Legal Matters

Intertwined: School Safety and SEL

By Maryam Brotine

If you had asked me a year ago, in the pre-COVID era, about “school safety and security,” I would have immediately thought of threat assessment procedures and school shootings.

Now, my mind goes to mental health and social-emotional learning — issues that have always been relevant to school safety and security, but whose importance for the entire school community has expanded considerably since Governor JB Pritzker issued Executive Order 2020-05 last spring, closing all Illinois schools serving pre-kindergarten through high school students due to COVID-19.

Back then we thought, “This is temporary — maybe we can resume in-person learning before the school year ends.” Then it became “Well, we’ll surely resume in-person learning by the start of the 2020-2021 school year.”

Now, over nine months later, the rollercoaster ride of uncertainty rolls on, leaving anxiety, stress, and trauma in its track. Are Illinois schools truly equipped to handle this ride and its aftereffects?

SEL in Illinois
Illinois schools are not wholly unprepared for this tumult. Following passage of the Children’s Mental Health Act of 2003 (405 ILCS 49/), the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) adopted Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) standards for students in grades kindergarten through 12. ISBE frames the learning standards within three broad SEL goals, each of which contains SEL learning standards for a total of 10:

Goal 1 – Develop self-awareness and self-management skills to achieve school and life success.
A.   Identify and manage one’s emotions and behavior.
B.      Recognize personal qualities and external supports.
C.   Demonstrate skills related to achieving personal and academic goals.
Goal 2 – Use social-awareness and interpersonal skills to establish and maintain positive relationships.
A.   Recognize the feelings and perspectives of others.
B.      Recognize individual and group similarities and differences.
C.   Use communication and social skills to interact effectively with others.
D.  Demonstrate an ability to prevent, manage, and resolve interpersonal conflicts in constructive ways.
Goal 3 – Demonstrate decision-making skills and responsible behaviors in personal, school, and community contexts.
A.   Consider ethical, safety, and societal factors in making decisions.
B.      Apply decision-making skills to deal responsibly with daily academic and social situations.
C.   Contribute to the well-being of one’s school and community.

Each of the 10 SEL learning standards has its own grade-specific benchmarks and performance descriptors. For example, a first-grade student working on Goal 1A should be identifying emotions and ways to calm herself, whereas a 12th-grade student working on Goal 1A should be describing how changing her interpretation of an event can alter how she and others feel about it. The SEL learning standards are currently being evaluated by ISBE’s Emotional Intelligence and Social and Emotional Learning Task Force, which is also charged with developing SEL curriculum and best practices as well as making recommendations on the funding of appropriate services to address SEL.

SEL Before and After COVID-19
It’s one matter to work on SEL under pre-COVID circumstances, with students and staff physically together, in close proximity on a daily basis. Even then, however, SEL was one subject among many learning standards and by no means the foundation for learning. Now students and staff are scattered in various learning settings (remote, hybrid, in-person yet distanced and wearing masks) and experiencing chronic stress, anxiety, and oftentimes isolation. After the harried, slapdash implementation of emergency remote learning last spring, schools have focused on increasing the academic rigor of remote learning and reducing learning loss. As aptly put in an Education Week opinion article, “How Ready Are We to Support Kids Through This Trauma?” SEL is still part of our new, varied learning settings, but it remains a bit of an outlier that’s difficult to address. There are SEL apps available, such as GoNoodle and Calm, but is more impersonal screen time the answer? Can schools truly ask their already over-stretched teachers to check in, one-on-one, with each student every day? Or, for schools fortunate enough to have a school social worker or school counselor, is it reasonable to expect them to conduct socially distanced “porch” visits with every student they serve?

In January 2019, following two years of research and discussion, the Aspen Institute National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development (NCSEAD) issued From a Nation at Risk to a Nation at Hope, a comprehensive report with sweeping recommendations for strengthening SEL. Though written pre-COVID, many statements in the NCSEAD report resonated with me precisely because we’re riding a pandemic that has exposed widespread educational inequities and systemic issues. Do these excerpts resonate with you as well?

Of course, the pandemic and its economic fallout also mean finances and resources are scarce, so you may appreciate this next excerpt as well:

• 7:250, Student Support Services. This sample policy states that “The Superintendent or designee shall develop protocols for responding to students with social, emotional, or mental health needs that impact learning ability.” This requirement comes from the Children’s Mental Health Act of 2003
• 7:250-AP2, Protocol for Responding to Students with Social, Emotional, or Mental Health Needs. This sample administrative procedure states that staff members will refer students with suspected needs to the building-level Student Support Committee.

 

Maryam Brotine is Assistant General Counsel at Illinois Association of School Boards. To learn more, visit Brotine’s collection of SEL resources, including those mentioned above, via bit.ly/ND20JRes.