Centering the Importance of Social and Emotional Development 

We will likely not even know for years how profoundly our children have been impacted by the experience of living through a pandemic—the sense of isolation, the corrosive impact of being glued to a device from morning to night, including (especially) during school hours, and the sense of loss and sadness when sports, performances, clubs, proms, and all the other things that punctuate and give meaning to a teenager’s life are canceled or moved to a format that is a poor approximation of real life.

But many kids were already in a crisis before the pandemic. One in six DC children, according to a 2016 report, said that they had actively considered suicide. 

Academic intervention does not, by itself, address social, emotional, and mental health challenges impacting a student’s ability to learn and perform on grade level.  Test prep does not cure depression.  The health risk is real.  We must ensure that are our students have access to robust mental health services and that school leaders understand that fostering a loving learning environment is not secondary, but core, to their mission.  

As your Councilmember, I will work to:

• Establish clear and high expectations for school culture and environment and hold school leaders accountable when schools fall short.  Creating a loving environment where children’s needs are met starts at the top.  When teachers are supported, their cups are full enough to best support students.  School leaders have an obligation to not just focus on test scores and academic achievement and that cannot be the primary metric by which we evaluate their performance.  

• Establish zero tolerance for developmentally inappropriate discipline practices. Schools should be safe and loving spaces. Expert after expert states definitively that a punitive discipline model is counterproductive and affirmatively harmful. And yet, we see plenty of examples of schools doing just that. Ending these practices is essential if we want to fully disentangle our schools from the criminal justice system.

• Provide schools with sufficient funding to serve the full range of student needs.  Per Maslow’s hierarchy, schools must first address children’s physiological and emotional needs for safety in order to set the stage for intellectual development. It is my personal belief based on my classroom experience and understanding of education reform debates that too often, well intentioned policy officials who genuinely want to address achievement gaps and learning loss focus only on academic standards and fail to fully account for the emotional work that must be done in order for learning to occur. Not only does this myopic oversight undermine efforts to increase academic progress, it puts too many children, disproportionately Black and brown children, on the path to prison. A successful school is a learning community where children are richly supported. We should not lower our expectations, but we also cannot expect schools to adequately meet student needs when the District fails to provide sufficient funding to make possible. At a minimum, the Council must ensure that school-based mental health services reach all students.  

• Give teachers adequate training and support.  Teachers can play a transformative role in the life of a child, but DCPS must ensure that they have receive robust, trauma-informed training and professional development so they can better support their students. To better support our students, it is essential that trauma-informed thinking be infused throughout the system. That does not just mean adding the word “trauma-informed” to existing materials as an empty buzzword. It means that principals, school leaders and teachers need specific, skills based training, on tone of voice, on appropriate disciplinary measures, on specific techniques in structuring their classroom’s physical environment to meet the needs of students grappling with deep, often unseen, emotional challenges. That means ensuring that schools have sufficient funding to provide school-based mental health services that meet student needs.

• Develop Better Metrics for Assessing Student Mental Health and School Culture.  For parents, understanding a school’s culture and learning climate is just as essential as knowing the percentage of students reading on grade level.  It can be difficult, however, for parents to assess whether a school has a punitive discipline culture or whether there is a toxic relationship between educators and administrators.  Suspension rates and teacher retention figures give parents a sense, but while very important, these are just two data points reflecting a school’s culture.