If your child is eligible for special education, perhaps. One key to getting help is to show the school that his social and emotional problems are impeding his learning or that of his peers. Another is to show that they’re blocking him from achieving a primary goal of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEA): “To ensure that all children with disabilities have [an] education that [meets] … their unique needs and prepare[s] them for further education, employment, and independent living” (34 CFR § 300.1). A third is to show that involvement in a social and emotional learning (SEL) program is critical for him to achieve his academic goals.
If your child’s school refuses to address his social and emotional needs, claiming that its responsible for meeting only his academic needs, you should have him evaluated by highly credentialed, objective professionals who specialize in social and emotional problems. If you don’t, you reduce or eliminate his chances of getting the services he needs. Mrs. Evans had her son evaluated by experts, filed a law suit against his school district, and and won in federal court. Referring to Mrs. Evan’s experts, the judge concluded:
Frank has experienced significant emotional conflict, anxiety and depression directly associated with his learning disability. Each of the experts on dyslexia testified that Frank exhibited an incapacitating sense of frustration that is typical in severe dyslexics whose intellectual abilities are significantly greater than their level of achievement…. The expert testimony establishes that, the nature of Frank’s dyslexia in conjunction with his emotional problems, is such that he needs an intensive program of …. (Evans v. Rhinebeck, 1996)
If the school personnel who work with your child believe he needs help to overcome his social and emotional problems, but fear that administration will balk at their requests, you might bolster their optimism by showing them these quotes, quotes they can then share with administration:
There is a direct link between emotions and learning. Multiple research studies … demonstrate that social and emotional learning programs pave the way for better academic learning. They teach children social and emotional skills that are intimately linked with cognitive development. (Goleman, 2004)
Students in [Social-Emotional Learning] SEL programs demonstrated improvement in … their personal, social, and academic lives. SEL programs fostered positive effects on: students’ social-emotional skills; attitudes towards self, school, and others; social behaviors; conduct problems; emotional distress; and academic performance. Notably, SEL programming yielded an average gain on achievement test scores of 11 to 17 percentile points. (Payton, 2008)
CASEL offers an excellent website that discusses the importance of social and emotional abilities and shows how they affect academic achievement (www.casel.org). Many of its resources are written by leading university scholars and can be download for free. Together with your reports from experts, CASEL’s materials might convince school personnel that they should offer your child a program of social-emotional learning.
In future postings, we’ll discuss the importance of behavioral improvement plans, positive behavioral interventions, and goals and objectives that match your child’s social and emotional needs.
Resources
Evans v. the Board of Education of the Rhinebeck Central School District, 1996.
Goleman, D. (2004). Forward to Joseph E. Zins, Roger P. Weissberg, Margaret C. Wang, and Herbert J. Walberg (2004), Building academic success on social and emotional learning: What does the research say? New York: Teacher College Press, p. viii.
Payton, J., Weissberg, R.P., Durlak, J.A., Dymnicki, A.B., Taylor, R.D., Schellinger, K.B., & Pachan, M. (2008). The positive impact of social and emotional learning for kindergarten to eighth-grade students: Findings from three scientific reviews. Chicago, IL: Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, p. 6.
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