Letter to the Field
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
