In Jill Staton’s fifth grade class, the videos playing on the classroom screen during social-emotional learning time are ones she and the students sometimes call “cringey.”
Cartoon drawings of skin, lungs, eyes and an amygdala (the part of the brain that controls emotional responses) glowed red on the screen as a student in the video demonstrated anger.
Staton said the student on the screen was “immediately in the red zone” — a phrase most students in Alpha Hart Lewis Elementary School know to signify someone who is experiencing large, negative emotions.
“Sometimes we find ourselves reacting and saying, ‘Oh, I don’t like that person. Oh, that made me so mad,’” Staton said to her students after pausing the video. “But we need to pause, we need to take a step back.”
Staton cued up another video. A group of adults crooned, “Stop! Name your feelings, calm down,” as basses played jazzy music in the background.
It was another “cringey” video, but students got the point: When something upsets you, the best thing to do is pause, take a breath and recognize how you’re feeling, then choose a coping strategy to help you calm down.
These are the kinds of skills students learn through Second Step social-emotional learning curriculum modules. Using district funds, Columbia Public Schools purchased this curriculum and rolled it out widely in elementary schools in 2020 and middle schools in 2018. This was to help students learn how to better manage their emotions and interact with others. With Second Step, students go through about 25 lessons per year and practice skills like regulating emotions and paying attention during class.
When COVID-19 hit, students were taken out of schools’ regimented environments, making it harder to develop and demonstrate these skills. Parents, teachers and mental health experts became concerned for students’ mental and social-emotional health. They noticed a need for more lessons dedicated to developing these skills in students, making Second Step more timely.
However, about three years since the start of the pandemic, and three years after Second Step was universally implemented in the Columbia district, students are gaining SEL skills.
“We’ve seen a gradual recovery from COVID,” said Susan Perkins, district director of elementary school counseling.
Perkins said the number of crisis incidents in the district on the elementary school level — times when elementary school students unexpectedly seek counseling help for anything from friendship trouble to bullying — has decreased since Second Step was launched. Such incidents point to behavioral, social and/or emotional issues, which is why a decrease in incidents is interpreted as a sign of better social-emotional health among elementary students.
Across the 16 out of 21 elementary schools the district has comparable data for, 1,171 unexpected counselor visits were logged among its elementary students during the 2018-2019 school year. This is according to data provided by Perkins. During the 2022-2023 school year, that number dropped to 833. This is about a 30% decrease in unexpected counselor visits made by K-5 students. However, this data is the result of school counselors manually tracking the number of visits made.
Perkins said while the district collected data for the 2019-2020, 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years, the pandemic and online learning makes comparisons between those years and years where students were in school full-time unreliable. Pre- and post-pandemic, the only significant difference in counseling programming, Perkins said, was more in-depth instruction using Second Step, which is why she attributes much of the decline in crisis visits among elementary schools to Second Step’s implementation.
Perkins said this “gradual recovery” is also due to the resources the district is pouring into students.
Road to recovery
This can be seen at Alpha Hart where, since the pandemic, behavioral support resources have been made available to help students bounce back.
“We’ve been able to add counselors since COVID and that has made a huge difference to have the extra counselor support because we absolutely need it,” Counselor Anita Ellis said.
Principal Amanda Minear said it is her understanding that the district is working on making the additional counselors permanent employees as they are currently working on Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds, which is money the federal government has given to school districts to help address the impacts of COVID-19.
Another reason students’ SEL skills are returning to normal levels, in Minear’s estimation, is the work being done by teachers to support their students.
“They are the unsung heroes every day,” Minear said. “They’re teaching the lessons; they’re talking with families. They are the big rocks that make those connections and so they’re the ones who notice, like, when a student hasn’t been in their class a couple of days, they’re reaching out saying like, ‘Hey, what’s going on with this kiddo?’”
Ellis said attendance is emphasized because when students miss school, they miss instructional time devoted to practicing SEL skills, as well as opportunities to socialize with others. They also have a harder time adjusting to the expectations schools have for them.
“(Kids) had a lot of time to sort of manage themselves at home,” Ellis said. “So coming to school and having a more structured schedule with adults telling them what to do and expecting them to do work and all of those expectations can be a big change when during your very formative years when you were small, you had a lot more freedom to just be at home.”
This adjustment period may result in more behavioral issues, especially for the younger students whose formative educational years were interrupted by the pandemic. District Chief Equity Officer Carla London explained as much during an Oct. 9 Columbia School Board meeting, when board member April Ferrao asked why there were more out-of-school suspensions among elementary schoolers than high schoolers.
“I think also what we’re seeing is a little bit ... of socialization skills that were lacking or missing for some of our kiddos,” London said at the meeting. “I think we’re seeing that and sort of a slow rise back to OK, this is how you behave in class.”
The more experience students have with developing SEL skills by going through Second Step modules and talking about SEL concepts, like emotional regulation, the easier it is for counselors to get straight to developing students’ coping skills and addressing issues during crisis visits, individual counseling appointments, small group sessions and classroom instruction time.
“I wouldn’t have been able to get to (that) before because we were spending all my counselor time just laying the foundation with those basics,” Ellis said.
Sarah Owens, director of School-Based Services for the Family Access Center of Excellence, said students in schools that regularly carve out time in their schedules for social-emotional learning lessons do better SEL-wise.
Better in Boone County
Overall, Columbia students seem to be faring better in terms of demonstrating SEL skills than students nationally.
The percentage of Boone County high schoolers reportedly feeling sad or hopeless decreased every year from 2017 to 2021 (the last year the data was collected). Conversely, the CDC reported that the percentage of high schoolers feeling sad or hopeless nationally increased from 2011 to 2021. Boone County students in rural schools in grades three-12 also reported better mental health scores than other rural Missouri youth across similar demographics.
“We’ve actually seen some pretty good markers (suggesting) that while there are nationwide concerns that are increasing for youth around mental health, specifically around things like risk for depression, we’re actually seeing the opposite here,” Owens said. “We’re seeing, like, a steady decline.”
Owens said having better mental health lays the foundation for the development of social-emotional learning skills. When a student’s mental health is out of order, so too is their ability to regulate themselves, interact with others, pay attention in class, etc.
“This is telling us that what we’re doing is moving us forward in the right direction,” Owens said.
That being said, “aftershocks” from the pandemic, such as economic strife at home and isolation from peers, are still hindering some students’ ability to develop these key behavioral skills.
“For many kids, the loss of instruction time, social time, you know, just active learning is going to have an impact long term,” Owens said.
The same is true for students who navigate physical and mental disabilities. The pandemic exacerbated those students’ issues, Owens said, and dealing with those added stressors while dealing with the return to a more structured learning environment proves challenging for some.
Staton agrees and says adults in the building play a key part in helping students bounce back from the pandemic. “We’re doing our very best to create an atmosphere in the classroom that is welcoming,” Staton said. “But we also understand that we took so much time off from this structured environment, and it’s going to take some time to get back to it.”
Perkins said that although kids are generally resilient, many people’s bodies registered the pandemic as a significant form of trauma from which it can take a while to recover.
“I also think that coming out of COVID and having that sense of trauma made it really difficult for kids to self-regulate because we spent so much time fearing for safety, not understanding COVID the virus, etc.,” Perkins said.
Staton, whose first full year teaching was 2020, says the pandemic was hard on adults as well.
“I think it’s not just the kids that struggled,” Staton said. “I think that adults themselves came back and had to kind of re-acclimate themselves to what a full workday looked like. And really that’s what we’re asking these kids to do.”
As a result of the myriad supports the district has given schools, though, in tandem with Second Step, Perkins said things are generally looking up.
“I think we’re finally coming out of that,” Perkins said. “I think our bodies are becoming ... more regulated and, therefore, in addition to what we’re doing in the schools to assist students, we’re seeing a decrease (in behavioral issues); we’re getting back to normal.”
Criticism of SEL
While SEL curricula like Second Step may be credited with helping students recover emotionally from the pandemic, some state-level conservative lawmakers do not believe SEL concepts should be included in curricula, arguing it is not the place of schools or the government to teach children these behavioral skills.
According to reporting this month in the Missouri Independent, SEL in schools is an “ongoing discussion” at the state level. Given conservative backlash, the Missouri State Board of Education decided to recommend SEL as an “optional framework” instead of a mandatory standard in schools.
This decision received mixed reviews. Critics of mandatory SEL education in schools expressed satisfaction, and some teachers expressed relief that they wouldn’t have to take on a job they felt was one for counselors (though Second Step was designed with the intent to make it easy for teachers to administer).
The Missouri National Education Association said it prefers that individual school districts decide whether to implement an SEL standard.
Other educators and counselors believe that having a uniform standard would be helpful and that SEL education is beneficial to students.
Asked whether SEL instruction remains necessary post-COVID, Perkins called SEL skills “life skills” and sees a need for them to continue being taught.
“We are equipping students with the skills that they need in order to be able to relate to others and work well with others,” Perkins said. “And so I think it’s obvious that what we put into place has really made a positive effect.”
Staton said Second Step is “pertinent to the learning environment as a whole” at Alpha Hart.
Despite its benefits, Second Step and other SEL curricula are not cure-alls. District spokesperson Michelle Baumstark wrote in an email that SEL education is not a replacement for support from families.
“We recognize our families are their children’s first teachers,” Baumstark wrote. “Families are critical partners in order to best meet the social and emotional needs of each child.”
She also wrote that the rhetoric surrounding SEL presents a “conundrum” for the district as it attempts to do what is best for students.
