Name: Risha Buntyn
​Position: Unconditional Education Coach, Los Angeles Education Program
What led you to your current position? I have worked actively in the education sector for the last 12 years assisting with students of all demographics and helping them to cultivate the tools and skills they need to be successful. I have mentored hundreds of youth and designed programs to address their specific needs, and empowered them to overcome adversity. Leading, influencing, and educating have always been things I have been passionate about so it was no surprise that when I saw the post for this position, I didn’t hesitate to jump at the opportunity. Seneca’s core values align with that of my own and it has been an extraordinary opportunity to learn from individuals from all walks of life coming together for common good and radical change. It was a big transition moving across the country, but I am grateful I did because my Seneca family has made the process a lot smoother.
What inspires you to do this work? God has shown me a lot as I have actively sought to realign and create an extended vibration of love and light into this world. I am inspired by the students and staff I work with. I am inspired by their stories, which sometimes aren’t different from my own. I am inspired by the idea of helping shift mindsets around education, behavior, and the role that social emotional learning plays in all of it. It’s not about escaping negative emotions. It’s using the anger, frustration, and pain in a way that acknowledges those feelings, honors them, and channeling them into something transformative and phenomenal. This is my hope; this is what inspires me.
What is a recent highlight you’ve experienced in the work or an important lesson you’ve learned in this role? A recent highlight for me is the excitement and anticipation around some of the things on campus that I've been supporting. I help facilitate Social Skills groups twice a week and the students are always eager to engage in the group. I am also piloting a Student Senate to promote student voice and empowerment on campus and have been receiving positive feedback from staff and students about upcoming elections and events.
Share your life motto or something unique about yourself. Let your life be the message.​

For this week’s blog post, I’m pleased to introduce one of our newest partnerships here in Los Angeles: Ánimo Florence-Firestone Charter Middle School! AFF is one of nineteen Green Dot schools here in LA. The school is in its sixth year, serving 421 students for 6th – 8th Grade. Their campus is in the Florence-Graham neighborhood between (you guessed it) Florence Avenue and Firestone Boulevard. This year marked the opening of a brand-new campus—complete with a ribbon cutting ceremony—which has been super exciting for students and us staff alike!

1. Strengthening Tier 1 Behavioral Supports. As co-lead of AFF’s School Culture Team, Risha has helped lead school-wide efforts to improve classroom management and safe behavior in the school’s common areas. School culture team members do regular walkthroughs and classroom observations, with monthly “look-for’s” and opportunities to provide feedback to fellow teachers. 

Name: Eidit Choochage
​Position: Clinical Supervisor, Berkeley Public Schools Program 
What led you to your current position? What led me to my current role was my Interest in working within the educational school systems, and I wanted a change in work/life balance, and the school schedule felt like an important personal next step in my career and life. 
What inspires you to do this work? Making a positive and meaningful impact in the lives of youth, families and the teams I am part of.
What is a recent highlight you’ve experienced in the work or an important lesson you’ve learned in this role? An important lesson in the work is remembering we are all human and must bring our humanity into the room and role. I inspire to help others do the same, and see first that we are human before we are our titles. 
Share your life motto or something unique about yourself. Something unique is that I stepped away from full-time to part-time work in order to launch my own career in the mental health/wellness world. I launched a podcast called “Therapeutic Life Healing” and it has been a great journey to step out into vulnerability to embrace my humanity as a mental health professional and merge my personal and professional world together. ​

Dear UE Educators!
​I want you to know that you are seen, and you are valued! As we are fully into the school year and are entering what some may call the October “Blues”, that doesn’t mean it has to be blue…it can be yellow 😊  (yellow is the color of the sun, smiley faces, and sunflowers. It's a happy, youthful color, full of hope and positivity). For us to shift the narrative of the month of October in the Education world, we first must recognize, identify, and try and understand why October can be (and has historically been) a challenging month:

• The optimism that comes from having a fresh start at Back-to-School has faded. Hopes ran high over the summer when we were fantasizing about the magic that is returning to in-person services and education. But reality set in now. October is the period of disillusionment: The beautiful supplies you ordered might be broken or lost or disorganized. The community and rapport-building exercises you planned got pushed back so many times due to lack of time that you’re not even sure if they’re worth implementing now, even if the students aren’t getting along the way you like. You’re at a place where you’re afraid to try something new and throw the kids off, but it’s becoming glaringly obvious that the way things are going now isn’t great.
  
  
• There are a lot of full workweeks between now and the winter break. There are several 3 and 4-day weeks at the beginning of the school year which help us ease into the Back-to-School routine, but by mid-October, we’ve got a grueling 5-day week schedule ahead of us until November break, and no other breaks after that until winter break. People who aren’t educators may think we’re whining if we complain about this, but what they don’t realize is that educators depend on those days off to catch up. A bunch of 5-day weeks in a row is good because we can really establish routines with students and get into a flow, but it also produces a tremendous amount of documentation and planning and assessment with too little time to handle any of it
  
  
• The end of the school year seems impossibly far away. In October, it starts to hit you that some obnoxious student behavior (which is currently driving you crazy five minutes into the school day) could be part of your everyday reality for eight more months. You start questioning your stamina: Can I really keep doing this until June? (YOU CAN 😊); I’m this tired and it’s only a few weeks into the school year. What have I gotten myself into? If that’s how you’re feeling right now, it’s normal. But normal doesn’t mean “let’s keep feeling this way.” And normal doesn’t mean required. You can change your perception of the situation, so it feels less stressful and overwhelming.

 
To help support in this change, I’d like to provide you with 3 strategies to help you beat the October Blues (taken from Angela Watson’s “How to Beat the October Blues and Re-gain your Enthusiasm for Teaching”):

1. Start by recognizing that you’re thinking way too far ahead.
You’re already anticipating the stress of things that won’t happen for many more weeks and trying to figure out how you’re going to have energy to do something that’s months away. That means you are creating your own stress by anticipating problems that haven’t actually happened yet. You’re worrying about how you THINK the year will unfold, instead of focusing on today. You don’t need the strength for 185 days of school right now. All you need is strength for today. And if even THAT feels overwhelming, break it down even further. You really only need strength for this very moment, right here in the present. Can you make it through the next ten seconds? Yes, you can. Then make it through the next ten seconds. When the panic starts to fade, take it ten minutes at a time. Can you make it through the next ten minutes? The next hour?

2. Stop comparing your present reality to what you had hoped this school year would be like.

• Let go of that idealized version of educating or providing services that you dreamed about over the summer and embrace what is actually happening. Every Educator gets thrown a bunch of curve balls: we end up teaching something different, we get new students added to the caseload at the last minute, and we have changes sprung on us overnight. That is part of the course in education, so we can’t hold on too tightly to what we want our work to look like. Flexibility and resilience are not optional character traits for teachers: flexibility and resilience are crucial elements of our success. Embrace those little –and big– annoyances that cause you to learn how to be flexible and that give you the opportunity to practice resilience.  

3. Actively look for ways to find and emphasize the good stuff.

• Find an experienced colleague in your school/community who is just unshakeable: nothing seems to throw them off, because that person has seen everything and is done riding the emotional rollercoaster. When you start to get overwhelmed, go hang around that person. If there’s no one like that, find one online through Twitter chats, Facebook groups or educator blogs. Surround yourself with people who are determined to love education no matter what, and who will encourage you to keep going during tough times.  

• Even though it sounds like a cliché, you MUST stay focused on the positive. Complaining and focusing on the negative will wear you down. So, use your interactions with other people in the field to talk about SOLUTIONS, rather than seeking out people to vent with you. You are not alone. And it’s going to get better in the months to come. The hardest weeks of the school year are behind you. Look at what you have accomplished already! Celebrate every little success, not only in your mind when you’re tempted to replay your endless to-do list, but also out loud with children. Don’t get distracted by the documentation and paperwork and meetings – handle your business, but always, always, keep your heart and mind focused on the kids. They’re the best part of this job, and it’s only going to get better with them from here on out.   
  
  

For more, please check out this 8 minute podcast and transcript from Roxanna Elden, who’s a high school teacher in Miami, FL (and author of the book See Me After Class): How Teachers Can Avoid the October Blues.
 
With SO MUCH ❤️ and GRATUTUDE!

As a parent and educator, I’ve come to learn firsthand how interconnected confidence and self-esteem are to the academic, social, emotional, and mental health of kids. Confidence and self-esteem are important foundational skills that support kids on their journey’s to a lifetime of mental health and social happiness. ​

For kids, self-esteem translates to how much they value themselves and their abilities, how much they believe they are valued in the world around them, and how good they actually feel about themselves. When you add in a layer of self-confidence, it adds extra tools into their toolboxes to help them be resilient, handle setbacks, learn from their mistakes, take chances, and try again! All great ingredients for a happy, healthy, successful life. ​

Check out this collection of self-esteem building articles, activity ideas, and more!

• Teach kids a growth mindset
• Encourage kids to be independent
• Teach and celebrate diversity and uniqueness
• Help kids set and meet individual goals
• Remind kids of their strengths
• Give kids positive and descriptive feedback
• Teach and discuss resilience
• Teach kids positive self talk and affirmations
• Help kids celebrate their accomplishments
• Encourage kids to follow their passion
• Have kids reflect 

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If you have any other cool resources to share, please add them in the comments section below!

​Information in this newsletter is informed by The Alliance for a Healthier Generation and resources from Kaiser Permanente's Thriving Schools RISE Initiative.

Welcome back to the new school year! I couldn’t be more thrilled to launch into a year of in-person learning after our year of separation. While I know that this transition will be anything but predictable as we implement strict procedures for quarantine in order maintain the health and safety of our communities, it still comes with a great deal of relief that we have entered this year together. Our journey over the past eighteen months has been a tremendous one. I first and foremost want to give a big THANK YOU to all our staff, school partners and families. I want to acknowledge all that we have collectively endured and know that we all have experienced varying levels of loss that, for some of us, was quite profound. I have been humbled to witness the tremendous levels of ingenuity and perseverance across our community. So often, we have needed to call upon one of the most important interventions in our Seneca toolbox – the intentional cultivation of HOPE and persistence even in the face of immense challenge. I also know that in this past year, I have been fueled by the support of our extended Seneca Family and found purpose in our shared commitment to this work for the students and families we serve.

​If nothing else, this past year has challenged many of our assumptions about education and schools, and we have done some incredible learning together. I hope that as we enter this new year, we can take some of those learnings with us to create schools that truly serve all students. 

While we have returned to school, largely in person, the pandemic and its impacts are far from over. To provide healing spaces for students, school professionals need emotionally attuned communities and support in implementing practices that promote personal sustainability. School partner, Kyndal Easter offers these tips for administrators on How to Build Emotional Support for Teachers. In the year ahead, emphasis on wellbeing and connection will be paramount as we build on what we have learned to create schools where all students are truly welcome and can thrive.
 
Best wishes for a safe and happy launch to the school year and beyond!

My name's Emily Dunk and I'm a Behavior Intervention Specialist with the CrossCOST Program in Seattle, WA. But before I tell you more about our program, I'm going to start this blog post the same way many of our program meetings start off - by talking about good food and drinks 😊

​I like to think that CrossCOST is like the waiter in this story. Not knowing where to start in asking for what you need is frustrating. Whether it's about learning vocabulary that is highly specific to other fields or being so close to a problem that it's almost impossible to step back to see solutions, most of us just need a little extra support sometimes. Without the waiter’s patience and curiosity, I would be stuck thinking that there isn’t a wine out there for me, or maybe worse, continue to pay for and order wines that I don't enjoy!  We strive to provide that same patience and curiosity to the schools we partner with to consult around behavioral, clinical, and school systems needs to coordinate the right kind of support. 

​Acknowledging that the school could really benefit from centering self-care first, and also wanting to meet the initial request, we decided to do both!  Our MTSS of Self-Care training not only taught the model of tiered intervention, associated language of MTSS, and the basics of behavioral intervention, but did so through the lens of staff wellness.  We provided a framework for thinking about self-care as a tiered model of support, giving tools to each staff member for recognizing their behaviors through their escalation of burnout, and identifying interventions at each tier. Staff reported feeling better equipped to care for themselves, and in doing so, increased their understanding of how to support their students through escalation too.

Sometimes it feels like progress comes at the expense of our own wellness. Often, it feels like working to shift systems to be more equitable, inclusive, and healing centered competes with a school’s academic and results-based goals. We're here to flip that narrative. By centering Unconditional Education (UE), we not only help schools meet their goals, but balance offering support with challenging existing systems. This allows us to impact lasting change within our school communities.  We like to call this process, “sprinkling the UE fairy dust.” ​

So what is CrossCOST? In formal terms, we are a team of behavioral, clinical, and school-systems minded specialists who coordinate services to support schools with UE as our philosophy of change.  And in informal terms, we’re just your friendly neighborhood waiters. So, what’ll it be? A glass of red or white? 😉

One guiding text has been Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands, which invites readers to take a voyage through the historical perpetuation of racialized trauma, diving into the history of white body supremacy and its impact. Menakem evokes his readers to acknowledge, understand and heal from the somatic effects of this racialized trauma. He recognizes the role of these somatic responses in one's ability to protect themselves from historical and ongoing harm and suggests that this kind of perpetual harm and the associated somatic impact require a different type of healing than may be traditionally applied in mental health work. The reading explores the somatic responses racialized trauma can have on both the “black-body”, “white-body” and also presents an array of healing practices. The book provides a balance of both theory and practice, asking the reader to slow down, reflect, and engage in specific healing practices at the end of each chapter.

Menakem realizes racialized trauma stems from white supremacy that is deeply embedded in American society. More importantly, Menakem teaches readers trauma is simply an irrational reaction that can be passed intergenerationally and subsequently causes a fight, flee or freeze response that can show up in (and often hinder) everyday interactions. In understanding the somatic effects of racialized trauma Menakem teaches readers how to navigate white supremacy to reach healing while acknowledging healing practices are often painful and challenging.

Sometimes people are accustomed to overriding their feelings and pain to get by day to day, until something/someone challenges them to think differently and seek change. It is only by doing the healing work that we can learn to relate and move differently together in the world.  I would recommend My Grandmother’s Hands to anyone who is looking to heal from what can appear to be a somatic-conditioned lifestyle. My experience with this book’s practices brought serenity and a new level of understanding to responses of intergenerational trauma.