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District Goals Update:
Social Emotional Health &
Wellness
Dear School Community:
When I wrote to you in August, I shared with you our district
goals for this school-year. They are thematized around four big
ideas: student achievement, community & collaboration, health &
wellness, and professional learning.
First and foremost, we are working towards increased student
achievement in our district, which is the first strand that wraps its arms
around our first two goals, followed by goals that concern themselves with
community & collaboration, health & wellness and professional
learning. The fully articulated goals are as follows:
2019-2020
Kenilworth School District Goals
For a deeper contextual understanding of our district goals,
I
encourage you to look at this presentation which presents more
rationale and background for these goals.
Looking at Social Emotional Learning in Our Schools
In an attempt to create community awareness about - and
agency over - the goals, I’d like to periodically share updates on our
progress. Today, I am zooming-in-on District Goal #4 by spotlighting
how operating a safe school incorporates social emotional learning
instruction, or SEL, into classrooms by equipping students with the ability
to regulate their emotions, set positive goals and develop empathy for
others.
This type of learning lives at the intersection of
self-awareness, self-management and relationship building.
As a school system, we realize that academic skills are
intertwined with the ability to positively interact with peers, negotiate
emotions and make healthy decisions, and as such we’ve ramped up our
efforts to provide our students with more explicit programs and resources
in support of greater social emotional learning. Some of these
efforts include:
·
New Curriculum - Beginning this year, our kindergarten
through grade six students will receive social emotional learning
instruction through a research-based program called Second Step to help us
build a culture of connectedness.
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Counseling Services - Each school is equipped with school
counselors and child study team members, including school psychologists and
social workers, who provide students with individual or group counseling,
as needed, particularly those who may need individual or small-group social
emotional support.
·
Community & Professional Partnerships - We are currently
engaged in several conversations with community service providers, such as
Care Plus and Trinitas’ Therapy Center, that may eventually serve as
partners to support our work in providing social emotional learning as
interventions for both students and their families.
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Enhanced Identification Efforts - We are working towards
equipping more school personnel with the ability to conduct SEL diagnostic
assessments, such as the one developed by the Devereux Center for Resilient
Children called the Dessa, which can also be used by parents, and the
Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) to be used as a way of
identifying students in need of targeted, social emotional learning
support.
Quest for Clarity
Within the context of making an organization healthy,
alignment is about creating so much clarity that there is as little room as
possible for confusion and disorder (Patrick Lecioni.) Please join me
in my quest to create, over-communicate and reinforce clarity of the
alignment between our school community efforts and the district’s goals for
the 2019-2020 school year.
Enjoy the long weekend,
Kyle C. Arlington
Superintendent of Schools
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