Public school plays a major role in most children's lives; from age six through 18, for nine months out of the year, it's where they spend at least a third of most days, and as such, is a place to make friends and grow as they learn about the world around them.
The El Dorado School District is taking steps this year to expand the education they provide to students by implementing a social-emotional learning framework that will help reinforce basic social life skills.
"In all reality, we have had social-emotional learning happening for years; the counselors have gone in and done classroom lessons for the last 20 years on these topics," said Holly Billings, ESD mental health coordinator. "What we're doing is expanding that to be more of a holistic approach so that everyone is part of it, from administration to teachers and other staff."
Using the professional learning community model ESD teachers use to develop academic objectives and plans, the social-emotional learning framework will help teachers set social development goals and expectations for students.
"There are general academic and social goals that we want our students to achieve by the time they leave El Dorado. Everyone wants them to have higher academic achievement, but we also want them to have high social achievement -- we want them to be responsible, have a high work ethic, manage their emotions," Billings said.
Put into practice, Billings explained, the social-emotional learning framework includes setting building-wide social expectations at each ESD campus and tailoring plans for students who need individualized guidance.
"Essentially, this is an outline for all the campuses that we will build upon and grow over time," Billings said, adding that social-emotional learning will be implemented for every grade level, including Kindergarten.
The COVID-19 pandemic, Billings said, brought to the forefront pre-existing social and behavioral needs of some students while also creating learning gaps -- both academic and social -- that the ESD hopes to start tackling in the classroom this year.
"I think one of the things we've seen for younger children -- if you think of kiddos that started Kindergarten during COVID, they missed out on a lot of those fundamentals we learn then -- working in groups, cooperating, collaborating," she said. "That was because we wanted to keep our kids safe, but ... some of those skills that are learned early on, we're having to re-teach or teach differently."
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the pandemic also contributed to -- or at least uncovered -- a mental health crisis among American teenagers: in 2021, 37% of high school students reported experiencing poor mental health during the pandemic and 44% said they often felt sad or hopeless during the previous year.
"Statistically speaking, students' mental health has taken a huge hit over the past five to 10 years, I would say, and we want to be able to provide all the supports necessary to help our kids along the way so that they can grow and develop as intended," Billings said.
What is social-emotional learning?
The Arkansas Department of Education defines social-emotional learning as "the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions."
Billings put the aim of the framework a little more simply: "Basically, being a good human."
The impacts of emphasizing social behavior and positive connections extend outside the classroom and off campus, as well, she noted. From helping students become college- or career-ready to showing them what healthy relationships with friends and family members look like, the framework serves to help children grow into functional adults.
"We definitely want them to be college- or career- ready, whatever they're going in to. We want them to be able to cooperate with other people, to be able to manage conflict, to be able to have healthy social and emotional regulation so that they're able to manage themselves in various situations, from work, to family, to college," Billings said. "We want them to have time management skills, strong work ethics -- 'if you start something, you finish it' --, healthy relationships and be able to develop those with friends and family."
"Ultimately, we want them to productive members of our community or whatever community they land in," she continued.
Other school districts in the county also integrate social-emotional learning in the classroom, and in January, the ESD was awarded a $52,000 grant through the SHARE Foundation's Violence Intervention Plan to create a coordinated social-emotional support system for students.
"The focus on social-emotional learning has been growing pretty rapidly over the past couple of decades," Billings said. "We want to emphasize that this is a framework to build upon and to expand that knowledge to our teaching staff where it's not a weekly lesson from our counselors. We want it to be more of a culture shift."