Consider the Grinch, agonizing over what to wear to the Whoville Christmas Party while masking deep-seated anxiety about socializing with those who once rejected him. Or Bruce Banner, the Hulk, whose green skin manifests his rage and pain, transforming him into a destructive force that mirrors the internal battles many of us face. These common tales with ostracized beings encourage us to hold hands and dance metaphorically with what we do not understand.

It is for everyone’s benefit when students bear witness to tales of resilience in the face of ignorance. Students need to understand what it means to be… green. 

I teach Frankenstein, a novel about a creature abandoned and misunderstood. Over time, popular culture has leaned into “greenifying” the monster, a color choice that raises an interesting question: Does the green hue signify his villainy, marking him as an unnatural horror? Or does it symbolize his status as an outcast, someone more misunderstood than monstrous? Who is the real monster: the creature, a grotesque replica of man, or the creator who neglects his own Adam, ashamed of what he has made? 

My high school students discuss the complexity of true villainy and examine the ripple effects of both empathy and neglect. Through this lens, the creature exists as a symbolic “other” in society upon his rejection, his green skin becoming a visual cue for alienation. My students begin to consider the ripple effect of compassion — or lack thereof.

I want my students to remember these tales and see the “green” as an opportunity — not to vilify those who are different, but to understand them. The state standards for my Arkansas high schoolers require us to examine characterization, the impact of setting on a character’s development, and the thematic lessons found in these struggles. These are common ELA standards across most states, and they naturally lend themselves to discussions about character flaws and the ability to overcome adversity regardless of one’s background or setbacks. 

I relish this task, often prompting students to reflect on their own trials — times they have felt misunderstood or out of place — so they can connect more deeply with the characters’ turmoil and triumphs. Every day in my classroom, I must remember this too: Uniqueness is to be cherished. A world filled with people who look, think, and live differently is not just a good world, it’s a better one, despite all attempts to stifle the humanity hidden beneath. 

The misunderstood characters in history and literature, green or otherwise, are often the change-makers, pushing forward social progress and widening the acceptable use instructions for being human. My teachers praised the Susan B. Anthonys, the Rosa Parks, the Elie Wiesels for existing in spaces of “different” and pushing against the status quo. 

These figures weren’t just rebels; they were visionaries whose very existence challenged the world to be better. While their skin doesn’t shine emerald in the sun, their differences make them stand out in their respective stories, forcing society to confront its own limitations, expanding our collective capacity for empathy. 

As a child, I loved stories like Charlotte’s Web, The Lorax, and Matilda, where characters overcome bleak societal adversity, their victories rooted not in brute strength but in the quiet, persistent force of understanding: Wilbur is spared because of Fern’s unwavering belief that his life has value. Matilda, dismissed as insignificant, finds empowerment through the kindness and intellect of a good teacher. These narratives teach that empathy isn’t just a virtue—it’s a catalyst for transformation. 

When my students read about Dr. Frankenstein’s creature or discuss real-world figures who were cast aside, they begin to see how otherness isn’t a curse but often a call to change the world — and empathy begins to bloom. Through these tales of the “other,” students learn how to embrace their differences.

Just as the “Wicked Witch” has a story worth hearing, teachers and students cannot shy away from narratives of otherness out of fear. Moving toward understanding the “green” in others helps dismantle the walls of misunderstanding and build a future rooted in compassion, not the harsh divisions that too often define our landscape. It is important now, more than ever, to work hard to see the goodness in others despite our differences. After all, what is truly “wicked” about being green?

School was becoming the place he poured all his energy into, on the heels of his father’s incarceration and uncle’s murder. But simultaneously, from as young as four years old, disgusted looks from educators taught him schools were a place where he would be treated differently because he was Black. Being your authentic self, raw emotions and all, seemed to only be okay for white children.

He watched Eric, a Black classmate frequently isolated and paddled for disruptions or difficulty focusing, be expelled in first grade after bringing a water gun to school. From an early age, aunts and uncles imparting wisdom shared their experiences, told that they “would be lucky if they graduated.” 

Marrying autobiography with research and analysis of education reform movements, Fuller recounts his educational life in devastating detail in Being Black in America’s Schools, “an American story that I honestly believe is begging to be told.” 

From managing suicidal thoughts at eight to becoming desensitized to students’ humanity in pursuit of higher test scores working for a network charter, perpetuating the educational violence he thought he never would, Fuller verbalizes how policies landed in the mind of a Black child and educator. 

Amid debates of how and where Black history will be taught and a youth mental health crisis that is disproportionately felt by Black children, Fuller’s work has been described as a “beacon” that showcases “what keeps us captive while giving keen insights on what can free us,” by Abdul Tubman, activist and descendant of Harriet Tubman. 

Revealing the humans behind data and educational movements, Fuller shows the dehumanization happening in ways big and small in classrooms across the country. Tracked into advanced work in high school, for instance, he remembered how it felt to be isolated from his Black peers, then to see counselors write them, and their futures, off before they’d even graduated.  

“In the same way that the inherent racism in our criminal justice system is killing Black and brown people all the time, the inherent racism in our education system is killing the dreams of Black and brown children in the classroom,” Fuller, now an associate provost at The New School in New York City, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. 

Released in late July by Dafina, an imprint of Kensington Publishing, Fuller’s story exposes hundreds of anecdotes and presents models for transformative change in the education system. Uplifting models that champion children’s emotional wellbeing and cultures, like community schools and the freedom schools of the 1960s, he imagines a future where all children grow up learning Black history, critical thinking, and financial and emotional literacy in order to lead and “dream their way out of a dreamless land.”  

Drawing from time as an educator and administrator in and around Philadelphia, Boston and New York City’s schools, Fuller has also released a workbook companion for educators about how to concretely apply these concepts to the classroom at grade level. 

“I would have loved for them to tell me that I was worthy, to see me as their child, their nephew, a younger version of who they were, to see me the way I witnessed teachers often see my white classmates. To see me as ‘just a good kid.’ … To attempt to understand me rather than punish me. I would have loved for them to ask me about my hopes and dreams and then cultivate them in me. I would have loved for them to have fun with me and show me the joy they felt from being around me,” he writes. 

In conversation with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, Fuller reflects on the importance of transforming schools to teach Black children to love themselves and what’s at stake when kids aren’t taught how to interrogate the world around them.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Jelani Cobb, writer and dean of Columbia’s journalism school, calls this “a book we needed yesterday.” Why write this now? What does it mean at this moment? 

Being Black in American Schools really came from a deep commitment of mine to marginalized children, all children, but specifically Black and brown children. And to liberatory education and powerful storytelling. I think this book is so important now in our current climate, given the attack on education that’s happening. The rhetoric in the conversation is pretty horrible.

It’s so important for us to have stories like this one to cut through a lot of the noise of the pundits, the politics because under all of that are the lived experiences of our students in our classrooms.

This book has been a four year journey really for me. In 2020 I was working for the New York City Department of Education. That was a summer where we had the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor all over our television screens. What pundits now call the racial reckoning was happening. 

For me as an educator, I was looking at the world and our society and seeing that we were calling to the carpet our criminal justice system in a way that I felt was very valid – starting to interrogate its inherent racism and its inherent flaws. 

I wanted us to have that same conversation about another major American institution, which is our educational system. In the same way that the inherent racism in our criminal justice system is killing Black and brown people all the time, the inherent racism in our education system is killing the dreams of Black and brown children in the classroom. 

I imagine that coming to that realization also shaped the storytelling form you chose for this, weaving in and out of your own personal narrative, research, and historical moments in education reform. How did you decide to do that, and why are those lived experiences so necessary for people to hear and hold? 

It was really important for me to craft the book in the way that I did and I actually fought really hard for it. [Powerful storytelling] is what’s needed to really inspire action and change. Storytelling is what connects us, it’s the human aspect. 

Over the years, through false narratives, through so many things, things get so politicized and so up in the air. There’s not enough of hearing the stories and the real lived experiences of people underneath all of the theories, underneath all of the data. It was really powerful to use my own story – one that is uniquely mine but is not unique, right? 

I talk about being a child of an incarcerated parent growing up. There are millions of children right now who are living that experience. I talk about being one of a few or sometimes the only a Black child or student of color in my classroom as I was being tracked in school [into advanced coursework]. There are hundreds of thousands of children that are experiencing that right now. 

My own story was authentic to me, I knew I could tell it well and analyze it now from my lens as an educator, but also, I felt like it was one that so many people could connect to. I weave in the research and the history and keep it greater than the story because I think it helps people connect to the point that I’m trying to get across … This is what happened, and this is what this means, and this is how it looks.

That comes across in moments like when you describe working in youth development in Philadelphia, seeing the distrust in the community, both for strangers coming to their door and for education after . You feel it, the lived impact of those moments. 

And at so many points, you describe having to advocate for yourself, against the bias of white educators who assumed you cheated or wanted to discipline you or your friends more harshly than your white peers. You show why believing a phrase you repeated often, “I deserve to be here,” was necessary. How do you instill or encourage that in youth who are systemically underserved, and how might we get to a point where youth don’t have to be such fierce advocates? 

I am a strong believer in advocating for yourself, especially as a marginalized person in this world and in our society. In schools, I think how you encourage it is through developing their critical consciousness, developing their own empowering concept of self. 

We come from a legacy of being marginalized, being pushed to the side and being told that we are less-than in society. Because of that, we’re not necessarily the first to advocate for ourselves, especially where we feel discredited or feel like we are seen as second-class citizens. 

I always encourage students that I work with and parents that they deserve to have quality education, they deserve to have a quality experience, and their voice deserves to be heard. 

That advocacy is so important and as you see in the book, my advocacy saved me in many ways. That was something that was really important in my household; my mom taught me to be an advocate for myself because she was an advocate for me. I had that, but not every student is gonna have that because parents come with their lived experiences as well.

To your other question, how do we get to a point where we don’t need to … I think at some level, we will always have to advocate for more for ourselves. That’s not trying to be bleak, but I just think that’s reality. How we get to a point where there’s not much as much advocacy needed is really, the point in the book: to first acknowledge that our educational system was, in its current designs and its original intention, not designed to properly educate Black and brown people well. And then start to interrogate the designs – how we restructure an education system so that it serves all students. 

You also explore why early childhood education is particularly important for forming a sense of self. Reports keep coming out revealing how many millions of young children – for some states like New Mexico, one in two – are experiencing parental incarceration, abuse, death or other ACEs [adverse childhood experiences]. How can educators better support the earliest learners with these lived traumas?

And also RST or racial stress trauma, which is still severely underreported. I believe that every child born outside of the nucleus of what American society is, whiteness, experiences some racial stress trauma. 

We know that from the age 0 to 5, so much of your child’s development takes place. Their mental development, their identity of self. When that is compounded with trauma, we have to address that – in our early childhood centers, our Head Start centers, and as soon as they’re entering into school. 

I normally break it down – at the earliest stages, our children have to love who they are. So what does that mean? However they identify needs to be honored, uplifted and they need to be seen, empowered and know that they have a place in our society. They’re not second class in society, they’re not “other” in society. They are front and center and important in society. You do that through building authentic relationships, and in curriculum. Liberatory curriculum is age appropriate, but also brings in the identities of those youngest learners in ways that are normalized, uplifting to their identities. 

The reality we need to face in America is what you just mentioned, most of our students are coming into the classroom with some form of trauma. We are creating an education system that is just ignoring it. Early childhood is also extremely underfunded. We need more mental health counselors and specialists in our early childhood centers … to think about the designs of your classrooms, schools and how you are addressing the needs of your students.

People will probably read this and be like, well, we don’t even have them in our middle or high schools. But that just tells you how much mental health children’s mental health is put on the back burner. We see it in the numbers. . We have to start putting our resources behind these things. 

That’s a part of liberatory education too, providing them with the tools and trained individuals to help them cope with the traumas that are the reality of living in America. 

You go through some models that try to do this very thing and put a huge emphasis on building up Black children – like community schools, the , and in . That emphasis on love, grace and empathy, it’s not something that’s necessarily taught to teachers in preparation programs. How do you remind educators or leaders who are currently in positions of power of that, to champion kids’ humanity? 

It is not taught in our teacher professional development programs as much as it needs to be. There are programs out there – I mention one, Glenn Singleton’s Courageous Conversations work which does great educator professional development around race – but there’s not a lot.

I’m not saying that children shouldn’t learn in your classrooms, but they won’t be able to learn if they’re in your classroom where they don’t feel safe or loved or like they are seen. 

I always say what moves people is storytelling. But also there’s and data out there that actually shows the more a child feels included in the curriculum, the more the child feels safe, or the better relationship the child has with their teacher, the better they’re going to do academically. There’s so much talk on disparities and how do we close the gaps … [We need more] access to that data showing that we need to have an emphasis on identity development and affirming curriculum. We need to have an emphasis on building authentic relationships. We need to have an emphasis on deconstructing bias in your practice. 

When I finished this book, we weren’t in the present day, of course. Now I’m thinking about the potential of what could happen with current policies, like book banning and the banning of diversity and inclusion, and what could come with Project 2025. I think where we need to focus is really on the grassroots. 

At the end of the day, regardless of what’s happening from a legislative standpoint, we still have millions of kids in the classroom that we are responsible for and can’t let fall through the cracks. If they ban diversity, equity and inclusion, so you can’t say those words, then don’t say those words, but still affirm your students in the classroom. Still honor their identity in the classroom. Those are the conversations that we need to be having with our teachers. 

We get caught up on, this is banned now so we can’t do this, or now we can’t teach AP African American studies. No, you can still honor your students and, and you don’t have to call it that, but you can still do it in the classroom on the ground. Our kids are suffering and we can’t continue to allow them to suffer at the hands of a small minority of people.

Particularly as you’re mentioning the hyper emphasis, especially after the pandemic, on learning losses and academic performance. I keep hearing from educators that we cannot lose the person in all of that, because it’s going to make it that much harder to do anything else. 

I hear sometimes this distinction that, oh, well, if we honor our student’s identity or if we really have a focus on what people like to call “soft skills,” they’ll lose the focus on the academic outcomes. Those two things are not separate, they go hand in hand. Children do better when their lived experiences are brought into the classroom, when you tie in real world current events and their lived experience, when you’re able to connect that to what you’re trying to teach them. They feel they feel more connected to what they’re trying to learn and therefore have better outcomes. 

Speaking of censorship and fear culture, in your writing, you express exactly why learning Black history, accurate history, is important for all children at every stage of education. Referencing the first ethnic studies course you took as a college student at Emory, you said it enabled you to “finally put theory and evidence behind many of mine and my family’s experiences. It was as if up until this point, I had been in a battle without armor.” 

Can you speak more on this, which alludes to a James Baldwin quote, about what you found in that course that you wished you had gotten earlier or that you think youth need exposure to today?

My dad was a part of the mass incarceration of nonviolent criminals who faced very long sentencing for drug related charges. I had experienced that act of violence by my society. Then growing up in South Carolina and experiencing on the ground discriminatory comments … I experienced all of that, that legacy of slavery, of racism that was passed down from generation to generation in our American society. 

When I got to Emory, I learned about redlining. I learned about mass incarceration. I learned about Jim Crow laws, I learned about all of these things and it was like, wow, no, I get it now. This isn’t just something that is happening. This is very intentional and it’s by design. It almost was an empowering thing because, as much as I had my family trying to let me know the great contributions of Black people in our society, your lived experiences are telling you a lot of different things counter to that. 

Without having the knowledge of, oh wow, our American society was designed to have these outcomes for this group of people, Black people. It’s not that we’re not as smart, or we’re just not as successful or we’re just not as capable. 

Now I understand the corrupt designs behind that lived experience, why my family and those around me have that experience. Now I understand it and I can go forward and combat it. I think that’s so important for our students to experience. 

The Baldwin quote came from a where he also said, children see everything, they are like a sponge. They’re observing everything but they can’t articulate necessarily what it is that they’re observing. But they know that something is off. They know that there’s some “terrible weight” on their parent’s shoulders that menaces them. That terrible weight is racism, is white supremacy. 

We’re experiencing that every day. Our children are experiencing it every day and they can’t necessarily articulate it. But if they’re not being taught the true history, they’re not being taught how to interrogate society, be civically engaged, and understand those individuals that were critical thinkers of our society – individuals like Baldwin, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King. If they’re not taught the designs of our American society, then that is still a very disempowering curriculum that perpetuates racial propaganda and a social caste system in America. 

It’s so important at the earliest stage I got a little bit of it at home. My first [classroom] experience of it was when I got to college, but children need to be experiencing that at the earliest ages of early stages of their educational experience that is developmentally appropriate. 

I just want to emphasize that perspective and name that it runs counter to the narrative that I often hear used to minimize the importance of teaching Black history or systemic racism: this is going to teach kids to hate America, that they will feel depression, not pride. 

I hear those same things that you’re talking about, we don’t want to feel bad, or sometimes, we don’t want kids to feel guilty for things that they had nothing to do with. But to teach truth and to learn truth is empowering for everybody. It puts everyone on the same playing field. 

It’s so empowering for a Black child to know, hey, it’s not just because of who I am innately. It’s because of the legacies of how this country was designed and policies and practices that took place that impacted my ancestors and now have impacted me. Then, what can I do now to change those things so that my legacy can be different? Or my children, grandchildren, whoever’s can be different? That’s empowering for a white child too, like, oh, this is, this is where we messed up in the past. Now what can I do to make sure that we don’t repeat that in the future? 

This book is also referred to as a call to action. To whom and for what are you calling out for? 

There are three things I hope people get from this book. One is first just the knowledge and the acknowledgment that our educational system and in its original intention and current designs was to perpetuate a racial and social hierarchy within our American society. 

Then, let’s look at the designs of our educational system and figure out, in what ways is this design perpetuating that hierarchy so we can start to redesign, reimagine, make necessary change. So that those in power who are able to make the change from a legislative perspective, do that. Those in power who are able to make the change from a school design perspective, do that. Those in power who are able to make the change from interactions with students in the classroom, do that. And then those who maybe are not a parent or educator per se but are interested in the ways that we educate children in this country, they can then start to advocate for those for changes within their local communities and school systems. 

My hope is that this book really inspires us all to action. All of us play a part in that. You don’t have to be senator or work for the federal Department of Education. I hope that this book really makes everyone feel like they all have a part in it and they all can be actors agents of change. 

Kids were grieving for the first time – more than Baldwin Union Free School District counselors, teachers and administrators had ever realized. 

“I don’t think we’ve ever seen — or maybe we weren’t attuned to before — the number of students who have lost a parent for one reason or another,” said Shari Camhi, the New York district’s superintendent, reflecting on the 2023-24 school year. ”We see a lot of cancer. We’ve seen just a lot of death.”

Baldwin is far from the only district tasked with supporting grieving students. As of spring 2022, nearly 250,000 children across the country lost a parent or caregiver to COVID alone.  

Perhaps, as Camhi conceded, it’s always been like this. Perhaps kids have been grieving quietly. And now, only after concerted efforts to boost family connections and prioritize students’ emotional well-being, were they opening up. 

Now, Baldwin was ready to support them: By the time counselors flagged the stories they’d been hearing from kids, a new, free wellness center had just been built – the home base from where they could launch bereavement groups. 

Their creation illuminates the thread that unites Baldwin’s wellness initiatives: family relationships. Camhi says the approach is old-school, a throwback to a time decades ago, before cell phones pushed kids into introversion and became a hotbed for bullying, when neighbors really knew each other and what was going on in their lives. 

After all, most schools do not monitor family deaths, information only discerned through building “rapport and trust,” said Gina Curcio, health, wellness, and community director for the district on Long Island.  

Serving kids across all grades, homed at the middle school with a separate entrance for privacy, the wellness center is open late each weeknight, staffed by child therapists and psychologists. Established through a partnership with PM Pediatrics and a 4-year grant from former House Representative Kathleen Rice, it opened in the fall of 2023 without common hiccups districts often face, like having to take on hiring hard-to-staff behavioral health positions. 

In the calm-colored space adorned with student artwork, bean bags and infographics about how the mind works, two peer bereavement groups hosted 11 children for six, weekly sessions during the school year; another ran this summer, with children meeting for 90 minutes weekly grouped by age. 

Beyond the stages of grief, they have learned coping skills through mindfulness, art and music therapy, and forged friendships with peers they had no idea were dealing with similar feelings. All things previously out of reach due to a combination of stigma, financial strain, and not having a comparable resource in their community. 

The bereavement space and “transition” groups they inspired, for kids making the leap into pre-K, 6th and 9th grade, and college, are just some of the many initiatives Baldwin has taken in recent years to address childrens’ emotional and physical well-being, which impacts their ability to show up at school ready to learn and feel safe.  

“We still suspend kids for doing things that make it unsafe for other kids… [but] we will reduce the suspension in exchange for weekly counseling for students, because we believe that if you are exhibiting behavior that way – something’s going on,” Camhi added. 

In ways big and small, Baldwin looks for ways to forge strong connections between children and their community. 

At game days this summer, parents were pushed to participate with their kids – no electronics allowed. By third grade, all students have had lessons on wellness tools, like grounding and breathing techniques to manage and express hard emotions. Each year high school seniors in AP Photography interview second graders about their dreams, their hopes and faces printed and exhibited around campus, in a local hospital and family courthouse. 

As national reports emerge that only 29 and 37% of Black and low-income families report their child’s school offers counseling and other support services compared to 52 and 59% of their white, more affluent peers, Baldwin’s wellness center and connection with families provides a strong contrast.  

From January through March this year, the wellness center hosted over 600 sessions for the predominantly Black and Latino district – ranging from peer conflicts — which psychologists say have been more difficult for children to navigate after pandemic isolation— to divorce, cyberbullying and symptoms of anxiety and depression. 

In groups and in individual therapy, often art-based, kids have learned how to set goals, compromise, and practice role-playing interactions with mean people or conflicts with friends. 

“I think you can make me happy again,” one six year old told a clinician, who had started sessions by saying they were sad and “depressed.”

Having the wellness services available to families on-campus, without the hassle of waitlists or insurance run-arounds, has been a game changer for families – even in times of extreme uncertainty. 

Last school year, one Lenox Elementary School mother got a call that her ten year old blurted out in class that he wanted to kill himself. 

“It stopped me in my tracks,” she told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, recalling immediately leaving work to hug her son and talk with the school social worker. She learned he felt behind and left out socially, and knew he was quicker to outbursts than her other children, but did not know he had been hiding suicidal thoughts because he didn’t want to make her sad. 

The Jamaican family, whose name has been withheld for privacy, became one of the first served at the wellness center. Initially scared to start, with an image in mind of being forced to talk on a couch to a stranger, her son changed tune after the first of about 20 therapy sessions where he used drawing as a way to express harder emotions.

“I love it. It’s not like the movies. It’s nice.”

Today he is sleeping better, has fewer intrusive thoughts, knows now how to notice and talk through bad feelings when they arise. He brought some of the tools home, like Legos, plush toys, drawings and stickers. Within his friendships, he’s not taking things as personally, or overreacting.

In 2019, in the district where more than a quarter are considered low-income, the graduation rate was 95%. By 2023, it grew to 99% – . The number likely has something to do with Baldwin’s emphasis on how students feel while at school – reflecting whether kids feel connected to each other, their work, and the place. 

like drug use and violence. 

In a first grade classroom just before the end of the school year, a group of Baldwin elementary students sat crossed legged, intently listening to each other recap one wellness skill that they “loved or learned” from the year. Together they held a “breathing ball” – taking a low, deep breath as they picture a ball filling up with air in their hands, expanding and contracting slowly. 

One said quietly when he got upset at home, he recalled the “sound bowl” – metal, sometimes filled with water, that when hit with wood released a calming frequency – and would feel better. 

The wellness educator encouraged him to craft or visualize his own version at home, urging: “remember, you can go anywhere in your imagination.” 

Top challenges in more than half of the country’s schools were students being unprepared or disruptive in the classroom, according to the Department of Education’s research arm in . 

For 40-45% of schools, student learning and staff morale was also limited by students’ “trouble” working with partners or in groups and use of cell phones, laptops, or other tech when not permitted. In 75% of schools, students’ “lack of focus” moderately or severely negatively impacted learning and staff morale. 

Fighting and bullying were also pervasive: In about one in five schools, physical fights occurred about once a month, while weapons were confiscated at 45% of schools. Thirty percent report cyberbullying is a weekly occurrence; for 11%, it is daily.

Researchers say while overall, key adverse student behaviors have been on a downswing compared to prior generations, such as illicit drug use, violent crime and teen birth rates, several forces are compounding for students and impacting their wellbeing: High rates of trauma, a fraught political climate, and feeling they are being left behind, or unseen in school.

“Look what these students have gone through … not only the pandemic, through wars. Through a tumultuous, divisive political environment in the last six or seven years that’s only intensifying between right and left, between Black and white, between immigrant and non-immigrant. [Those separations] are filtering into schools and classes, perhaps with an awareness that we have not had before,” said Ron Astor, UCLA professor of social welfare and expert on bullying, school violence and culture. 

Students are also witnessing state legislatures and local school boards limit what classrooms can and cannot teach, leading them to question whether they belong in their school, he said. The atmosphere is impacting families across the political divide: “If parents and society see the school as teaching the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, if you’re not reflected in that school – that’s going to impact your attention, too.” 

From coast to coast, districts are weighing phone bans amid rising concerns about bullying and distractions. But some researchers say solely nixing phones without boosting mental health supports or addressing overall school culture wouldn’t curb the negative attitudes students may be forming about school and the purpose of their education. 

Astor said some young people are experiencing conditions like ADHD, depression and PTSD, which can manifest in dissociation. Lack of focus can also stem from feeling irrelevance, either that the subject matter is not important to their future or that some part of who they are is not represented at school.

Framing students’ inability to focus as the cause for delay in learning recovery, “ignores the fact of why they’re maybe not motivated, why they’re not connected as they should be, why they don’t see themselves in the curriculum,” he added. “Why, when they did see themselves, they’re being taken out or not allowed to say or do things because they’re part of an oppressed group,” referencing book bans, history challenges, and restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion curricula and positions. 

Astor and Johanna Lacoe, research director with the California Policy Lab, point to several ways school leaders can address these behavioral concerns: stronger classroom management training for teachers and keeping counselor, nurse, psychologist and social worker roles filled. 

“Young people who are in the classroom and who are behind, frustrated and struggling are just so much more likely to check out,” said Lacoe, a commissioner on San Francisco’s Juvenile Probation Commission. “For a teacher with 33 kids, who has maybe not that much experience managing a classroom, to teach to the range of abilities that present themselves with no support, is what we’re currently asking teachers to do.”

How schools handle disciplinary action after cyberbullying, violent behavior, and disruptions can greatly impact student perceptions of school. Lacoe pointed to several models that help students feel belonging after an incident such as in lieu of suspensions for low-level infractions, particularly as school leaders’ concerns about chronic absenteeism grow.  

In the , schools provide services such as healthcare, behavioral and housing support to children and families.

There are models at work where, “you’re always telling a student that they belong here even in the time of this [adverse] behavior – that they can make right what happened through a process, inclusive of the people involved,” Lacoe said. “You can figure out a way to resolve it that works for everyone and if possible, keeps the young person engaged at school.”

The vast majority of school leaders surveyed in late May by the National Center for Education Statistics – over 80% – agree the pandemic’s impacts are still lingering, negatively impacting the behavioral and socioemotional development of their students. At least 90% of public schools reported offerings for students since 2021. 

Students, including Astor’s own undergraduates, are asking, “‘Where do I fit in this world? How do I fit in society?’ … I think all of this impacts your ability to focus and your attention, including your motivation.”

After conducting a survey, administrators at Carroll T. Welch Elementary School in the Clint Independent School District found that about a quarter of its students felt they did not “fit in” at school.

“There’s some students that feel like they have to be different. Like, ‘I can’t be my true self because of what (other students) might say about me,’” said Daisy Garcia, principal of the school in Horizon City.

Now she hopes to create a more welcoming and affirming environment for them through the El Paso School Design Collaborative, which aims to reimagine how schools can better serve students and communities.

As part of the 10-month program which started in May, schools were tasked with identifying an issue at their campus and coming up with a plan to address it with the help of experts from Transcend, a nonprofit with the goal of improving education systems in the U.S. Out of the dozens of schools from across El Paso that applied to be part of the program, eight were selected.

“Our vision is to help young people learn in ways that enable them to thrive in and transform the world. And the way that we do that is by supporting communities to create and spread extraordinary equitable learning environments,” said Transcend Managing Partner Dottie Smith.

The program was brought together by the Council on Regional Economic Expansion and Educational Development, or CREEED, a nonprofit that aims to improve academic performance in El Paso, and the El Paso Community Foundation, a nonprofit that funds initiatives in health, education, human services and more throughout the city.

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“The broad stroke idealistic goal is for there to be a systemic change in how schools approach school design,” Vice President of Operations for the Community Foundation Stephanie Otero told El Paso Matters. “We hope that each school in our region will have a student centered model where student voice is at the core of decision making.”

With Transcend at their side, each of the participating schools set out to form teams of teachers, administrators and parents tasked with finding out how to improve their campuses. While the teams work directly with students, experts at Transcend help administrators conduct surveys, process data and provide them with examples of other schools that have centered student well-being in their education model.

“(We’re) deepening their understanding of the research and science, and what their young people are saying they want,” Smith said.

Some schools like the East Side’s O’Shea Keleher Whole Child Academy in the Socorro Independent School District included two fifth grade students, counselors and the school nurse in their redesign team to get their input on how to improve their campus.

Others talked to students to get their perspective.

Daisy Garcia said her team at Welch Elementary interviewed 75 of the school’s 700-plus pupils from all walks of life, ranging from Spanish speakers to at-risk students to get their input.

“We wanted to make sure we had a really big pool of who we interviewed,” Daisy Garcia said. “We didn’t want just high achieving students who we know feel loved and they feel like they have leadership skills.”

Many of the schools in the collaborative program focused on , also known as SEL, which aims to help students understand their emotions and build social skills as a way to improve educational outcomes.

Silvestre and Carolina Reyes Elementary in the Canutillo Independent School District and O’Shea Keleher put an emphasis on the social part of SEL, hoping to improve the way students connect with one another.

“One of the things that we’ve found is that our students feel very well connected to the adults in the building, but many of them are still struggling with having that peer to peer interaction,” said O’Shea Keleher Principal Laura Garcia. “So we’re trying to find the root of that problem and then help give them tools to interact with their peers in a very positive manner.”

While educators say students were already struggling to connect before the pandemic, lockdowns exacerbated the issue and were especially hard on younger students.

“There were a lot of skills that we lost, as far as interaction between our kids. It was problematic at all levels, but I think our babies in pre-K through first (grade) never learned those skills through the pandemic,” said Reyes Elementary Principal Jessica Melendez-Carrillo.

After conducting research and learning about student’s needs the teams can move on to the “envisioning” stage to make plans to address the issues they identified.

Melendez-Carrillo said her team at the Upper Valley school has been looking into implementing “morning circles” where students can have discussions, resolve conflicts and connect at the start of the day. She said the team is currently brainstorming and learning from other schools who have implemented these circles to see what that will look like.

“We’re collaborating, we’re thinking, we’re revisiting our protocols that we currently have and seeing how can we improve and make them better?” Melendez-Carrillo said.

The team at Welch Elementary has looked into implementing a similar concept they call “talk circles” that allow teachers and students to have conversations on an equal playing field in the hopes of encouraging children to be themselves at school.

“When they do the circles in the morning the teachers are going to participate just like the students so there’s not any kind of power or authority there. Everyone has the same type of authority and it goes back to that feeling of belonging and having a voice,” Daisy Garcia said.

Laura Garcia said the team at O’Shea Keleher is still gathering data and working with Transcend on creating a parent survey before they plan their next move.

Once the teams have finalized their plans, Smith said Transcend will help implement them, evaluate their success and start the process all over again.

“We take schools through this to help them create a model that will match their vision,” Smith said.

In the end, the school leaders taking part in the collaborative program hope it helps improve their student’s lives and prepares them for the future.

“I want to ensure that every one of our students who we send to middle school has that strong sense of self and confidence that they can be whoever they want without worrying about being judged,” Laura Garcia said.

CREEED’s Choose to Excel Director Nadia Tellez said the program aims to help students succeed beyond school.

“We’re excited to support an initial group of eight schools to explore new models of student success that ensure students not only can go on and succeed in college, but that they’re prepared to succeed in our workforce and in their local communities,” she said.

Other schools involved in the program include Vista Del Sol Environmental Science Academy, Jose H. Damian Elementary, Gonzalo and Sofia Garcia Elementary, Jose J. Alderete Middle School and the Canutillo Middle School STEAM Academy.

Smith said that once this first cohort has completed the 10-month program, Transcend hopes to continue working with them and expand to other schools throughout El Paso.

Disclosure: The Council on Regional Economic Expansion and Educational Development and El Paso Community Foundation are financial supporters of El Paso Matters. Financial supporters play no role in El Paso Matters’ journalism. The news organization’s policy on editorial independence can be found .

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Missouri education leaders knew establishing social-emotional learning guidelines for public schools would draw controversy, with some celebrating the idea and others decrying it as government overreach.

So when the Missouri State Board of Education to change course and pursue social-emotional learning as an optional framework instead of a statewide standard, the reactions were unsurprisingly mixed.

Some Republican officials celebrated the move, declaring it a victory for critics of the idea. Proponents, meanwhile, were left scratching their heads and wondering how social-emotional learning got wrapped up in the culture war.

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State Board of Education President Charlie Shields told The Independent the board’s decision will ultimately be a positive thing for social-emotional learning in Missouri.

“If we would’ve moved forward with standards, I think that, frankly, would have set us back in terms of trying to change what’s actually happening,” Shields said.

˛Ńžą˛ő˛ő´ÇłÜ°ůžąâ€™s proposed social-emotional-learning framework is a set of goals intended to progress soft skills, like teamwork and self-motivation.

Board members spoke enthusiastically during the October meeting about expanding the current guiding document into resources for educators, hoping to curb teacher burnout.

According to Google Trends, social-emotional learning has had interest for much of the 21st century, being searched consistently but not widely until around 2016. The phrase dramatically increased in prominence in August 2020 before peaking in September 2020.

Christi Bergin, a research professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia and director of the prosocial development and education research lab, said social-emotional learning has been a tool to correct student behavior since the 1970s.

Social-emotional learning has grown in popularity as students returned to school from COVID-19 closures and teachers noticed additional behavioral issues.

“It was always a need,” Darbie Valenti Huff, a professional developer at the Missouri State Teachers Association, told The Independent. “When our students started to really struggle and had a hard time adapting after the pandemic, it just spotlighted that maybe they didn’t have those skills to help regulate and things like that beforehand.”

Valenti Huff was named ˛Ńžą˛ő˛ő´ÇłÜ°ůžąâ€™s teacher of the year in 2017, heralding her success as a result of her continuing education in social-emotional learning.

She told The Independent that she was always interested in social-emotional learning, but now others are taking notice.

Dissent

The State Board of Education discussed improving classroom behavior and expanding resources for educators during the October meeting with a focus on teachers. The charge to bring SEL statewide came from a Department of Elementary and Secondary Education blue ribbon commission, a group that hopes to improve teacher recruitment and retention.

But some, following the meeting, spoke as though the blue ribbon’s recommendation was dumped entirely.

Jeremy Cady, lobbyist for conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, posted online that the board “halted“ the proposed standards. State Rep. Doug Richey, a Republican from Excelsior Springs who is running for state Senate, that the board’s decision was “welcome news.”

“After my effort to defund (social-emotional learning), this past session, met with significant opposition, I wasn’t sure this day would actually arrive,” he wrote.

Richey sought in March to pull state funding of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, or DEI, not social-emotional learning. Though for some in Missouri, the two initiatives sound similar alarms.

State Sen. Bill Eigel, who is running in the GOP primary for governor, labeled social-emotional learning as “awful” during an appearance on operated by Mike Lindell — creator of MyPillow and election conspiracist.

“As governor, I am going to dismantle DESE and continue to lead the fight against children being used as research experiments for leftist agendas. No to government bureaucracy in education. No to social emotional learning,” Eigel posted on social media alongside a clip of the interview.

A portion of Missourians who responded during the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s public-comment period on proposed social-emotional-learning standards linked the guidelines with DEI. There are more than 1,000 instances of commenters writing “DEI” in their .

Many negative responses are identical or nearly identical.

“Please focus on teaching students how to read, write, math, science, and etc.,” one respondent wrote. “Social-emotional learning and DEI programs do not help students learn and have no place in the students’ of Missouri education.”

Shields told The Independent he doesn’t understand why people draw a connection between DEI and SEL. He wondered if some opposing commenters read the 15 guidelines before condemning them.

Aggressive comments didn’t persuade the board’s actions to make the guiding social-emotional-learning document optional, Shields said. Instead, he was focused on others’ worries that the standards would become part of schools’ accreditation and scoring system.

“We were very careful that we didn’t set the effort backwards by moving it forward as standards,” he said. “We actually think we can move forward the guidelines and possibly have more impact.”

Shields said the board will continue to discuss social-emotional learning, including the development of resources for teachers to apply the 15 points outlined in the initial document.

Educators’ take

Bergin, who is the co-chair of the work group who created the standards, described the following situation when talking to The Independent.

A teacher has a classroom of students that haven’t been behaving well this school year, perhaps bickering or calling one another cruel names.

It lingers in the teacher’s mind, and it would be nice to have a lesson on cooperation or respect — but there’s an intimidating list of core-subject lessons to complete.

If the state and district administration encourages social-emotional learning, that teacher will feel like there’s permission to pause and teach social skills. The feeling of permission is the reason Bergin likes standards instead of an optional framework.

Bergin has helped numerous districts implement similar programs.

“The climate of the classroom improves, and children are happier there,” she told The Independent. “They actually learn more because when children are in environments where they feel like all their classmates care about them, they care about each other. They are free to learn more, and they’re more engaged in the classroom.”

She has watched test scores improve as students learn social-emotional skills.

Valenti Huff was also part of the work group that created the standards.

“Our approach was, ‘let’s try to find that common ground that we all agree on…’ I don’t think that’s quite what happened,” she said.

She wonders if the name “social-emotional learning” caused some commenters to disagree.

The work group began meeting in February and prepared a document of standards members believed the whole state could appreciate. They presented a first draft in May.

The standards have three categories — me, we and others — to help students with a “healthy sense of self,” “relationship-building skills” and “prosocial skills.”

The most current version includes a glossary of traits for each category and student indicators of goals. Skills include cooperation, emotional regulation, respect and active listening.

The group included educators from ˛Ńžą˛ő˛ő´ÇłÜ°ůžąâ€™s urban districts and rural districts to ensure the goals worked for everyone because it was created to be a standard, and, therefore, not optional.

“Without them being a set of standards that we all agree should be a priority and should be taught, I just am afraid that it will fall by the wayside in some districts,” Valenti Huff said. “It will maybe be used as a resource, but I’m afraid it might be an afterthought.”

Others were opposed to another statewide standard.

“I think teachers barely have time to teach what we were trained to teach and that SEL is the responsibility of counselors and families,” one public comment says. “I am not a trained therapist or life coach.”

The Missouri National Education Association, the state teachers’ union, has not made a formal statement on the guidelines. But its policy is in favor of character education and prefers local school boards to have the final say on curriculum issues.

“It is really about these policies and maintaining some flexibility for districts so that they are not looked at as cookie-cutter communities, but instead are allowed to do what’s best for their students where their students are at,” Mark Jones, the MNEA’s communications director, told The Independent.

He said teachers will be looking for clarity and consistency if their district adopts the guidelines.

“It’s really about helping educators have tools and access those tools that benefit their students while conducting their normal lesson plans during the day,” Jones said.

He sees social-emotional learning as an additional layer of learning that is incorporated into the school day, like having students work in groups and practice collaboration.

Bergin said social-emotional learning can be applied in many ways, but she also sees it fit into the everyday rhythm of the classroom.

“My preference for approach is what we call interactional, which is when we just work on tweaking the way that educators interact with students during their regular academic curriculum,” she said.

Currently, the state has not prepared any directions for educators or materials for professional development.

Valenti Huff said the original plan was to have a team help with implementing the standards by creating resources for teachers and detailing them further.

Shields said the board has not abandoned the next steps and has directed DESE staff to look at best practices nationwide and provide options to districts.

“This is not a one-and-done discussion,” he said. “This is an ongoing discussion, so we will circle back on this in the future.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on and .

˛Ńžą˛ő˛ő´ÇłÜ°ůžąâ€™s are being refined to focus on student behavior after the State Board of Education reviewed on the program.

Some board members referred to the current draft as a “beginning,” and the board decided not to vote on passing the standards during its meeting Tuesday.

The public was invited to comment on the department’s proposed social-emotional-learning standards in September. Although a majority of responses were positive, the State Board of Education decided to alter the state’s approach.

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Chrissy Bashore, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s coordinator of school counseling and student wellness, said there was “a great deal of confusion around social emotional learning and what it means” — particularly as she read negative comments.

Positive comments were optimistic about potential mental-health gains for students, whereas negative comments told state officials that this was beyond their role.

“Kids belong to their parents, and parents have the right to educate their kids and the responsibility to see that their kids are well-educated,” one comment said.

Others complained that social-emotional learning, often abbreviated as SEL, sounds like diversity, equity and inclusion and accused the department of “indoctrination.”

“When conservatives hear social emotional learning,” Kimberly Bailey, a board member from Raymore, said during the meeting, “they think of the loaded-up, ideological version that you find in some places. That’s not what we’re trying to do.”

Commissioner of Education Margie Vandeven suggested changing the word “standards” to “framework” to reiterate the optional nature of the state’s plan.

“They can choose to use the resource, or they can choose not to,” Board President Charlie Shields said. “They can develop their own frameworks.”

Board members said they were eager to provide a resource for teachers that want to address behavioral issues, but they wanted schools to have “local control” to create their own plans.

Shields said the SEL guidelines should assist teachers who feel overwhelmed by student behavior, likely helping the teacher retainment issue.

“Teachers are asking us for some level of expectation about the classroom environment,” he said.

“This is an opportunity to not just focus on one thing but to take on that charge of being thought leaders and create that portfolio,” she said.

She wants to study other states’ resources to see what Missouri can offer educators.

Vandeven wondered how fruitful the study would be.

“The issue is states are implementing SEL standards or they are forbidding them,” Vandeven said. “This is a very divisive issue.”

Board member Kerry Casey, of Chesterfield, wanted to focus more on the standards and proposed renaming them to remove the “social-emotional learning” title.

“We are concerned about behavior in the classroom because that is what is certainly impacting our teacher retention and recruitment,” she said. “But it’s affecting the lives of our students and their ability to learn.”

Her proposed name would include “behavior” instead of emotions.

Shields said the name wouldn’t fit, for not every guideline addressed a behavior.

Other board members thought the public would be suspicious of a title change after the standards stirred controversy.

Vandeven was worried about the time to make larger changes Casey mentioned, pointing to the two DESE staff members working on the framework.

“There are two of them,” she said. “That will take all year.”

Vandeven also worried that some criticisms would persist even after edits.

“We have the potential of revisiting something, and we could find ourselves in the same place again,” she said.

Although they received harsh words from some community members, the board seemed to focus on the potential to help educators. The criticism was not the sole reason for making changes.

“The controversy doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to move forward,” Shields told the board.

The board reiterated the importance of creating a guide for student behavior and interactions.

Carol Hallquist, the board’s vice president, said those who want to reserve behavior as a parent’s responsibility may not see all the work educators do.

“The desenters said this is the job of the parent,” she said. “But it’s the job of the parent to feed them, and we’re doing that. It is the job of the parent to ensure that children have warm clothes to wear, but we’ve got clothes closets in schools.”

A handful of those in attendance at the meeting applauded.

Casey said districts who have implemented a similar program to the proposed standards have enviable results. She referenced Potosi R-III School District’s work implementing researchers’ methods.

“It not only benefited the teachers, but it benefited the students. It benefited the students in terms of academic outcomes, their behaviors and their success in life,” she said.

Christi Bergin, associate dean for research and innovation at the University of Missouri, helped create Potosi’s program. She is co-chair of the group creating ˛Ńžą˛ő˛ő´ÇłÜ°ůžąâ€™s framework.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on and .

Approximately 48 team members were impacted by the move, a source told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

CZI spokesperson Raymonde Charles confirmed the layoffs in a statement: “Over the past eight years, we have learned a great deal about how to equip educators with the research, tools, and partners they need to center students’ well-being in support of academic achievement and success. 

“Guided by insights from our grantees, research, and educators, our work in education continues to evolve, and the structure of our teams has changed as a result. We remain committed to helping educators give every student exactly what they need to thrive inside the classroom and beyond.” 

Despite the layoffs, CZI (a financial supporter of ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ) remains one of the nation’s largest philanthropies working on education issues. Since 2015, the philanthropy has given grants to nearly 1,000 organizations working to aid teachers in supporting students to thrive in and beyond the classroom. 

Recent CZI efforts have included a first-of-its-kind “connection builder” that facilitates meaningful, one-on-one teacher-student conversations that have proven essential for student engagement and academic success; an initiative to develop evidence-based approaches to boost early literacy that has already reached more than 12,700 children and 14,500 educators; and an effort that partners with schools and districts to create research-based surveys that helps educators better understand students’ aspirations, strengths, and barriers to succeeding in advanced coursework.

All affected employees were offered the same severance details, said a source. The package includes 16 weeks of base pay, continued health insurance and a $10,000 stipend to use as needed to assist with transitional needs. Employees also received a prorated portion of their 2023 bonus. 

Disclosure: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provides financial support to ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

LINCOLN — Nebraska lawmakers will be back Monday after two months with a dueling education hearing and forum on social and emotional learning.

The Education Committee will meet in State Capitol Room 1525 at 1:30 p.m. Monday to consider three studies offered by State Sen. Dave Murman of Glenvil, the committee’s chair.

Legislative Resolutions , and will respectively look at parental involvement in education, the Nebraska Department of Education’s use of COVID-19 pandemic relief funds and social and emotional learning in K-12 schools.

Murman described these as information gathering and paths toward transparency to improve schools.

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“I’m looking forward to the hearing, and hopefully we’ll come out after the hearing with better ideas, especially for the future going forward in education,” Murman said this week.

Monday will feature but no opportunity for public comment, which is not unusual for interim studies. The eight are:

• Brian Maher, the Nebraska education commissioner.
• Mike Pate, a Millard Public Schools board member.
• Lisa Wagner, president of the Central City Public School Board.
• Jackie Egan, representing NAACP Lincoln, Nebraskans for Peace, Let’s Talk Alliance and the Lincoln Education Collaboration.
• Kirk Penner, a State Board of Education member and former Aurora Public Schools board member (testifying in his personal capacity).
• Lisa Schonhoff, an English language learning educator with Bennington Public Schools.
• Sue Greenwald of the Protect Nebraska Children Coalition, a conservative political action committee that formed in 2021 to elect more conservative school board members.
• Lori Samuelson, a school psychologist in Hastings Public Schools.

Back to ‘basics’

Following years of backlash to critical race theory and comprehensive sex education, Monday’s hearing may feature a new concept for some: social and emotional learning.

The Nebraska Department of Education a definition from CASEL, the , that it is the process for children and adults to “understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships and make responsible decisions.”

The department also has its own for educators and leaders about the concept.

Murman said social and emotional learning has become a “buzzword,” and the hearing is a way to consider its role compared to the “basics,” such as reading, writing, math and STEM subjects.

Renee Jones, a Lincoln Public Schools teacher and the 2023 Nebraska Teacher of the Year, said the social and emotional well-being of students has been a “pressing concern,” exacerbated by challenges because of COVID-19.

“We simply cannot stick to teaching the ‘basics’ (math, reading, writing, history, etc) without recognizing that we are teaching humans, rather than information robots,” Jones said in an email.

Framework as ‘Trojan horse’

However, Penner has said social and emotional learning is the “Trojan horse” for all gender and critical race theory lessons being brought into education.

“3 of us on the board are on a mission to remove SEL and after ‘24 elections we should have the majority to have it removed,” Penner said in a .

The York County Republicans will host an event led by Greenwald, a former pediatrician, on Tuesday — ”S.E.L. Horrors” — where she is set to address how social and emotional learning has “infiltrated” every aspect of the school day.

The event will feature Greenwald’s interpretation of how social and emotional learning brings Marxist teachings, how moral relativism is replacing moral absolutes of religion, how sexualizing children traumatizes them and how the nuclear family is under attack.

Schonhoff, who is running for the State Boad of Education, said she has been a public school educator for more than 20 years and is a mom of four children attending public schools. She said she will share how the teaching “is being pushed into our schools at alarming speeds.”

‘The whole child has to be involved’

State Board of Education member Deb Neary of Omaha said many of the topics for Monday’s hearing are “born out of politics” and not problems in the state. were dominant in Neary’s re-election campaign last fall, including continued fallout after the board considered health education standards, including sex education, in 2021.

Neary said teachers and schools have been teaching social and emotional learning for decades.

“Teachers and schools have always talked about kindness and getting along and persistence,” Neary said. “Now they’ve been tagged with a name and there’s been a lot of misinformation around it and fear-mongering by politicians.”

Jones said she’d like the committee to bear in mind how each component of a student’s health impacts not just their academic performance but their “ability to navigate life beyond school.”

Murman said the hearing is not intended to diminish teachings of kindness and compassion but to help everyone involved with education understand and improve systems for students.

“If they [students] don’t have the right mental health or emotional health, it’s not the best learning environment either,” Murman said. “The whole child has to be involved in education.”

Additional resolutions

Murman’s two other resolutions are intended to dive deeper into efforts announced in the past year.

This spring he introduced — the “Parents’ Bill of Rights and Academic Transparency Act” — which has not advanced from the Education Committee. It would legislate that parents are the “foremost decision maker in every child’s life” and address parental involvement.

Lisa Wagner of Central City said she plans to detail how parental involvement is addressed in her city.

The final resolution comes nine months after Murman and four other senators called for an into the Nebraska Department of Education’s use of pandemic funds, centered on Launch Nebraska, a department website built to help schools reopening during the pandemic. 

The office of then-Gov. Pete Ricketts identified a New York University website link last June that, after two or three clicks, led to a document defending critical race theory and discussing racial justice. The link was removed prior to the senators’ news conference last October.

In , Murman also called for the department to remove links and resources to on its . The resources remain on the department’s website.

David Jespersen, a spokesman for the department, confirmed Murman’s office had reached out on some links, which were left up after staff decided they were appropriate.

Jespersen said there are still layers of vetting for anything that goes on the website.

Murman said he understands that only started in his role leading the State Department of Education and was not in charge when the pandemic funds were spent. He said it’s not about trying a “gotcha” but understanding what happened and what can be done moving forward.

Public forum down the hall

Just down the hall from the hearing will be a on social and emotional learning, led by State Sens. Machaela Cavanaugh, John Cavanaugh, Terrell McKinney, Carol Blood and Megan Hunt. The forum will start at 3 p.m. in Room 1510.

None of the five senators serve on the Education Committee, though McKinney served on it previously. He that anyone worried about what’s going on with should pay attention to the hearing. 

Machaela Cavanaugh said there was a “pretty large outcry” from the public about not being able to testify on Murman’s resolutions.

“I thought, well, if we’re only going to have one side of testimony here, and that doesn’t seem appropriate, we should find an avenue for the public to come in and share their thoughts,” she said.

The senators have the space for two hours, and Cavanaugh said they’ll try to accommodate anyone wishing to speak. It will run similarly to a normal hearing but won’t be recorded since it’s not official.

Murman said he will likely sit in on the forum and does not want to be confrontational.

“I just want to hear a broad range of ideas on all three of those LRs,” Murman said. “I’m sure there’ll be some beneficial testimony there.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Cate Folsom for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com. Follow Nebraska Examiner on and .

The summit will be held at a downtown Marriott from June 29 through July 2, despite from LGBTQ rights advocates and others who object to the group’s stance on social and education issues. 

The American Historical Association sent to the Museum of the American Revolution on June 26, urging its president to reconsider the decision to let Moms for Liberty hold a portion of the summit there.

“Moms for Liberty is an organization that has vigorously advocated censorship and harassment of history teachers, banning history books from libraries and classrooms, and legislation that renders it impossible for historians to teach with professional integrity without risking job loss and other penalties,” the letter read.

Neither Moms for Liberty nor the Museum of the American Revolution responded to a request for comment about the letter. 

The summit is a must for Republican leaders, a reflection of the organization’s influence. Some high-profile speakers, including DeSantis, are returning for a second round: The governor spoke at last summer’s event alongside Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and former secretary of housing and urban development Ben Carson. 

This year’s event has proven an even bigger draw for conservative politicians and their followers. Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice said the 650-ticket summit has already sold out. 

The vocal, right-wing parent organization was formed in Florida in 2021 by school board members Tina Descovich and Justice and by , who is married to the of the Florida Republican Party. 

Moms for Liberty members originally targeted COVID protocols but have since focused on critical race theory, diversity and inclusion, social-emotional learning and LGBTQ issues, among other topics. The group claims 285 chapters and 120,000 members across 44 states.

The organization gained national recognition after members disrupted school board meetings across the country, with of those who oppose their views. Local chapters have mounted highly successful efforts targeting materials related to racism, slavery and gender. 

Moms for Liberty was recently labeled an by the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

Justice called the characterization shocking and absurd. 

“I think they’ve really shot themselves in the foot,” she said. 

Her group’s mission is to empower parents and support their fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children, she said. 

“That includes their education, their medical care and their morality and their religion,” she told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “And it seems like we’re in a tug-of-war with the federal government in our nation’s schools.”

President Joe Biden also was invited to the summit, but his office did not respond, Justice said. The Biden campaign did not answer emails requesting comment.

Moms for Liberty has endorsed across the nation, many of whom have gone on to win. 

Despite its ability to attract high-profile politicians and zealous parent advocates, some experts question whether education will be a key issue in the 2024 presidential race.

Jeffrey Henig, professor of political science and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said he thinks it will likely take a backseat. 

“Education is one of those issues that is tempting politically because it gets a fervent response for a subset of voters, particularly parents,” he said. “And that can be attractive because it lets you mobilize people who don’t always like to turn out — or are on the fence. But … it can backfire.”

School politics, he said, “can take sharp twists and turns” that leave politicians exposed.

“Today’s cheers for a strong stand against so-called ‘smut’ in texts can morph into indignation at book banning and perceived attacks on treasured schools and teachers,” he said. 

Frederick M. Hess, senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said politicians once used education to appeal to voters in the middle. Now, he said, they use it to court their base. 

“If Trump is the nominee and you don’t like him, it’s not likely that his stance on Title IX or school choice will change that,” he said. “And if you’re concerned about Biden, wokeness or federal spending, it’s tough to imagine that a proposal for universal pre-K or student loan forgiveness is going to win you over.”

Michael J. Petrilli, president of the , a research fellow at Stanford University’s and executive editor of , said that if Trump gets the nomination, his views on education or other issues won’t really matter. Nothing will distract from the candidate himself, he said. 

The embattled former president, whose divisive rhetoric has continued well beyond his time in office, is facing a host of legal troubles, including a recent indictment over alleged . 

“If Donald Trump is the Republican nominee, the election will be about Donald Trump,” Petrilli said. “End of sentence. Policy issues will play an exceedingly minor role.”

But if another candidate wins the party’s nomination, Petrilli said, he or she might use the issue of school choice to entice working-class Hispanic and Black voters.

“And it might work,” he said. 

DeSantis has banned classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity . His Parental Rights in Education Act — often called the Don’t Say Gay Bill — has been replicated .

Haley, a former , has referred to transgender girls participating in girls’ sports as “the women’s issue of our time” on the campaign trail. Placing herself to the right of DeSantis, she has said his legislation isn’t stringent enough. 

Henig said the Florida governor’s overall stance is too extreme to succeed with a national electorate.

“Americans still have a lot of trust and allegiance to their local school communities,” he said, adding that Democrats might frame DeSantis’s efforts as an attack on teachers.

“What’s the most important feeling?” a woman in a bedazzled bucket hat calls out to an auditorium of 300 young students.

“LOVE!” the students shout in response.

The word explodes from them, as if yelling it with enough force will transform the word into the feeling itself, and then Miss KK will truly know what she means to the students of in Winston-Salem.

It’s just another Friday at Kimberley Park, where Karen Cuthrell (aka Miss KK) makes regular appearances to read aloud to the students.

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They know the most important feeling is love because they’ve met the “Feeling Friends,” characters created by Cuthrell and featured in the books she reads to them.

Kimberley Park has gone all-in with the Feeling Friends this year, embracing the curriculum Cuthrell built around her characters with the goal of supporting children’s social-emotional health.

The Feeling Friends are 12 animal characters, each associated with an emotion — Lotta Love the LovaRoo, Angie the Angry Tiger, Billy the Bully Goat, and their friends. The Feeling Friends curriculum includes books, songs, puppets, activities, and professional development led by Cuthrell.

Since adopting Cuthrell’s curriculum, Mia Parker, the school’s family engagement coordinator, has noticed a significant improvement in the behavior and mental state of the students and their families.

“She’s like a freakin’ goldmine,” Parker said. “There’s so many things that she does that resonate with our children. And with everybody, not just the kids.”

Miss KK & the Feeling Friends

The shimmering Miss KK persona was forged in a moment of darkness and fear.

“Almost 29 years ago, my daughter was diagnosed with depression,” Cuthrell told EdNC. “When I heard the word depression, I became scared because back then, depression was such a dirty word.”

In addition to worrying about how the stigma of a mental health diagnosis would impact her young daughter’s life, Cuthrell was at a loss for how to support her.

“She was 6 years old when the doctor said I had to get her to talk about her feelings,” Cuthrell said. “I realized she didn’t have a feelings vocabulary.”

Cuthrell started thinking about ways to help her daughter develop that vocabulary as a starting point on the road to better mental health.

“I knew she liked music, I knew she liked dance, I knew she liked books,” Cuthrell said.

Cuthrell started by hiring a music teacher to help her write songs about emotions. Together, they created 12 characters, each based on an emotion they thought would help her daughter and other students talk about their feelings: fear, anger, shame, disgust, guilt, hostility, meanness, sadness, tenderness, happiness, satisfaction, and love.

Next they hired a Morehouse College student to draw cartoon versions of their characters. His mom sewed stuffed animals inspired by his designs, so children could have something to hold and squeeze while navigating their feelings through songs.

“In a three-month span, we went from an idea to throwing a concert at (a community college) with cassette tapes and coloring books,” Cuthrell said.

Cuthrell took on the persona of Miss KK — a name inspired by the fact that she and the music teacher she worked with were both named Karen — to visit schools, singing and dancing with students as she introduced them to the .

“And one of the reasons I started doing that is because I realized that my daughter was in a school where they never had any Black performers coming in,” Cuthrell said.

It’s important to Cuthrell that the Feeling Friends were specifically designed with Black children in mind.

“You can’t take some curriculum, just put a brown face on it and say that it’s culturally responsive, because it isn’t,” Cuthrell said.

“Funding needs to be opened up to African Americans to write curriculum,” Cuthrell said. “because if you want to be culturally responsive, we know our children.”

The Feeling Friends curriculum is built on the foundation of the widely used for social-emotional learning. The evidence-based focuses on five competencies: self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, social awareness, and relationship skills.

Cuthrell’s curriculum also incorporates the principles of . According to the Othering & Belonging Institute:

Within a targeted universalism framework, universal goals are established for all groups concerned. The strategies developed to achieve those goals are targeted, based upon how different groups are situated within structures, culture, and across geographies to obtain the universal goal.

As Cuthrell explained, “What we write is for everybody, every kid loves it. But it really resonates with our children.” Children like her now-thriving adult daughter.

Because North Carolina is Cuthrell’s home, the Feeling Friends curriculum is similarly aligned with the state’s for elementary schools.

Strong social-emotional health is particularly important for children who live in communities with high rates of violence, crime, poverty, and/or unemployment. It can serve as a for children who are at risk of exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).

That includes the students who attend Kimberley Park Elementary School.

Diamond Cotton & Kimberley Park

Kimberley Park Elementary sits in the heart of the Boston-Thurmond neighborhood in Winston-Salem, a mile-and-a-half north of downtown on Cherry Street.

Like many predominantly Black neighborhoods established during the era of and in the early 20th century, was home to middle-class working families and successful small businesses.

And as in other thriving Black neighborhoods, bisected the community in the mid-20th century. Then Black workers began losing jobs to mechanization and globalization. The neighborhood developed a as illegal activity and drug use increased, and some homes fell into disrepair.

There’s little evidence of that visible today as Black parents walk their children down tree-canopied sidewalks to their neighborhood school. from community members in partnership with philanthropic organizations has revitalized the area.

And Principal Diamond Cotton has revitalized Kimberley Park Elementary School.

Cotton took over as principal of Kimberley Park in March 2020. She was the fourth person to hold the position that school year.

“I was asked to come here for a reason… We were in the bottom 10% of the state on test scores, so we had to do some work to try to get out of that hole,” Cotton said. “For me though, I knew that there are lots of pieces that contribute to the academic success of kids.”

Kimberley Park was designated as a Restart School due to its “recurring low performing” status. According to the Department of Public Instruction, are granted “charter-like flexibility” to adopt innovative strategies that can lead to better student outcomes.

Cotton started her work at Kimberley Park by focusing on what she called the “extreme behavior” of the students, caused by the trauma she knew they experienced on a daily basis.

“When I came in, kids didn’t know how to walk in the halls, they didn’t know how to respond to each other. You could tell there were lots of needs,” Cotton said.

Then 10 days after she took the job, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the closure of schools in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools district.

Cotton worried about what her students were dealing with at home, but the closure also presented an opportunity to hit the reset button for the school, its staff, and its students.

The flexibility of being a Restart School gave her the ability to retain staff members who shared her vision for the school, and bring new members on board. She also got support from the superintendent to beautify the school building and grounds, removing bars from the windows, replacing broken doors, painting murals on walls and floors, and planting new flowers and shrubs outside.

She and her staff established new norms for the school, including a weekly Friday morning assembly called “Harambee,” a Swahili word that means “all pull together.”

During Harambee, staff members lead students in singing and dancing, teachers or volunteers read aloud, students receive awards for academic improvement, and Cotton announces which staff member will be receiving a free lunch in recognition of their work (which she pays for from her own pocketbook).

When students began returning to classrooms for the 2020-21 school year, she started with the youngest students, who had no previous experience with the school. She and her staff brought back one grade level at a time, establishing new norms and expectations as they went.

By the time the fifth graders returned, the school’s appearance and culture was nothing like they remembered from their years before, and the new norms had already been accepted by the rest of the school’s students. The KP School (as it’s often called) was reborn.

But despite the changes to the school, students were still bringing the trauma they experienced in their lives off-campus into the hallways and classrooms.

“It’s not unusual for there to be a shooting down the street and our kids to be impacted by it in some way, shape, or form,” Cotton said.

She knew she needed to find a way to help them talk about and process their feelings.

“A big part of it was culture and making sure that we were providing an environment that was supportive of the needs our kids had, even if there were deficits coming from home,” Cotton said. “And so that’s how we landed on the Feeling Friends.”

Cotton had welcomed Miss KK into a school where she had previously worked and knew the Feeling Friends had been visiting Forsyth County classrooms for more than a decade. With the flexibility granted to her as the leader of Restart School, she had the opportunity to adopt Cuthrell’s entire Feeling Friends curriculum schoolwide.

Cotton and Cuthrell started with providing professional development to the staff, training them in social-emotional learning, giving them the “feelings vocabulary” of the Feeling Friends, and giving them the books, music, puppets, or activities appropriate for their classrooms and grade levels.

Parker said that when students get upset now, instead of lashing out or shutting down, they have conversations.

“They can tell you their emotions, and they can tell you why they’re feeling that way,” Parker said. “Because the teachers are teaching that curriculum, so they’re getting that SEL that they wouldn’t normally get if it’s not embedded into instruction.”

“People walk into our building, and then they’re like, ‘It just feels different.’ And that’s what I want,” Cotton said.

“I see the school going in a very positive direction,” Parker said. “So much so that if it were not for the fact that I’ve given the state 32 years, I wouldn’t retire!”

And it’s not just the kids who are learning.

Parker described a powerful moment when a veteran teacher stood up during a recent staff meeting to say that she had seen the Feeling Friends curriculum working for her students, even though she hadn’t initially been on board.

“I think that was what made it so impactful for her to say that,” Parker said. “She validated that she’s learning, too.”

The Feeling Friends curriculum at KP School has also included emotion coaching workshops for parents, which Parker believes is an essential part of the curriculum’s success.

“Miss KK also teaches them how to deal with their emotions, and how their adverse childhood experiences impact how they perceive their children and what they project to their children,” Parker said.

Cuthrell works with people of all ages, from preschoolers, to , to parents.

“It’s a holistic program that’s good for everybody, that’s rooted in love, that’s based in love,” Cuthrell said.

She’s replaced Miss KK’s bedazzled bucket hat with a simple black beanie, but Miss KK still shines through. “Because love is the most important feeling.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

A rare silence in a first grade classroom changed S. Renee Mitchell’s life. 

To learn names as a guest artist, Mitchell prompted students at Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary in Portland, Oregon to pair their intros with an adjective, something they liked about themselves: “Brave Brian”, “Kind Kyla”. A quiet pattern in body language emerged: Black students dropped and shook their heads.

“I kept seeing it over and over and it was just like, Oh, what’s happening? The Black kids are not able to identify something positive,” Mitchell said, her eyes brimming as she spoke. “I still get emotional about it. Because it reminded me of me. I was a kid who couldn’t tell you positive things about myself because I didn’t hear positive things reflected back, not even in my household.” 

At the time, Mitchell did not consider herself an educator. She’d been working with Portland schools as a way to connect with her community after leaving The Oregonian — where she worked as a Pulitzer Prize nominated . Still, that evening, the career journalist wrote what would become a semi-autobiographical children’s book: The Awakening of Sharyn: A Shy & Brown Super Gyrl. 

It’s a tale of how a young person can come to love all of themself, especially the parts others seem to disagree with. Through words, Mitchell found a way to model how to heal from pain and build a positive self image — the purpose she would dedicate her life to in the decade that followed. 

She shared a draft of her children’s book with that group of reticent first graders, hopeful they could realize their brilliance young and maybe skirt the feelings of depression and fear that she felt for so long. By talking about her own feelings of shame and isolation as a kid, she opened the door for youth to open up without fear of judgment; shed their shame. 

She then facilitated what would be the first of many ‘Superhero Awakening Ceremonies’ at a community center. The space filled with color, glitter and exclamation as children illustrated what they loved about themselves on capes, masks and paper. Parents were invited into the classroom to celebrate and sing an empowerment song: “Thank you superhero, I think you are amazing. I love you, superhero. You have so much style, you make me want to sing.” 

What would have been a lackluster introduction exercise transformed into an outpouring of love for the young people who needed to hear it. And in seeing them, and their pain, Mitchell helped them engage differently in the classroom.

It was one of many experiences Mitchell now has of prompting herself and others across generations to come together and use art as therapy. 

A self-described Creative Revolutionist, she imagines what art-inspired events or connections are possible, rather than what’s established and “allowed to happen.” She began hosting middle school poetry slams and family Write Nights, where parents and caregivers worked through prompts with their children.

“All of this for me is interconnected, it’s intergenerational. So yes, I love working with youth. It’s what I specialize in,” Mitchell said. “But it’s not the only thing that I do. Because in order to really have an effect on youth, you have to have an effect on community. And at the end of the day, I’m trying to do what was never done for me.”

Her approach — “I have an idea. Let’s just keep rolling with it till the wheels fall off,” — got her noticed by the then principal of Portland’s most diverse high school, Roosevelt. She was recruited to teach and stayed on for four years as the only Black educator. 

“I taught journalism, but it was also like, how can I mother? How can I treat these like my own children?” she said. “How would I want them to be seen in the classroom? And that’s how I behaved.”

She’d start her days sourcing leftover bagels and bananas for students who came to school hungry and carved out class time for poetry, reinforcing for young people, “you don’t have to do or present things in the way people expect.” 

Mitchell founded Roosevelt’s first Black Girl Magic Club with funding from the city’s Office of Youth Violence Prevention. Young girls gathered to dance, coexist; process their families, relationships and what it meant to be Black in Portland. She encouraged them to explore poetry as a medium — for its ability to make pain into something beautiful and allow the mind to wander. 

In 2018, three of the four winners of Stand for Children’s $16,000 were members of Black Girl Magic Club. Their applications, one of which was submitted as a poem, explored trauma and their sense of self. After some of them performed their stories at a MLK celebration, adults approached them in tears: they felt seen, wished they could be as brave, and wanted to celebrate them for their vulnerability. They were stunned that their personal stories were impacting people in ways they hadn’t imagined. 

Mitchell was determined to hone the success into something greater for more of Portland. And after four years as a teacher, she also felt more could be done to support her community outside of the traditional school system than within it. She also decided to pursue a doctorate degree in education at the University of Oregon, and began training teachers and community members about how to help Black children heal from racial trauma.

Acknowledging — not hiding from — traumatic experiences became the seedling for her youth leadership development nonprofit, I Am MORE: Making Ourselves Resilient Everyday. Founded in 2018, I Am MORE has earned three social emotional learning awards from the New York based NoVo Foundation, and Mitchell’s impact was formally recognized when the city named her their 2019 Spirit of Portland winner. Each summer, the organization hosts a paid leadership training internship where youth discuss financial literacy, colorism, toxic masculinity, racial trauma and other life issues.

“We help young people understand that they are MORE than the worst thing that has ever happened to them,” their website reads. To this day, the work mirrors Mitchell’s instincts with the shy first graders at MLK: recognize pain and create ways for young people to heal with each other and the adults around them. I Am MORE cohosts everything from open mic nights, where some teens just listen quietly, to camping trips focused on human connection. 

The impact is felt inside and outside of the classroom: young people learn to express and advocate for themselves, in classrooms, at home, or in relationships. 

“My work as an artist in the schools… helped me understand everything that I’ve done started with trauma. It was me seeing those kids, connecting that with my own trauma, and then trying to figure out — how do I make something out of that?” 

The process . She began processing her childhood, sexual assault and domestic violence through poetry and playwriting as a young adult.

The middle child of eight siblings and a miscarriage, Mitchell grew up unseen and misunderstood. Often the only Black student in her Northern California and Oregon classrooms, she was frequently isolated and bullied, including at home by her brothers. While her father, an educator and community activist himself, introduced her to Black thinkers, history and social commentary early on, he passed away suddenly when Mitchell was 11. Ever since, she yearned for a “reconnection” to the positive roots she associated with his stories, work and sprawling library. 

“When youth experience something, they feel like this is the first time this has ever happened, and it’s only happening to them. And so I was really clear about some of the trauma that I experienced and the death of my dad — how that after that I started thinking about suicide,” she said. 

“Even though I was smart, even though I was obedient, even though I was a great cleaner, even though I did everything I was supposed to do, I still was miserable and depressed and overlooked and suicidal and no one really paid attention.”

In high school, a biracial student that Mitchell tried to befriend said she had to cut ties, lest she be identified with being Black, too. The isolation and harm from predominantly white environments was an accepted reality that followed her until she attended a historically Black university. 

Though she felt liberated at Florida A&M — for the first time, surrounded by Black joy — in her first semester she was raped. Two years later, an abusive partner emotionally isolated her and repeatedly threatened to shoot her friends. The violent partnership stirred up previous suicidal thoughts.

“I sat on the bed and I got his gun from the closet on the top shelf. And I sat on the bed, and I put it to my head. And then I was like, ‘What am I doing?’” 

“That was a turning point for me. And it also helped me have a depth of compassion for youth who may be going through the same thing and don’t have that thing that shifts — that moment,” she said, donning a silver chain that reads ‘resilient’. “Everything in me is fighting for that kid.”

Mitchell, who also survived domestic violence in her second marriage, talks about her trauma often, through poetry, playwriting and performance. After speaking for a community college class, one student responded with an essay: her abuser trained her not to talk. After hearing Mitchell’s story, she felt granted “permission” in a way, to process and heal from what happened.

Mitchell keeps notes like these, and student art, within an arm’s reach at her home desk. She says they are reminders of her purpose, why her life led her back to weaving her community together in Portland. In the last year alone, I am MORE has partnered with other organizations to orchestrate art galleries, Black power movie nights, quilting and financial literacy workshops.

“This is not a job for me. This is a life path because of the trauma that I experienced. Because of the many times where I felt like my life is worthless. And understanding as a teacher, so many kids are going through this same thing every day,” Mitchell said. “They just need someone to see them in that moment and remind them of who they really are.” 

Craving a place of belonging

Mitchell is chipping away at the walls between communities in Portland, the same place she and her sisters hated so much as ostracized teens they graduated early to leave. 

Racism is baked into the region’s history — in 1859, Oregon became the only state in the nation to explicitly ban Black people from living within its borders with an exclusion clause in its constitution. The city was fiercely redlined; Northeast Portland’s Albina neighborhood was established as a Black stronghold.

City projects decimated the community under the guise of “urban renewal.” . For five decades, an empty stretch of land remained — the Hospital never grew. Mitchell felt sick driving past the lot. A new Black-led project is now working to build affordable homes, a community garden and shared office space on a plot returned to the community by Legacy Health. 

“Now, I have been accustomed to racism, but Oregon had a particular kind of racism. And I was like, I never want to live here again, I just want to escape,” Mitchell said, reflecting on her state of mind as she headed off to attend Florida A&M. In her teens, there were no gathering spaces or community experiences for Portland’s Black youth. 

The same cannot be said today. is reviving a cultural icon, its building home to the former Albina Arts Center, a destination for young and old in the 60s and 70s. A hub of learning, dance, music and intergenerational joy, community members came to the Center to access free photography, Swahili and modeling classes for just over a decade. 

Mitchell signed the lease in February as the pandemic wore on, taking responsibility for the Center’s next chapter from . With support from art curator Bobby Fouther and lifelong Albina resident Sunshine Dixon, Grant began the Soul Restoration Project and in fall 2021. 

Without adequate funds to keep the Albina Arts Center open, the institution so central to Black Portland had shuttered in 1977 – and would stay closed for years. Nonprofits like without success to buy and restore the space, now managed by the Oregon Community Foundation. While a feminist bookstore leased the space from 2006-2019, it remained mostly vacant, save the occasional community event, until Grant made it home to the Soul Restoration Project in 2021.

Residents describe a particular bookstore that mirrored Albina’s energy : Reflections, where they would run into neighbors, cousins, playing dominos, laughing and drinking coffee. A Black Cheers, in Mitchell’s sister Linda’s words, where everyone knew your name. Small but beloved. 

The pandemic shut down events. Young people began telling Mitchell they hadn’t eaten, washed up, or brushed their teeth for days in spring 2020 because they had no motivation. 

There was an acute need for a youth-centered community gathering space, one centered on mental health and wellness.

At the time, I Am MORE led hybrid programming at its coworking office space, but were constantly sushed for making “too much noise,” in the heat of conversation or laughter about their sexualities, hyper masculinity, colorism. They needed a bigger space to “show, to be ourselves,” safely.

“Not having access to those kind of spaces…you just don’t know how to ground yourself,” Mitchell said. “That’s the kind of thing we’re trying to revive…if I come here, my soul is going to be fed…I’m gonna walk away feeling better about myself and my connection to the community. That’s what’s missing in this very tiny Black community here in Portland, Oregon.” 

‘It’s helping me get to where I want to be’

On a Friday afternoon in early March, Manny Dempsey, a 9th grader, gets settled in an armchair and flips through an early draft of his children’s book on an iPad. It’s a series of letters addressed to his unborn son. 

He waits quietly for a publishing brainstorm with Elias Moreno-Lothe, I Am MORE’s “Vibologist” and youth director, who is DJing across the room, cohosting their weekly open mic night, Freestyle Fridays. The art mentorship, and atmosphere, is not something Dempsey can access at school. 

“It’s not a place that I love but it is home,” he quickly says of Portland. When asked about the Soul Restoration Center, he flashes a smile. It felt like an art gallery the first time he walked in a few weeks before. It’s where he could pop in after school to meet generations of Portland artists and dream big about the children’s book that’s become close to his heart, a love letter to future generations.

“The space is really good to me. It’s helping me get to where I want to be in my future. I want to make comic books and share my art worldwide and not just in one space,” Dempsey said, sitting in the gentle sensory explosion that is the Soul Restoration Center at 14 NE Killingsworth. 

Soft hip hop beats and the occasional Lauryn Hill are a constant, as are the sounds of a distant water fountain and faint smokiness from incense. Light from the front wall of windows showcases walls decked in Black art, ranging from humorous (a lifesize bronze LeBron James statue) to nostalgic and painful. 

A central stage is framed by a large skylight — some of Mitchell’s artwork hangs in the center, tributes to ancestors that read “heal.” Tucked at the bottom of a shelf are a row of teddy bears. 

Mitchell’s crew have decorated the open room to feel like home. Couches and close to a dozen rugs, a mix of mustard yellow, brown and red. 

“We know that people are coming in tense. We know that they don’t have space to gather. And in every way we want to lower those defenses, particularly with our youth,” she said.

The city, wanting to bolster youth development in the wake of police violence and Black Lives Matter protests, by . Mitchell became the fund’s first grantee, which enabled her to hire more staff, pay artists, plan citywide empowerment programming for the year and decorate the space. 

Many describe the Center as one of healing, particularly necessary in Portland right now as hundreds grieve the loss of loved ones. In 2021, Portland were recorded, surpassing the city’s previous record of 66 and numbers seen in much larger cities like San Francisco. Black families were disproportionately affected.

Sunshine Dixon, who joined Mitchell’s team as a community connector after working with Darell Grant, came to realize Portland’s youngest are attuned to and looking for ways to address the violence. Outside of the North Portland’s public library, she and Grant provided art supplies and encouraged young people to work through whatever was on their mind. 

One nine year old drew a man with a hole in his head, with bullets around the edges of the frame. 

“I said, can you tell me more about this picture, and he said yeah, there’s a hole in this guy’s head because you have to have a hole in your head if you don’t believe there’s gun violence,” Dixon said.

“This place is also addressing black youth and recognizing that they need a place to come, they need a fugitive space, space to be. They need a place of healing. They need a place of safety,” she added. 

Near the end of 2021, Mitchell began brainstorming more ways to meet the community’s emotional need to heal from violence through programming. “How can we not distract but give them something different?” 

She invited a renowned quilter to lead a workshop and share the behind her craft; during times of enslavement, Black women repurposed discarded food scraps, bags and clothing to make quilts. 

Together Stitching Hope, Peace by Piece, partially funded by the City of Portland, was a hit. Most attendees were young Black men who had never sewed before; two became so interested that they went home with their own gifted machines. In Mitchell’s words, the workshop had “opened up something so deeply in them.” 

“And that’s what I wanted to have happen — not to come to an event where someone says stop picking up a gun,” she said. “How can I redirect their energy towards something when they are in charge of their creativity?” 

The Albina Center’s former dance floor transforms week in pursuit of that creative goal. In January, it became a theatre for a Black power movie night and discussion; a local rapper screened The Murder of Fred Hampton. 

I Am MORE also facilitates signature fishbowl circles — a community building exercise centered on active listening. Youth start in the center, with elders surrounded in a circle. They’re prompted to share what they need that they’re not receiving, without interruption — observed like fish in a bowl.

“The young people get to speak and the people around them, all they do is listen. So the youth feel heard, they feel like somebody is paying attention to their opinion, what they have to say,” Mitchell explained. 

When adults enter the center, they begin by acknowledging what they heard before offering up ways they might support or lessons from their own life. Strangers learn what they may have in common, and build a sense of understanding. Mitchell added the exercise helps older community members, who yearn for ways to share knowledge, to build a legacy. 

The programming is an outlet for young people like , now 20, who love learning and creating but dislike traditional school environments. Today, he works four jobs at local youth development nonprofits.

“I had the worst attendance rate out of my whole class… I was not good at high school, but I was good at jumping on opportunities. And using them as much as I could,” Wrapper said. He taught himself to play piano, use Adobe Premiere Pro for videos and perform spoken word, with the encouragement of Mitchell and Moreno-Lothe.

On Saturday mornings in March, yoga mats, journals and pillows filled the space as social worker, mother and wellness instructor ZaDora Williams hosted a support group for Black women. 

“Baby, however you come, this is one place you can be loved on. You can create art with bullets, you can literally be you, that is what we are encouraging… We’re giving them language so that they can hopefully not re-experience the chronic health issues physically, mentally, spiritually that have plagued Black communities for generations,” Williams said.

Mitchell has curated the gathering space she, her siblings and neighbors craved as children. 

She models nurturing behavior she expects her team to use — asking if they’ve eaten and providing food if they haven’t; making them write their own job descriptions so they have agency over their work; canceling meetings with city partners if youth don’t have a seat at the table. 

Like her empathetic, creative reaction to quiet Black children nearly a decade ago, Mitchell leads with possibility and heart. 

“At the end of the day, I behaved in a way I desperately wanted to experience while growing up. And my students recognized it as love, without me ever having to define it out loud.”

Updated June 7 | Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to both the Weave Project and ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

“One of the things that happens in human development,” Davidson says, “is that the prefrontal cortex matures as we get older. It’s an important part of the brain that enables us to do what psychologists call mental time travel, where we can anticipate the future and reflect on the past. But in preschoolers, where the prefrontal cortex is not so developed, they’re not worrying about tomorrow. Their future is maybe three minutes from now.”

Teaching children mindfulness is easy, he says, but must be done in an age-appropriate way that looks very different from how meditation practices are typically taught to adults. One strategy he recommends for preschoolers is to practice belly breathing where the children lie on their backs and a little stone or stuffed animal is placed on their tummies. They’re asked to simply observe the stuffed animal or stone moving up and down as they breathe for a minute or two.

“They are really easily able to do that,” Davidson says, “and they get it immediately.”

Another technique is to have the children sit and listen keenly while the instructor rings a bell or chime, and to raise their hands when they can no longer hear the sound.

“You can be in a classroom with 20 kids, and the quietness and stillness are palpable during that time. As soon as they stop hearing the sound, they start jumping up and waving their hands. But for at least that 10 or 15 seconds, they can really taste what stillness is like, and they love it. They frequently will ask for it because at a non-conceptual, visceral level, they know that it’s beneficial.”

Once a child has “tasted the stillness,” Davidson says, they can return to it again and again and it becomes a useful strategy in learning their own self-regulation. Mindfulness isn’t just a way to get fidgety little ones to be quiet for a while; it serves as a means for them to be in charge of themselves — to learn to calm themselves and modulate their thoughts, behavior and emotional responses to their environment — skills that studies have shown to be robust predictors of success in multiple major life outcomes, from physical wellness and financial success to the likelihood of avoiding substance abuse or engaging in antisocial behavior.

“A large body of longitudinal data show that kids who have a better capacity for self-regulation at age 4 or 5 do better in life. If we can teach those skills early in life — and we can — they will have multiplicative effects as the children develop.”

Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the founder and director of the . He came to the topic of mindfulness and the study of healthy minds by way of a question he couldn’t answer: Why are some people vulnerable and some resilient? He was already a neuroscientist in 1992 when he first met His Holiness the Dalai Lama, with whom he is now a close associate and friend, who issued a challenge that altered the direction of Davidson’s career and led to his groundbreaking investigation of emotion and the brain, for which he is now recognized as a global authority.

“You’ve been using the tools of modern neuroscience to investigate anxiety, fear and depression,” the Dalai Lama said. “Why can’t you use those tools to study kindness and compassion, to study the positive qualities of life?” Davidson says that simple challenge was a wakeup call that led him to focus on well-being and healthy qualities of mind and ultimately to the establishment of the Center for Healthy Minds. More recently, the Center has launched a “Kindness Curriculum” aimed at promoting social, emotional and academic skills among preschoolers.

It all starts with mindfulness, which is foundational in answering Davidson’s question about resilience. He defines resilience as the rapidity with which one recovers from adversity. To paraphrase the bumper sticker, he says, “stuff happens.” No one can lead a life completely buffered from adversity. Resilience is about how we bounce back from the stuff.

“And it turns out that the simple skills of mindful awareness can help us return back to that baseline more quickly. We can measure this objectively — it’s not based on self-reporting but actually measured in behavior and physiology, and in the brain. We have shown that through the increased practice of simple mindful awareness techniques you can actually learn to become more resilient and to recover more quickly from adversity.”

“This is not only at the core of our psychological well-being, but our physical health as well. Some of those systems that need to recover are the stress biology systems; for example, the stress hormone cortisol. Researchers have measured cortisol levels following an acute stressor and know that people differ dramatically in how quickly they come back to baseline. This has tremendous applications for physical health because when cortisol remains elevated beyond the point where it is serving a function, it can have really deleterious effects on the brain and the body.”

Developing an acquaintance with mindful awareness, Davidson says, is one of the “Four Pillars of Well-being” that the Center has identified. The next, which builds on mindfulness, is connection, the qualities that promote healthy social relationships such as kindness, compassion, appreciation and gratitude. The third and fourth pillar are insight and a sense of purpose, but Davidson says those really begin to take on significance in the early teen years. Kindness and connection start very early.

“We have done randomized, controlled trials on simple practices designed to cultivate kindness and compassion in both kids and adults and the practices translate into real behavior,” he says. “In one trial we did with preschool children with our Kindness Curriculum, we found that compared to a randomized control group, the kids who received our curriculum behaved more altruistically on a hard-nosed measure of altruistic sharing compared to their classmates who received a standard curriculum. These and other findings indicate that with practice kindness can be learned, which has led us to a simple but very radical conclusion, which is that characteristics like kindness — and well-being more generally — should be regarded as skills.”

The good news in this finding is that skills, unlike qualities which are innate, can be taught, practiced and learned.

“We all have various kinds of early predispositions, genetic and environmental, and have a starting place. But these characteristics can be further nurtured and developed. The way we now think about kindness and compassion is very much like the way scientists think about language. We all come into the world with a biological propensity for language, but we know that if we’re not raised in a normal, linguistic community, language won’t develop normally.

“Similarly, kindness and compassion are part of what it means to be human, and there are good data showing that the vast majority of young infants, when given a choice, behave in a prosocial, altruistic way.”

The default response for humans is to help others, not to be selfish, he says. But in order for those seeds to grow, they have to be intentionally cultivated. And they must be, he says. As the news of the day continues to underscore, humans have to learn to get along more cooperatively and compassionately: The flourishing of humanity and the planet are at stake.

It all begins with mindful awareness, and if you want to get started learning on your own, it’s easy. Just put a stuffed animal on your belly and breathe.