Social-Emotional Learning

As Coffeyville Public School nears the end of the second year of KSDE School Redesign, we have also completed the second year of the originally slated three-year trauma-informed plan to become a trauma-informed and resilience-focused district. While trauma-informed may send the message that only students with traumatic backgrounds are targeted with these programs, the antidote to trauma and toxic stress is resilience. Many of the programs and interventions are focused on building resilience with our students. 

All of our interventions that have been implemented in the area of trauma-informed and social-emotional learning are what we believe to be best for all of our students to build resilience and life-long skills. The focus areas for the first year were: teaching awareness of and techniques for regulation and self-management, building strong and meaningful relationships between staff and students, collecting data on both externalizing and internalizing behaviors and risk factors, and implementing a social-emotional curriculum in all of the USD 445 buildings. These focus areas have become our non-negotiables that are implemented in all of the buildings from the Early Learning Center to Field Kindley High School. 

The focus areas for the second year included: gaining more knowledge about brain science specifically on how the brain responds to stress and how to counteract this, building on our already strong partnerships in the community, reforming in-school suspension to Recovery Rooms with Restorative Practices, incorporating KSDE’s Social, Emotional and Character Development standards, and increased parent involvement in social-emotional learning. The district social-emotional team has reviewed the data and information from this school year and made the decision to extend year two into the 2020-2021 school year to continue towards mastery of the areas of focus, therefore our original plan will extend over four years. 

This plan is a culmination of more than four years of professional development and learning on the Adverse Childhood Experiences student, the impact of trauma on the body, brain and learning, and an array of interventions that are researched-based. 

Coffeyville Public Schools has been asked to present our work in the area of social-emotional learning at many conferences and the district has had more than 30 other school districts from Kansas and Oklahoma visit.

Posted 2020