SEL Center

Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety

Letter to the Field

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Letter to the Field

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The Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety (CISELSS) is sunsetting on September 30, 2023, after 5 wonderful years of partnership and collaboration with the field.

With this letter, we offer two final resources from our Center. We hope that they are especially relevant to you at this particular moment in time.

  • Strategic Communications in Times of Conflict (audiocast and companion resources)
  • Equitable Systems Change for State Agency Leaders (brief)

These resources are the last in a long list of technical assistance (TA) we offered through CISELSS in direct response to the most important and urgent needs of the field.

We want to extend our enormous gratitude for your fellowship over the last 5 years.

To the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Safe and Supportive Schools, thank you for funding this center at a time when education leaders were calling for high-quality, evidence-based, practical TA on social and emotional learning and safe learning environments, which research and science show are foundational to academic and other kinds of success.

To the many state and local system leaders across the nation that we served, thank you for the opportunity to support you in your work to serve every young person, family, and educator in your learning communities so that they could thrive regardless of their background, identity, or circumstance.

To the national and regional TA centers, the nationally renowned subject matter experts, and the thought-leading organizations and agencies in our ecosystem with whom we partnered, thank you for your collaboration. In particular, we want to name our most consistent collaborators: the regional Comprehensive Center and REL networks and the other centers funded through the Office of Safe and Supportive Schools and the Office of Special Education Programs: the Center on PBIS, the National Center on Safe and Supportive Learning Environments, the Student Engagement and Attendance Center, the REMS TA Center, and the T4PA Center. By working together, we made sure that our services to the field were aligned, coherent, efficient, and impactful.

It has been our privilege to serve the field through CISELSS. Through our universal, targeted, and direct TA, we have made a meaningful, sustainable difference in the lives of our nation’s young people, their families, their educators, and their larger communities. Our team is enormously proud of our work.

Though the Center is sunsetting, our team isn’t going anywhere! Our resources and services that address alignment and coherence, restorative justice, comprehensive approaches to school safety, participatory systems change, trauma-informed practices, school climate, and social and emotional learning will endure through WestEd’s Resilient and Healthy Schools and Communities body of work. Our Center website will remain live, and if you would like to continue to work with us, we can be reached at [email protected]. We look forward to staying connected.

Warm regards,
Natalie, Christina, and the CISELSS team

2022 Office of Safe and Supportive Schools Funding Opportunities

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The Office of Safe and Supportive Schools (OSSS) is conducting FY 2022 grant program competitions that promote mental health in the wake of COVID-19. Applications for these funding opportunities are due November 3, 2022. Learn more on the grant competitions webpage.

OSSS and The National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments (NCSSLE) are hosting a set of webinars to assist applicants with understanding the application process and grant procedures:

  • The Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grant Program provides competitive grants to support and demonstrate innovative partnerships to train school-based mental health service providers for employment in schools and local educational agencies (LEAs).

Register for October 12 Session

Register for October 18 Session

  • The School-Based Mental Health Services Grant Program provides competitive grants to State educational agencies (SEAs), LEAs, and consortia of LEAs to increase the number of credentialed mental health services providers providing school-based mental health services to students in LEAs with demonstrated need.

Register for October 11 Session

Register for October 19 Session

Applicants are encouraged to read through the entire application package which can be found on the grant competitions webpage before participating in these webinars. Each session will be archived on its respective event webpage.

Peer-to-Peer State Collaboratives: Sharing Successes & Final Convening

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As described in earlier posts, for the past two years, the Center has hosted peer-to-peer collaboratives for state educational agencies (SEAs). The 10 participating states have been working together to address their most urgent and important needs related to alignment, coherence, and strategic communications of SEL, school safety and other whole-person strategies and initiatives.

Over the past two years, the collaborating state teams have participated in professional learning sessions, peer consultancies on shared problems of practice, and virtual convenings. Teams have also met regularly with technical assistance (TA) liaisons from the Center every 4-6 weeks while advancing the team’s work in between meetings.

This September, as the collaboratives came to a close, the Center hosted a final convening for participating states. Participating teams shared key accomplishments, including:

  • Inventorying the many initiatives related to SEL and whole person support that exist across their SEA — or multiple state agencies — and using these inventories to begin building relationships and aligning efforts across divisions and/or agencies.
  • Creating strategic communications plans that have helped their states communicate a clearer understanding of SEL and whole person initiatives — including their value — to others within state agencies, to policymakers, and to the field.
  • Creating strategic communications plans that have helped others understand the connection between physical safety and psychological safety (and thus, the importance of strategies that support psychological safety — such as mental health support, SEL, and trauma-informed practices — for supporting physical safety as well).
  • Revising existing SEL-related initiatives to incorporate a stronger focus on equity. For example, Indiana updated its SEL competencies using an equity lens, and Michigan produced guidance on appropriately addressing issues of equity when implementing universal screening as part of MTSS.

To support this work, the Center employed several guides developed by WestEd to respond to needs expressed by states within the collaboratives and across the field. These included:

Several states piloted initial versions of these guides and produced valuable feedback to improve the final, published versions. In some cases, the states’ pilot experiences resulted in the publication of case studies, such as:

Finally, the participating states shared their goals and plans for how to continue their efforts of (1) creating alignment and coherence across whole person initiatives, particularly at the state level, and (2) improving communication about whole person initiatives both internally and to the field.

Spotlight on Indiana: Updating SEL Competencies with an Equity Lens

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In October 2020, CISELSS was invited by the Region 8 Comprehensive Center and the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) to participate in a series of stakeholder meetings to update Indiana’s SEL competencies. IDOE developed its PK-12 competencies and indicators in 2018, but following the renewed nationwide energy around social justice and human rights, IDOE leaders realized that they could be more explicit about how SEL can advance educational equity.

The stakeholder group — consisting of teachers, local subject matter experts, other school personnel, and community members — was convened to center the voices of the people most intimately involved in school communities. The purpose of the group was to provide suggestions for revisions of SEL competencies and indicators to reflect a greater focus on educational equity and cultural responsiveness.

A draft of the updated competencies was shared at Indiana’s Whole Child Summit on February 2021, with a request for additional feedback from those in attendance. Next, IDOE will be sharing the updated competencies with Indiana’s first-ever Equity and Inclusion Officer, and then release the final version publicly thereafter.

With the CISELSS peer-to-peer collaborative, the Indiana team will continue on with their strategic communications focus, highlighting these updated SEL competencies as a key initiative for communicating with both internal and external stakeholders.

Peer-to-Peer State Collaboratives: March 2021 Convening

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As described in an earlier post, the Center has launched two peer-to-peer collaborative opportunities for state educational agencies (SEAs). The collaboratives serve 10 states that are working together to address their most urgent and important needs related to alignment and coherence of SEL and other whole person strategies and initiatives.

Following an in-person kick-off convening in February 2020, the state teams have been working with Center technical assistance (TA) staff to address their state-specific problems of practice. Additionally, throughout the year, the Center hosts virtual convenings for participants from all 10 state teams to collaborate and learn together

This March, state collaborative participants had the opportunity to participate in four days of professional learning with peers from other states. The session topics were as follows:

  • Monday, March 22 — Building Collaboration Based on Trust in Order To Take Action: This session was co-hosted with the Coherence Lab Fellowship. Participants explored practical strategies for strengthening their professional relationships to improve their collaboration and to help them advance their alignment and coherence efforts.
  • Tuesday, March 23 — Practice Makes Perfect: Incorporating Asset-Based Framing into Your Strategic Communications: This session was a follow-up to the collaborative’s January keynote event by Trabian Shorters on asset-based framing. Participants used key communications materials from their state educational agencies to practice what they had learned about asset-based language.  
  • Wednesday, March 24 — Fireside Chat with North Dakota: Introduction to the Exemplars Protocol: This session provided a deep dive into the Center’s third and final protocol, Spotlighting Whole-Person Success: A Guide for Using Statewide Data to Identify Exemplar Districts in SEL and School Climate. Participants had the opportunity to hear about North Dakota’s experience with the pilot.
  • Thursday, March 25 — Canary in the Coal Mine: Attendance Data as an Indicator of Community Well-being: Attendance data can serve as an early indicator of community and student well-being. Low attendance rates may indicate opportunities to improve school climate and promote a sense of belonging for students. For individual children, it may indicate that they are navigating adversity, which their school or district may be positioned to ameliorate. In this session, participants worked to build their capacity for using such data to support districts and schools in promoting well-being.

 

 

 

 

 

Opportunity for STATES: National Collaborative to Advance Mental Health

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The National Center for School Mental Health (NCSMH) and the School-Based Health Alliance (SBHA) invite states, in collaboration with five local entities (school districts, school regions, school-based health centers, hospitals, local public health authorities, federally-qualified health centers, etc.), to participate in a 12-month Collaborative Improvement and Innovation Network (CoIIN) for the 2021-2022 school year.

This CoIIN will focus on making measurable improvements to student health and mental health, including social, emotional, behavioral health, and substance. The NCSMH-led track focuses on Comprehensive School Mental Health Systems.

For more information, please visit the application instructions: http://bit.ly/CoIIN-SMH-RFA.

Application deadline: 11:59pm ET on April 5th, 2021.

The deadline has now passed. Stay tuned for updates and future opportunities.

View the applications webinar here.