“Be a Friend. Be a Learner. You own it.”
These three principles — referred to as the FLY values — guide students and staff at Samuels Elementary in southeast Denver, where Principal Cesar Rivera believes that an emphasis on social and emotional learning is crucial for student success.
Now, thanks to a national grant, Rivera will have new resources to establish social and emotional learning practices such as staff trainings and run an on-site student wellness center.
Denver Public Schools and the Denver Afterschool Alliance are recipients of a new four-year grant for public schools and after-school programs that aims to bolster social and emotional learning, which focuses on skills like controlling emotions, solving conflicts and building relationships.
Six U.S. cities were chosen to participate in the first-ever Social and Emotional Learning Initiative sponsored by the New York-based Wallace Foundation.
Gigi Antoni, director of learning and enrichment services at the Wallace Foundation, said Denver was selected because of its previous commitment to social and emotional learning and strong partnership between DPS and its after-school programming providers such as the city’s parks and recreation department, YMCA of Metro Denver and the Boys & Girls Clubs of Metro Denver.
“We know a lot about how important social and emotional learning is to students’ success both in school and in life,” Antoni said. “But what we don’t know a lot about is what it takes for large school districts and communities to align and build really rich social emotional learning environments for children (together).”
With the grant funds, DPS will hire an initiative manager who will oversee a team of coaches that will conduct trainings and help bring social and emotional learning curricula to six elementary schools and after-school partners.
The elementary schools — Samuels, Cowell, Swansea, Trevista, Newlon and Force — were chosen by DPS to encompass a wide swath of the city, as well as target those with strong after-school partnerships and displayed commitment to social and emotional learning.
In the program’s first year, DPS and the Afterschool Alliance will receive between $1 million and $1.5 million to distribute across the elementary schools and their out-of-school partners. The first year of the partnership will predominately focus on teacher and staff training for everyone from bus drivers and custodial staff to senior administrators.
The objective is to encourage school staff to be consistent about providing social and emotional support throughout the day, from when kids first board the bus to school to when their out-of-school programming ends, said Katherine Plog-Martinez, executive director of DPS’s whole child team, which oversees mental health staff, social emotional learning and school health initiatives.
“We hope that in these schools the school teams really come to see and value and respect the role that every adult in the building plays in achieving the social emotional outcomes of the students,” she said.
Plog-Martinez said she hopes that other schools will want to adopt similar strategies after the grant period ends.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
