Allan Appel Photo
Sen. Blumenthal and Scarlett Lewis.
“Had Adam Lanza had access to SEL [social and emotional learning], the tragedy might not have happened,” Scarlett Lewis said. “I felt a great compassion for Adam Lanza and his mother.”
Lewis lost her 6‑year-old, Jesse, in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, and social emotional education was at the heart of a dialogue about upcoming revision of the No Child Left Behind law Monday at New Haven’s Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School Parish Hall on Kimberly Avenue.
Lewis along with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal led a discussion that drew 20 teachers, boards of ed officials, psychologists, and other professionals who work with kids. Blumenthal has introduced an amendment to pending legislation that will transform No Child Left Behind into Every Child Achieves Act.
This is the second of an ongoing spate of statewide dialogues about education reform designed to drum up ideas, support, and momentum for including SEL, which teaches compassion, love, understanding, and cultural and interpersonal skills to kids, teachers, and others on the front line of education today.
Clark and Akbar.
Click here for a story from the Newtown Bee for how Blumenthal’s meeting with Scarlett Lewis in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook tragedy has led to this effort, in honor and memory of Jesse Lewis.
“Incredibly, use of federal funds” for professional development is currently “restricted to academics,” Blumenthal said.
Blumenthal’s amendment, which was officially termed the Jesse Lewis Empowering Educators Act, seeks permission to use approximately $3.5 billion of federal funds for “professional development” of education staff for social and emotional learning, as well as academics.
“Reading, writing, and arithmetic can’t be learned by children who are angry, depressed, or in conflict with other students,” said the senator.
He was in town because New Haven education officials do such a good job already highlighting the social and emotional growth of the child as one of the system’s key goals, he added.
Currently the Senate version of the new education reform bill is in committee awaiting reconciliation with a House version. “I’m encouraged,” Blumenthal said about his amendment’s prospects.
At Monday’s gathering the following suggestions emerged:
The New Haven Family Alliance’s Kyisha Velazquez and Cotto.
• Flexibility: That is critical to a bill, according to Will Clark, the board of ed’s chief operating officer and head of its citywide wellness committee. “Senator, you are preaching to the choir in this room. Inclusion of social and emotional learning and growth is one of the New Haven Public Schools’ goals.”
Clark went on to describe the many ongoing programs, including stats from the city’s 17 school-based health clinics. About 40 percent of kids who go there show up for mental health, largely behavior problems, he said.
“The pitch I’d make is flexibility. When funding is restrictive, it’s a problem,” meaning current programs that are successful might have to alter to meet requirements of new funding, and “switching curriculums to chase the money” is not desirable, he added.
• The Comer School Development Program. Build on it, said New Haven Family Alliance Executive Director Barbara Tinney. Director of Instruction and School Improvement Iline Tracey added that for years frontline staff, the teachers and administrators, have received some training in the SEL area. But for reasons of the coming and going of funding and other pressures, the efforts have not always been sustained. She called for an increase in this effort, a “massive training.”
• A cultural component to the training. That was the urgent plea of Maysa Akbar, executive director of the Integrated Wellness Group, a psychotherapy practice on Blake Street.
Everyone around the table, including people from Bridgeport, Darien, and Madison, endorsed this idea. “A teacher leaving Brookfield and going [to teach] in New Haven” is likely to encounter what Chris Kukk of Western Connecticut State University,called “culture shock.”
What we don’t want to happen, said Akbar, is that “I define you as a behavior problem, because you’re not in my experience. If we’re going to this” the framework, which Sen. Blumenthal described, “do it the right way.”
• Know Thyself, Teacher. That was the advice of Laura Emerson (pictured), a fourth-grade teacher from the Darien Public Schools. “A teacher needs to reflect on their own SEL. It will help us deliver the program more effectively.”
• Compassionate Policing. James Cotto, the director of the Catholic Charities Family Center on Grand Avenue in Fair Haven, bemoaned that so many young people “are scared of the police. They [the police] need to be part of the conversation,” and the SEL training he advised.
In the best of all possible worlds, SEL would also be available for other folks who interact with kids, including school bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and school security guards. “Sometimes they have the best connection with a [ troubled] kid,” said Clark.
Blumenthal called the $3.5 billion a comparative “drop in the bucket” and reminded his listeners that states and localities also spend many additional dollars on SEL. [Coordinating the different programs, sources, funding was the reason for Clark’s crie de coeur for flexibility]. Blumenthal said his hope is that the federal funds might create a model that will get national attention and help guide and encourage future programs.
Even as he described the simple inclusion of the amendment into the bill as a “feat,” he remains hopeful it will be there when the final legislation emerges in the fall.
It will be up to the Department of Education to flesh out the details and language of the implementation. That’s the stage where the suggestions he heard this day may be applied, he added.