​As many of our schools and students have returned to in-person learning, I urge us to resist returning to the status quo. The past year of immense loss and global grief has given us space for deep healing, connections, and engaging in generative practices of self-care. 

While our bodies will remember the habits and memories of the physical life that existed before the pandemic, we can utilize alternative practices to slow down and deepen our somatic awareness. Centering and grounding practices like meditation, centering, yoga, stretching, deep breathing, quiet reflection, physical exercise, and rest are more important than they’ve ever been. As we move towards a world with more justice, liberation, joy, and freedom, our bodies – and the connection between our body and mind – are essential. 

I’ve compiled a list of community organizations, activists, and practitioners who are connecting practices of liberation to our bodies. Integrating these somatic and embodiment practices into our everyday allows us the opportunity to act more consistently in alignment with our values even when we are under pressure. Take a moment to explore the offerings below and see if you can create a new normal with your body. Make your practice your own. Do not rely on punishment if you miss a centering activity or are unable to easily incorporate this into your life. Small moments of rest and reflection whether that be when your day begins, before you step in a classroom, a post workday ritual, or 60 seconds of mindfulness on your break time can be the political or self-care practice we need to continue to engage in this work with dignity, care, and compassion as our full selves.

Media:
The Nap Ministry on Instagram
Generative Somatics on Instagram
Self-Care Is For Everyone online store
Prentis Hemphill LinkTree

• Podcast: Finding Our Way
• Video Practices: Street Somatics & Centering Practice

Adrienne Maree Brown LinkTree

• Podcast: Centering at the End of the World Practice

​Literature:
Resmaa Menakem LinkTree

• Book: My Grandmother’s Hands

The sharp staff at Washington Elementary (SJUSD) had a productive time participating in the 1st Annual Breakthru Bracket Challenge during the month of March.  For those unfamiliar with the March Madness NCAA bracket challenge, allow me to explain how we celebrated our in-house intervention expertise.

First, for our staff professional development in early March, we all discussed the pathways to “breakthrus” with students exhibiting challenging behaviors.  Most teachers, novice & seasoned, will experience that breakthrough moment with a challenging student. Usually, it is when an intervention is implemented by the teacher with such fidelity that a near immediate change is observed.  Voila....a breakthru.

Four fictitious students were identified as displaying some trauma induced behaviors conducive to the current distance learning format.  Teachers went into breakout rooms to contribute effective intervention strategies to address the behaviors outlined. Well, 4 breakout rooms each generated the top 4 strategies.  This totaled the Sweet 16 of Breakthrus.  

Teachers filled out their bracket, selecting winning interventions per matchup, just like anyone would complete a March Madness NCAA bracket.  Unlike the NCAA tournament, we as a staff voted using online polling to vote for the winners per intervention matchups. From the Sweet 16 to the Elite 8 to the Final 4 --- to crowning the champion breakthru intervention. Each winning intervention matchup earned a participant a series of points.  The teachers with the top 3 winning brackets, per points earned, received prizes.  Even more impactful, is that now we not only have a champion level intervention strategy that represents a possible pathway to a breakthru for any students, but the staff has a ‘sweet 16’ to choose from for the future. 

Name: Vanessa Soria
Position: Clinical Intern
What led you to your current position? Before starting this position, I worked with youth navigating the juvenile justice system, and my experiences within this program definitely intensified my curiosity for school-based work. In my time working with the young people and their families, I kept hearing about and witnessing the challenges that many of my youth, especially youth of color, experienced in their school environments. For these reasons, I wanted to complete my clinical internship in a school-based setting. I want to work with others to build an environment that truly prioritizes student well-being, co-creates hope, and encourages the exceptional creative potential that our students have.
What inspires you to do this work? So many things! We have the privilege of being invited in by our students and their families to hear their stories, strengths, and struggles. Their stories full of strength, resilience, and hope constantly inspire me to continue to do this work. I am grateful I get to learn of and from our students and families while building these positive relationships. Additionally, I continue to be inspired by all those around me that continue to show up for our youth and bring their whole self to this transformative, but challenging work.
What is an important lesson you’ve learned in this role? A lesson that I have learned throughout the years, but was highlighted in this role, is the importance of advocacy and building community. The covid-19 pandemic gave a spotlight to the systemic barriers that harm families of color and this really highlighted the importance of advocating for and alongside these families. Additionally, the pandemic brought a lot of isolation for all of us. This highlighted the power of building positive relationships and community, as well as the importance of engaging in radical listening that builds a non judgmental and welcoming space.
Share your life motto: My life motto is "Sin Miedo" or without fear. Especially as a woman of color, I try not to let fear stop me from ensuring my voice is heard. I hope to empower the young people of color I work with to do the same.

The Diverse Learners Team (DLT) led by Dr. Tamarah Tilos, Seneca alum and fan favorite, coordinated the All-School Meeting for students, families, and staff on March 19 to highlight learning differences and re-introduce the skilled members of the DLT. This team has been working diligently on ways to support a culture of access and inclusion within the context of a hybrid model. The presentation included a guessing game to help familiarize the school community with staff members and their workspaces on campus. 

We are excited to continue working with NSSF next year and look forward to supporting their oldest students transition to 6th grade - middle school!

March 16th marked the 1-year anniversary of our Education for Change schools’ transition into distance learning.  Back then, the thought of returning to in-person school after Spring Break of 2020 was considered possible... However, it is now Spring Break 2021, where we find ourselves on the cusp of returning to schools partially re-opening.

​The opportunity to reconnect with students, their families and our school colleagues in-person elicits excitement after a year of distance learning.  Finding ways to provide play and art therapies virtually; pushing into student’s Zoom classes to provide behavior interventions; striving to connect with students who go video off/mute and communicate through the Chat; parents working while having their children at home, experiencing Zoom fatigue; and redefining boundaries while working from home, are some of the many ways we’ve adapted to working completely different from what we’ve known.  Adapting to this setting has been an ongoing process and required much effort, creativity, flexibility, and persistence to support our students while also witnessing the impact of the pandemic on our communities.

Within these adaptations we have also found silver linings such as: time saved not commuting; opportunities to take a walk during the workday; more autonomy over daily schedule; the ability to jump on a Zoom call when setting up an in-person meeting would be complicated and being able to work outside of the Bay Area if needed.  After a year, we have gotten used to some of these silver linings while also finding ways to connect “good enough” with our students, their families, and colleagues.  The excitement of returning to in-person may be counterbalanced by the loss of what we have gotten used to, along with additional questions regarding safety and uncertainty of what re-opening will look like.

​With so many details getting figured out (which students return, what will the schedules look like, what space will I have, will students have the support they need, is it safe enough, etc.?), this can be overwhelming to hold all at once.  As I hear these questions, three thoughts come to mind: 

• Adapting to change, even a change we want, takes energy.
• Tolerating uncertainty is hard and takes energy. 
• Staying grounded in our locus of control is helpful, but at times. is easier said than done. 

Holding this for yourself while additionally holding uncertainties of students and families is a lot.  Through it all, we hold the well-being of students and their families at the forefront.  As you do, I encourage you to give yourself some grace and kindness as we all go through this transition together.

Community Day School (CDS), an alternative program in Oakland Unified School District is the proud home of the Wolverines and is dedicated to using a therapeutic and restorative justice-centered approach to give students a second opportunity to succeed in school. The campus empowers middle and high school students to build upon their strengths by supporting them academically, socially, and emotionally, through individual and small instruction, counseling, and career exploration.

As our students face a broad array of challenges in life, we work to help them understand how change is inevitable and how resiliency is a must. Regardless of the change being negative or positive, the Unconditional Education motto is vibrant at Community Day School. District and Seneca staff are working together to re-open campus and provide students with academic/technical support, meals, and a reliable space for them to find success. OUSD has provided each classroom with two air purifiers and personal protective equipment, and requires all members to complete a daily healthy screening before entering the learning hub. Here are just a few images of how our gorgeous campus is gradually transitioning back after a year of disarray.  

Our new partners in San Mateo, KIPP Valiant Community Prep, are launching back into in-person services. As a K-8 school of over 600 students, Valiant wisely chose to bring back a small pilot classroom of middle school students before opening more broadly. 

​Leveraging their existing MTSS structures, the team utilized their COST and Culture and Climate teams to plan universal and small group interventions for the students returning to campus. When this process was a smashing success, the Valiant team knew they were ready to scale up. Now with most of the elementary school students returning after spring break, the COST and Culture and Climate teams have sprung into action to plan team building activities, targeted SEL lessons, procedures for teaching classroom routines, and high leverage academic instruction blocks. With our fabulous UE Coach, Keri Stewart, at the helm, we know these plans are going to be airtight with the ability to flex and adapt to emerging needs. Gooooooooo, Valiant!

Despite the challenges we’ve faced during this 2020-21 academic year, Lighthouse Community Public Schools (LCPS) committed to meeting the needs of students and families using every tool at their disposal.  Our collaborative student services teams have delivered Zoom parent training, social skills groups, drop-in sessions, advisory lessons, crisis intervention, family therapy and individual therapy.  They have provided outreach and case management, and simultaneously wondered: who might we be missing, and how can we find them when we’re in distance learning?

Thus, LCPS decided to implement one of our Unconditional Education intervention tools at both of their East Oakland campuses. The tool is our Social Emotional Screener (SES).  Rolling it out on both campuses was a first this year, as was implementing it during distance learning while in a pandemic.

The SES provides teachers a platform to reflect on their students’ social/emotional needs based on key indicators of health and wellness. The purpose of the SES is to use data to drive our interventions and help set our priorities: to shine the light where it is needed most.  Through this screening process we may realize that a specific teacher has a classroom full of students who need support with focus and attention, or that a handful of students across classrooms have been socially isolating and could use some targeted social skills support. We go into the screening process with an open mind, and with the help of our amazing Assessment and Evaluation team, emerge with detailed reports. These help us build a collaborative plan for addressing the most pressing needs of our youth.
​
Lighthouse Lead Counselor Courtney Cerefice took lead on implementing the screener on the Lighthouse campus this year.  I asked Courtney to share about the experience of using this tool during a pandemic, and what she learned in the process.

We have used different versions of the socio-emotional screener in the past. Historically, we had used the screener to:

1. Track teachers reported symptoms and behaviors over the course of the year for students that are in services,
2. Plan for Tier 2 services in collaboration with other data (attendance, behavior, academic scores, and parent feedback).
3. Support teacher-learning about classroom culture, management, the importance of brain breaks and movement opportunities, human development, etc.
4. Support in SEL planning for Tier 1.
5. Support the development of other Tier 1 opportunities (celebrations, whole school learning, classroom presentations and learning arcs, etc.).

There was a lot of teacher feedback around difficulty targeting certain behaviors because students are not seen in the same way on Zoom as they are in a traditional in-person settings. Items such as "disordered eating" felt challenging for teachers to identify because this is a behavior that they may not have an opportunity to see.

We needed to spend a little more time with teachers to develop their understanding of what the screener is and what it is not. There was some reluctance to "diagnose children." There was lots of talk-through of the "behaviors" and "symptoms," and talking about how we can notice a behavior without turning that behavior into a diagnosis -- or worse, ascribing an identity to a child. This was a learning opportunity for our staff. A behavior is not an identity. Students are full-humans first and deserve to be seen this way.
​
With regards to the data that was returned to us, typically we would have looked at the data in teams (Deans, APs, etc.) and shared it out to the larger community. This needed to pivot this year. Scheduling time with our larger team was extremely challenging due to the many commitments these team members already hold. Instead, we chose to interpret the data as a clinical team and then share the recommendations out with our larger team. This is not ideal, but we recognized that waiting to get the data analyzed would potentially delay supports to staff that were very much needed.

​The results were what we were hoping to see. Students with the greatest need had been previously identified and were mostly receiving services already. It has allowed us to pivot, look at Tier 1, and make learning offerings to our staff and families! Our teachers are accurately identifying the students that need the most support and we can take this time to create learning opportunities for our staff and families that further develop their ability to support students on all Tier levels.

The SES is best implemented over the course of the year and used as one piece of data (possibly in tandem with attendance, discipline, etc.). The socio-emotional strand is an area that can be tricky to deliberately gather data for. When there is not a specific socio-emotional screener being used, schools may use data that is one-off of actual socio-emotional data, then attribute that data to socio-emotional outcomes. This can be problematic (think about deciding that an attendance concern is socio-emotional when it could be due to any number of things, including childcare or transportation concerns, housing instability, etc.).  Having a screening tool that targets visible behaviors allows teachers and staff to target items that they may not have previously considered to be worthy of noting or uplifting for support. It also encourages teachers to look for those behaviors that may be easier to overlook but can have significant socioemotional needs behind them. This particular screener is quick for teachers to complete and becomes easier as they continue to use it.

​“We all wear different hats here, formal and informal. Can you talk about the hats you wear in your community and what they mean to you?” This was a question my housemate asked someone applying to live in our cooperatively run house during their informal interview. It is a question I’ve been subliminally thinking about at work all year. 

In distance learning, however, many SSAs are trying on the ‘teacher’ hat in new ways. One SSA said that last year she felt like a lot of her job was, “...a lot of crisis response and general in-the-moment behavioral redirections, incentive plans, tracking, and stuff like that,” whereas since distance learning, her work has shifted to encompass more of an academic support role focused on supplemental teaching. Some SSAs are also running reading intervention groups, or in my case, a community meeting every day for a group of sixth graders. School staff are spread thin, and as SSAs, we often flex and bend to fill in the gaps. With shortened class periods and long independent work blocks, there are a lot of academic gaps to fill. 

Providing emotional support also looks different outside the often hectic school setting, with both potential for disengagement and intimacy. One SSA said she finds herself, “often feeling like a therapist” during her one-on-one Zoom check-ins with kids, with “a lot more kind of ‘talk therapy’ that comes up.” In the words of another SSA, “...we spend the most time with students, so we often have to switch out of different hats because we have to meet the different needs of the students throughout the day.” The need for emotional support has always been there, but the opportunities and needs for one-on-one check-ins with students have grown during this year of isolation.
 
One SSA described our role as always wearing the hats of teacher, therapist, case manager, and behavioral coach rolled into one, and for her that hasn’t changed during distance learning. The main difference for her is that she is now finally accessing training on supporting students’ needs outside the behavioral realm: “For example, I had to dispense a lot of academic content without any training on how to teach math, ELA, etc. to students [last year].” This year, however, she had the opportunity to receive some training around supporting students with academic needs. 

​Sometimes I feel spread too thin as an SSA. Other times, I feel grateful that I get to be so many different versions of myself in one day. To a group of 12 sixth graders, I’m their community meeting teacher. To other kids, I’m the person who helps them with their schoolwork and organization skills. Then there is my 3rd grader who asked, “Wait, are you my therapist?” And I get to take the things I’ve learned in each of these roles and apply them to whatever situation I find myself in. It’s a balancing act that can be draining, and is not for everyone, but I find that grounding in the relationships I am building—despite whatever hat I’m wearing—keeps me from slipping.