
Approximately 700,000 young people in the United States lost a parent during 2020-21, with the COVID-19 pandemic boosting bereavement rates—not only due to the virus, but to the increased violence, substance use, and requisite illness that it engendered.
Researchers have revealed how these ramifications disproportionately impacted, and continue to impact, historically minoritized communities, those most harmed by inequitable access to responsive, unbiased healthcare, and whose lived realities in an unjust world themselves correlate with increased likelihoods of disease—a ‘weathering‘ of the body under the persistent stress of injustice.
For young people, the loss of a loved one—especially of a parent, guardian, or other primary caregiver—can pose a significant disruption in development. It may constitute an early childhood trauma leading to later-life mental and physical health implications, especially if interwoven with other experiences of inequity.
When considering differentiating instruction, we must consider bereavement alongside the other contextual factors and life experiences we consider when building supportive classroom spaces. Writing offers one way to do so.
A Possible Role For Teachers
It’s important to note that teachers are not trained mental health professionals—and role clarity is a critical component of maintaining adult mental health when working with youth, especially in the face of an unprecedented youth mental health crisis. It’s also important to note that young people should never be put on the spot to make disclosures about loss or grief, but neither should they be silenced when bringing up personal experiences in the learning space.
To honor these tensions and center everyone’s well-being, children and adults, at school, the following writing activities offer ways for personal reflection that may support those experiencing loss while offering differentiated options for engagement.
1: Expressive Writing
Research in the psychological sciences shows that expressive writing, or writing that uses emotion words (e.g., sad, angry, delighted, awestruck), improves mental and physical well-being—with a correlation between greater numbers of emotion words and higher levels of impact.
To apply this finding to practice, create intentional, private spaces for students to engage in writing—perhaps distributing journals and making space for ‘writing stretches’ in which students keep their pen or pencil moving, noticing what emotion words come up for them that day, using those words as prompts to propel their freeform storytelling. The Feelings Wheel is a helpful resource for identifying and sharing feeling words.
2: Allowing Choice in Writing Topics
Choice bolsters agency, and agency is a critical tenet of trauma-informed care, given that the situations that cause grief and trauma are often those that leave young people without control and agency. Infusing consistent, meaningful opportunities for students to have a say in and over their learning offers a reclamation of autonomy.
In the writing classroom, this might mean allowing students to design and/or select their own prompts and writing topics or storytelling formats—according to Universal Design for Learning best practices—when multiple modalities would guide them toward shared learning objectives. “Being able to choose their own topics meant the room was full of children’s stories of the reasons for their choices,” writes Elizabeth Dutro in The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy: Centering Trauma as Powerful Pedagogy. “Research is often deeply connected to autobiography.”
3: Teaching Letter Writing
As the popular YA novel by Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead, demonstrates, letter writing—whether to real or fictional recipients—can serve as a powerful vessel for processing emotions, communicating thoughts and feelings, and paying tribute to important people in our lives who have passed away, allowing writers to leverage literacy for learning amid loss.
Using letters from Dellaira’s text as a model, invite students to experiment with letter form: writing to an ancestor, perhaps, or a celebrity; their past or future self; someone with whom they no longer speak; someone they hope to one day meet. There are many variations on this prompt, and while they do not all connect directly with grief, they may create space for explorations of the emotional themes most resonant to students in the moment.
Grief, too, it’s important to name, is not always tied to a death—’living losses’ include:
–Moving to a new school, state, or town
-Experiencing a parent’s divorce
-Enduring a familial falling-out
Letters–and writing more broadly–can make space for young people to make sense of these experiences.
4: Responding to Content Alongside Structure
Avoidance is a natural coping mechanism when faced with any pain, but it can also perpetuate othering for students experiencing hardship. This means that, as a caring adult in a young person’s life, if a student does elect to explore themes of grief and loss in their writing, it is best to acknowledge their storytelling, rather than circumvent the substance of their piece, commenting on writing technique alone.
An Easy Place To Start Supporting Grieving Students Through Writing
If you aren’t sure where to start, consider thanking the student for trusting you enough to share their story; share a lesson that you learned from reading the piece, or a question or thought that it inspired you to entertain; connect the students’ lived literature experiences; or express empathy and validation for the courage the young person is demonstrating through their work.
Of course, if a student’s writing sparks concern for their or others’ well-being, you will need to connect with—and connect students with—additional mental health resources. Identify your support team in advance so you feel prepared should concerning situations arise, but know that articulations of grief can be healing, writing, and reading vehicles for processing hardship in the space of a supportive learning community. By making space for this work in careful, moderated ways, you offer students resources to turn to when coping with challenging emotions across the lifespan.
About Brittany R. Collins
Brittany designs and supports educational and professional programming at Write the World while working directly with students, teachers, and partners to support their platform use. Having previously developed and overseen Write the World’s Creative Writing Workshops, Brittany channels her passion for designing programs that foster and facilitate engaging learning environments for Write the World’s educator-facing programs. She connects pedagogy, technology, and professional learning to collaborate with teachers worldwide.
Beyond Write the World, Brittany is a writer, teacher, and instructional coach in the fields of trauma-informed teaching and social-emotional learning. Her book, Learning from Loss: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Supporting Grieving Students, was published in 2021, and she has published over 40 peer-reviewed and public-facing articles in The Washington Post, Education Week, Edutopia, National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), Inside Higher Ed, and Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Usable Knowledge, among other outlets. Brittany has facilitated programming for students and teachers through Harvard Graduate School of Education; Columbia University; PBS Learning Media; National Association of Social Workers (NY); New York University; and School Crisis Recovery and Renewal; among other organizations.
Brittany studied English and Education at Smith College and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Creative Nonfiction at the Yale Writers’ Workshop; and holds a Certificate in Traumatic Stress Studies from the Trauma Research Foundation.
Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Future of Learning newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about education innovation.
Immediately following the Saturday, Oct. 7, attack on Israeli communities by Hamas and Israel’s resulting declaration of war, teachers began reaching out to the San Diego County Office of Education seeking guidance on how to address the war on Monday morning with their students.
Julie Goldman, the office’s director of equity curriculum and instruction, and her team spent that weekend compiling a detailed guide for educators and parents on how to discuss the events happening overseas. The guide, released Oct. 9, contains resources on how to have civil discourse on contested issues; historical information and current news on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; material on discussing war and violence in age-appropriate ways, and information on combating antisemitism and Islamophobia in schools.
Goldman said the office, which serves the county’s 42 school districts, 129 charter schools and five community college districts, has many Palestinian American, Israeli American, Jewish and Muslim students.
“We want to make sure that every child feels seen and heard and loved and valued in our classrooms,” Goldman said. “None of us can learn if we don’t feel safe, and so it’s really about creating those safe spaces for dialogue.”
The work Goldman’s office did to provide these educational guides is exactly how education leaders should respond to important social issues, according to Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
“Their job is to help students understand the world, to help them wrestle with a world which is complex and sometimes overwhelming,” said Hess.
Hess and Jal Mehta, a professor of education at Harvard University, routinely debate big issues in education, often from opposing viewpoints, on their blog, “Straight Talk with Rick and Jal.” The goal, according to the two, is to offer educators a model for promoting constructive dialogue among students, where two people may disagree but can still learn from one another.
Mehta said teachers and principals may be tempted to stay out of teaching about the Israel-Hamas war because it’s so politicized. But even younger students are aware of what’s happening in the world – in particular Jewish and Palestinian students who may be deeply affected by the events.
“What schools can do is broaden students’ understanding and help them see kind of the multiple truths that are there in this situation,” Mehta said.
These conversations can be conducted in age-appropriate ways beginning in first grade, Hess added. While elementary students may be too young to understand the emotional, historical and moral debates surrounding Israel and Palestine, he said, they can build a basic understanding of the region’s geography, the history of how and why Israel was created, and why Palestinians feel like they have been “trapped in ghettos.”
“None of us can learn if we don’t feel safe, and so it’s really about creating those safe spaces for dialogue.”
Julie Goldman, San Diego County Office of Education’s director of equity curriculum and instruction
It’s okay for teachers to acknowledge with students that they aren’t experts on the topic, Mehta added. “In terms of this conflict, I wouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” he said. Educators can share that they are learning alongside their students, he said.
Goldman said teachers trust her office’s resource guides because of the process that goes into to creating them. Starting in 2020, the office began putting together educator guides out of “a real and immediate need” to address political events, school shootings, hate crimes and various heritage months, as topics within the classroom, she said. Her staff reaches out to community groups and others for their input.
Goldman said a resource guide that includes vetted primary sources from different perspectives can give students and educators a way into difficult discussions without shutting anyone out. The guide on the Israel-Palestine conflict includes links to lessons and curricula from the education nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves and the Judaism-focused Institute for Curriculum Services, as well as sources from the Anti-Defamation League and AllSides, a company designed to combat media bias.
“We will have had this meaningful scholarly discussion that’s based in history and primary sources,” she said.
While the Israel-Palestine conflict has always been a difficult subject for educators, the recent adoption of policies in some states that limit conversations on topics such as race has added to teachers’ fears about discussing such contested issues, said Deborah Menkart, co-director of the Zinn Education Project, a collaboration between progressive nonprofits Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.
“Their job is to help students understand the world, to help them wrestle with a world which is complex and sometimes overwhelming.”
Rick Hess, director of education policy studies, American Enterprise Institute
The Zinn Education Project recently released a list of resources and lesson plans for educators that include both Palestinian and Israeli voices, but Menkart said the focus is on providing perspectives often left out of mainstream media or textbooks. Many of the resources on their list include Palestinian and Arab authors and lessons from nonprofits such as Teach Palestine.
That has led to some criticism of her group’s list of resources, acknowledged Mimi Eisen, program manager at the Zinn Education Project. But she said it’s important that educators both share resources that aren’t one-sided and uplift the voices of those who’ve been “oppressed and stifled.”
Classroom discussions, especially in middle school, should explain the differences between Judaism and Zionism, and Palestinian people and groups like Hamas, she said.
Eisen said she has heard from teachers who said that even if they aren’t able to dedicate full class periods to talk about what’s happening in Gaza, they leave time at the start or end of each class to ask students to share how they are feeling, what they are hearing and learning about the issue, and to allow some discussion that’s student-led.
In San Diego, Goldman said teachers have found the resource guide to be helpful for starting conversations on Israel and Palestine.
“The main point is, are we preparing teachers not to step away but to find these age-appropriate ways to have meaningful conversations,” Goldman said. “The essence is how am I creating an inclusive space, so that all of my children feel seen and valued and they know that they can bring all parts of their languages and cultures to the classroom.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
In Newton, the liberal suburb of Boston where I live, parents of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim children gather weekly to discuss our concerns about how schools are responding to events in Israel/Palestine. We come together to find community and safety amid escalating hostility toward us because of a crisis we did not create and do not condone.
Schools should support the well-being of all students equally. They should help children develop a healthy sense of identity and belonging, encourage curiosity about divergent perspectives and teach the skills needed to constructively address conflict. Unfortunately, we feel that Newton schools, like others throughout the United States, not only fall short, but are complicit in perpetuating divisive anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment — and their complicity is not new.
When 9/11 happened, my oldest daughter was in school in Newton. The principal took great pains to tell the children that they and their families were safe. But it felt like she was only considering the white kids, oblivious to how others, especially Muslims, would increasingly be subject to suspicion. My daughter, just 5 at the time, got the message at school that being a Muslim Arab was something “different” and to be ashamed of.
Schools should support the well-being of all students. They should help children develop a healthy sense of identity and belonging, encourage curiosity about divergent perspectives and teach the skills needed to constructively address conflict.
Seeing the writing on the wall, our mixed American Jewish-Palestinian Muslim family relocated to Jerusalem so the kids could find pride in their culture. When we returned to Newton 13 years later, our youngest daughter found friends here, most of whom were Jewish. But the kids worried they would be ostracized if they spoke about Palestine at school, and when my daughter raised concerns about censorship with school staff, they dismissed it as a simple misunderstanding. She decided to leave the district and graduate from a school where kids from marginalized backgrounds were believed when they talked about their own life experiences.
One year later, during the 2021 Israeli attack on Gaza, a teacher was dismissed from that same Newton school for writing a pro-Palestinian (not anti-Israel or anti-Jewish) statement on a white board. While we do not know enough about what happened in the classroom to determine if the termination was justified, the principal’s explanation to the community was definitely not appropriate. He wrote that “our students” had been put in an emotionally vulnerable position – but he certainly wasn’t talking about the district’s Palestinian students. My daughter read the letter and said it felt like being told that “others need to heal from your existence.”
Now, in 2023, everything is exponentially worse.
In the last three weeks in Newton, as in other cities, the superintendent, school principals, PTO groups and a local antiracism group issued statements about the current violence. A few expressed compassion for all those affected by events in the Middle East. But those messages were quickly walked back under pressure and revised to clarify solidarity only with Israelis. To us, it felt as if our city was condoning the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians.
If teachers and students are too frightened to learn about Arabs and Muslims and too uncomfortable to discuss the role the U.S. plays in international affairs, how can schools help kids become informed, global citizens?
References to the historical context, including 75 years of Israeli expulsion, colonization and occupation of Palestine, were absent. Uninformed people were left to misunderstand that the deplorable violence against Israeli civilians on October 7th was motivated solely by some kind of innate or religious hatred of Jews.
False accusations of antisemitism make Arabs and Muslims targets, threatening their children’s safety, both inside and outside of schools. A six-year-old Palestinian boy was murdered, and his mother seriously injured, by their Chicago landlord who was motivated by anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim hate, fueled in part by media bias that relies on inflammatory words like “brutal” “and “violent” in relation to Palestinians. In Newton, a Palestinian American mother, who was fearful that flyers of Israeli hostages posted around the city would increase division between Muslims and Jews, removed them with the approval of city hall. She was subsequently doxxed, lost her job and now has police protection because of threats against her family.
I understand why educators are scared to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. A few years ago, the Newton school district and several individuals were sued by the pro-Israel group Americans for Peace and Tolerance, which falsely asserted that the district’s instruction on Islam, the Middle East and Palestinians was antisemitic. Teaching accurate, nuanced history and providing unbiased context about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis has become dangerous for educators, not unlike the dangers they face from anti-critical race theory forces who seek to limit learning about the role of colonialism and slavery in U.S. history.
Unfortunately, that fear has led schools to avoid teaching about Palestinian experiences and narratives. To us, this censorship feels very much like blatant anti-Palestinian racism.
But it is not only Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students who suffer when fear and anti-Palestinian racism are normalized. All students do. If teachers and students are too frightened to learn about Arabs and Muslims and too uncomfortable to discuss the role the U.S. plays in international affairs, how can schools help kids become informed, global citizens?
The consequences of having an uninformed citizenry are dire. Without quality, unbiased information and antiracist education, U.S. citizens are less likely to support rational, humane policies and more likely to acquiesce to violent ones. As I write right now, Palestinian children are being killed in Gaza and Israeli hostages remain captive.
For all these reasons, Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and allied parents will continue to meet to support one another and the rights of all children. We will continue the important but often exhausting work of advocating for the recognition of Palestinian humanity in our schools and in Gaza and the West Bank. Only when U.S. educators stand bravely to uplift everyone – including Palestinians – can our schools ethically and credibly teach the next generation how to pursue justice and peace.
Nora Lester Murad is the author of “Ida in the Middle,” which won the 2023 Arab American Book Award in the young adult category and the Skipping Stones Honor Award, as well as “I Found Myself in Palestine: Stories of Love and Renewal from Around the Globe” (2020) and “Rest in My Shade: A Poem About Roots” (2018). While living in Palestine, Nora co-founded the community foundation Dalia Association and the group Aid Watch Palestine. From a Jewish family, Nora lives with her husband in Massachusetts and blogs at www.NoraLesterMurad.com.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
This story was produced by The 19th and republished with permission.
When Job Mayhue was a first-year student at the University of Michigan, both his girlfriend and best friend revealed within two weeks of each other that they had been sexually assaulted.
“I obviously knew that rape and sexual violence was an issue but had not had such clear proximity to it,” he said. “It hurts you different when it’s somebody that you know and love. I just was thinking, ‘I don’t want this to ever happen to anybody else.’”
Mayhue got involved with organizations that focus on sexual violence prevention, ultimately becoming a leader with It’s On Us, a national nonprofit program that works to support survivors and end college sexual assault. Having recently served as chair of It’s On Us’ male-identifying student athletes caucus, Mayhue — who graduated in the spring — found that men on college campuses simply are not adequately informed about sexual violence and consent.
“The trainings that we get — sometimes they aren’t even trainings — they’re just not enough,” Mayhue said. “They’re much more about checking the box rather than actually changing minds and hearts about issues. Obviously, that’s not effective.”
The new study found that 45 percent of respondents reported that they had not received sexual assault prevention training from their higher education institution and up to a third of those who did were ill equipped to identify and intervene in potentially violent interactions or relationships. Only 34 percent of respondents received formal training about consent in school, and just under a quarter (24 percent) of men learned about dating, sex and relationships in their K-12 education, meaning they had no baseline understanding of these issues or experience with comprehensive sex ed before starting college.
The report recommends several interventions, including a need for higher education institutions to offer comprehensive sex ed; effective trainings on campus sexual assault; prevention education that includes information on healthy relationships; bystander training; and a uniform definition of consent developed by policymakers.
“The vast majority of the men that we surveyed indicated that the ways that they learned about sex and relationships were from family or friends, the media, pornography or social media,” said Tracey Vitchers, executive director of It’s On Us. “You can’t guarantee that the information that they’re learning from those sources is accurate or healthy or comprehensive. In order to have effective prevention education, young men also need to have some form of comprehensive sex education prior to or in conjunction with the prevention education their colleges are providing them.”
The problem, Vitchers continued, is that most colleges do not provide comprehensive sex education based on the assumption that students already received it in grade school. But California, Oregon and Washington are the only three states that require comprehensive sex ed to be taught in all schools.
“In order to have effective prevention education, young men also need to have some form of comprehensive sex education prior to or in conjunction with the prevention education their colleges are providing them.”
Tracey Vitchers, executive director of It’s On Us
“It sort of ties into this larger challenge that we see nationwide where the college level is the first time that there are federal mandates for institutions to provide comprehensive sexual assault prevention education under the Clery Act,” said Vitchers, referencing the federal statute requiring colleges and universities to compile campus crime data, support survivors and identify the policies they’ve adopted to make campuses safer. “Whereas sex education and healthy relationship education or sexual violence prevention education at the K-12 level is controlled by the state, and there isn’t a national mandate.”
As a result, some K-12 students might not receive any sex ed, others might receive abstinence-only instruction and a select group might receive comprehensive sexuality education. These disparities have a negative impact on young men receiving sexual violence prevention education when they get to college, Vitchers said.
“If you ask somebody to be an active bystander, but they’ve never been educated on what a scenario is where they might have to be one or they don’t know how to interpret somebody else’s body language or behavior or if they don’t know that the behavior of their friend towards their girlfriend is unhealthy, how are they supposed to know that’s the moment to step in?” Vitchers asked.
Eighth grade is the only time 23-year-old Mayhue, who is from Chicago, recalled receiving sex ed instruction before college. Sexuality education is optional in Illinois. In middle school, Mayhue said the curriculum he did get focused mostly on scare tactics. The message amounted to: “Don’t have sex; you’ll get STDs. Be abstinent.” Topics such as consent or rape did not come up, he said, making his college years the first time he seriously pondered the significance of sexual violence.
Louis DiPede, a junior at Temple University in Philadelphia, had a similar experience. He said that he never received instruction about sex ed, dating or relationships at his private high school in northern New Jersey. A political science and criminal justice major, he decided to play an active role in sexual violence prevention after taking a class on sex crimes at Temple. Since then, the 21-year-old has become an It’s On Us leader, now serving as its fraternity caucus chair.
“We want to make sure that we’re telling people that, ‘It’s OK to have sex, but here’s how to do it safely,’” DiPede said. “‘It’s OK to have sex, but you have to ask for consent, and here’s how consent works. Here’s situations where you can’t consent.’ So, I think those are so important when we talk about sex ed and how the field as a whole needs to develop a holistic approach as well as actually get into schools.”
He is president of the Phi Mu Delta fraternity chapter at Temple and said that he’s proud of the organization for raising awareness about healthy forms of masculinity and being inclusive of LGBTQ+ experiences, including how the queer community addresses sexual violence. According to “Engaging Men Part 2,” LGBTQ+ men and men of color were more likely to accurately identify unhealthy or abusive relationship behaviors than other groups of men.
“It’s very interesting that you have students who come from historically excluded communities who are better educated on these issues, whereas potentially their white or straight or cisgender counterparts are not as well educated,” Vitchers said. “And I think that that’s just really fascinating, and it’s something that we are really thinking about digging into more.”
DiPede wants Greek letter organizations to improve how they educate members about sexual assault. The It’s On Us report found that fraternity members, along with athletes, are more likely to receive sexual violence prevention training than other groups of college men. Still, Greeks “displayed a lack of understanding of when sexual assault can occur and who can be a survivor of sexual assault,” the report found.
Some of the college men he’s encountered hesitate to get involved in sexual violence prevention because they believe it is a cause for victims only, DiPede said.
He tells men that they don’t need a particular backstory to become an advocate and that simply listening or supporting the work of others may be helpful, he said. Eventually, they will be ready to take part in an open and honest dialogue about sex, relationships and consent.
“We just need to get the right people in the room and equip them with the toolbox, so they can go back and help other people,” DiPede said.
Sometimes, it is the men themselves who need support as survivors. Last year, the University of Michigan announced that it would pay a $490 million settlement to more than 1,000 current and former male students who said that a sports doctor fondled their genitals and subjected them to unneeded prostate and hernia examinations during his nearly 40-year tenure at the school.
“If you were to go to anybody and say, ‘I am telling you this because you are potentially a violent person,’ and that person feels that fundamentally they’re not, that’s going to cause that person to get defensive and tune out. That is something that we’ve seen across all of the research that we’ve done, that the young men on college campuses find that [prevention education] is either completely ‘name, blame, shame’ or is irrelevant to them as men within their campus community.”
Tracey Vitchers, executive director of It’s On Us
Students protested the university for failing to respond to the allegations against the doctor much sooner. Mayhue invited men to discuss the controversy, but many brushed off what happened or simply didn’t feel comfortable discussing it, he said.
“Some guys didn’t know what to do with the weight of rape,” he said. When men do open up about their own experiences with sexual violence, however, it influences other men to do so, Mayhue added.
“It just creates a space where someone can say, ‘Hey, this happened to me, and if it’s happened to you, you’re safe here,’” he said.
Many colleges implement sexual assault awareness and prevention education programs that send the opposite message — that not only overlook that men can be victims of sexual violence but characterize all men as would-be perpetrators, Vitchers told The 19th.
“That immediately causes them to tune out because … that puts their guard up,” she said. “If you were to go to anybody and say, ‘I am telling you this because you are potentially a violent person,’ and that person feels that fundamentally they’re not, that’s going to cause that person to get defensive and tune out. That is something that we’ve seen across all of the research that we’ve done, that the young men on college campuses find that [prevention education] is either completely ‘name, blame, shame’ or is irrelevant to them as men within their campus community.”
The online platforms that higher education institutions have relied on since the COVID-19 pandemic shut schools down three years ago have added to the problem, according to Vitchers. They don’t reflect what most college campuses are like today and don’t give students the opportunity to ask questions or take part in role-playing discussions. They’re more like risk-management solutions than prevention education courses because they don’t include activities that “get to the heart of some of the nuances or biases or confusion that students have about some of these topics,” she said. Students pick up on the message that the schools aren’t invested in the issue and mentally and emotionally check out, too.
It doesn’t have to be this way, Vitchers said.
When It’s On Us officials have gathered college men in a room to discuss sexual assault, they have found that the students want to ask hard questions and engage in an intentional conversation.
“We want to see a shift in the way that colleges invest in prevention education to actually being student-centered because otherwise students are going to continue to look elsewhere for this information,” Vitchers said. “And the information might not be wholly accurate or may be laden with really harmful myths about sexual violence and rape and who can or cannot be a perpetrator.”
Misinformation is one reason prevention advocates want to connect with a broad swath of college men about sexual violence. But DiPede is also motivated to cast a wide net because of how pervasive this kind of misconduct is.
“I think everyone is impacted by sexual assault,” he said. “We’re suffering at a societal level because of it.”
This story was produced by The 19th and republished with permission.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Dora Ramos is a family child care provider in Stamford, Connecticut, where the temperature climbed above 90 degrees for a few days in July. She takes care of children in her home, which has a large backyard, and was able to adapt, still getting the children outside, even on the hottest days.
“Our parents bring the children at 7:10 a.m., so we bring them outside very early — first thing,” she said. “We have sprinklers; they use the hose to fill up pots with water and ‘cook.’”
But in Dallas, where the high hit 110 degrees on August 18, it wasn’t safe or possible to play outside for weeks-long stretches this summer, said Cori Berg, the director of Hope Day School, a preschool there. “It was cranky weather for sure,” she said. “What most people don’t really think about is what it’s like for a child in a center. They’re cooped up in one room for hours and hours and hours.”
Much research supports young children’s need for movement, outdoor play and time in nature. Regulations in many places require kids in child care facilities to have access to outdoor play space, weather permitting.
But increasingly, the weather does not permit. And leaders in the world of early childhood development are starting to call attention to the imperative to design and upgrade child care centers — and the cities where they are located — for our climate-altered world, with the needs of the youngest in mind.
“During the smoke some kids felt very sad that they couldn’t go outside. And the caregivers had to explain to them what was wrong.”
Jessica Sager, who runs the network All Our Kin
“They have the least responsibility for causing the climate crisis but will bear the brunt of it,” said Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force, which has just issued its first set of recommendations. (Full disclosure, I’m an advisor to This Is Planet Ed, which convened the task force in collaboration with the think tank Capita.)
“One of the things we have to do is take the climate resources coming through the Inflation Reduction Act, and make sure that we prioritize young children, both in multifamily housing and early care/education,” said Garling. But while children under 5 have a developmental need to spend time outside, extreme weather — whether heat, wildfire smoke or other air pollution — is particularly dangerous for this age group. Young children breathe twice as much air per pound of body weight, Garling pointed out.
Ankita Chachra is a designer, architect and new mother working on the issue of climate-resilient cities for children at the think tank Capita. She recently blogged about choices made in cities around the world, from Copenhagen to her native Delhi, that can help preserve outdoor play. These can sometimes be simple adaptations. When it’s very hot, Ramos, for example, takes her children outside first thing in the morning.
“Copenhagen has parks that do flood with extreme rain,” Chachra said, but permeable surfaces, like grass, allow the water to drain away quickly. “Asphalt, rubber, and metal get extremely heated when you don’t have shade to protect those surfaces. Grass, mulch, and wood absorb heat differently. A shaded street or area is 4 degrees Celsius cooler than those that don’t have shade,” she added. And when cities make room for parks over cars, there is more equitable access to safe, cooler outdoor space.
Cori Berg, in Dallas, is grateful for her yard’s “two giant pecan trees — those giant shade structures are really expensive.”
When children just can’t go outside, early child care educators said they have to improvise. Jessica Sager, whose network All Our Kin supports in-home family child care providers in 25 states, did an informal survey at The Hechinger Report’s request to ask providers how they are coping with extreme weather.
“One of the things we have to do is take the climate resources coming through the Inflation Reduction Act, and make sure that we prioritize young children, both in multifamily housing and early care/education.”
Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force
“I heard a lot of stories about the wildfires in particular,” she said — the smoke from Canadian fires affected at least 120 million Americans this summer. “Our educators had air purifiers — we had gotten them during Covid. Our coaches had already worked with educators about doing indoor gross motor play — obstacle courses, scavenger hunts. Balls, scarves, parachutes. Putting a mattress on the floor and letting kids jump up and down. A lot of song and dance activities. Or putting colored tape on the floor and pretending it’s a balance beam. ”
On a city-wide level, some have proposed bringing back free or cheap indoor playspaces, such as the McDonald’s ball pit, perhaps repurposing disused shopping malls.*
But despite all this creativity, it’s emotionally difficult for both providers and children when children can’t play outside because of severe weather and other hazards — Berg’s “cranky weather.”
“During the smoke some kids felt very sad that they couldn’t go outside,” said All Our Kin’s Sager. “And the caregivers had to explain to them what was wrong.” There’s a “real parallel to what caregivers had to do during Covid,” to make a scary reality understandable for little kids, she said.
Garling and other policymakers are conscious that they are bringing up climate threats at a time when the early childhood sector already feels besieged.
The United States government spends much less than the average of its peer countries on early child development in a good year, and supplemental funds provided during the pandemic have just fallen off a cliff, leaving the sector even more cash starved. Group child care in private homes is often parents’ most affordable solution: The National Center for Education Statistics says 1 in 5 children under 5 spend time in these settings.
But these home-based programs pose a major infrastructure challenge. Garling’s organization recently released a new interactive map showing that in New York City, these centers often — 37.2 percent of the time — include basement space. And 1,638 centers, serving 22,000 children, are at risk of flooding in storms such as the one that hit the city with more than 8 inches of rain on September 29.
“At times it feels overwhelming. There’s so many things early care and education professionals have to worry about,” Garling said. But on the other hand, she argued, there are federal funds the sector can and should claim for retrofitting and upgrades now.
“I feel like there are current opportunities through [the Inflation Reduction Act] that are creating more urgency — in a good way,” she said. “This is not something I was talking about two years ago and now it is 80 percent of what I talk about all the time. “
“They have the least responsibility for causing the climate crisis but will bear the brunt of it.”
Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force
In the meantime, early childhood educators are working hard to instill a love of nature in the children they care for, in all kinds of weather. Berg has been taking her teachers on nature walks, and introduced a curriculum about Texas’s many state parks.
The Connecticut child care owner, Ramos, who grew up visiting a farm in her native Peru, sees empathy blooming in her toddlers as they encounter the natural world. “One day a one year old was walking and saw a little slug on the ground,” she recounted. “He points — ‘Oh no, oh no!’ He was so sad. The father immediately went down, picked it up and put it on the grass. It made my day.”
*Clarification:This sentence has been updated toclarify the support for indoor play spaces.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
