Last Wednesday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that Nassau County's Roosevelt Public Schools will be the only Long Island district awarded new Pre-K grant funds. Statewide, 32 high-needs districts will get a share of $15 million in just-released funding. Roosevelt now has 142 students in a Pre-K program, says Newsday, and the new dollars will provide seats for 54 more, plus a program for 18 three-year-olds. According to the newspaper, "Funding was awarded to school districts based on the quality of the application and other factors, including district and student need, as well as the system's efforts to target the highest-need students and maximize the total number of children served in prekindergarten programs."

In October, 29 Long Island districts filed Notices of Intent to apply for new state funding. According to Newsday, nine ultimately completed the arduous application process.

"We're delighted that Roosevelt was awarded this expansion grant," says Lucinda Hurley of The Long Island Pre-K Initiative. At the same time, she points out that approximately 10 percent of our region's four-year-olds are still without access to state-funded full-day programs. (This is in contrast to New York City, where 100% of four-year-olds are offered seats.)

It sounds like it might mean avoiding technology, but the new term "technovoidance" is actually the opposite--it refers to using electronic devices to avoid dealing with unpleasant or difficult feelings. For example, writes psychologist Dillon Browne in Psychology Today: "When our child comes home from school and says he or she was called a loser, we say 'no, you're not!' Of course, we don't want our little ones to feel difficult emotions because we love them so much. Maybe we quickly redirect them to another activity on a tablet, smartphone, computer, or otherwise."

The problem, according to Browne, is that avoiding emotions leads to more distress in the long run--especially anxiety. By using the strategy of "technovoidance," parents  paradoxically reinforce children's fears. 

A better alternative: help children name and understand what they're feeling, coaching them to make sense of what's happening inside them.

Read more. 

"Children's early classroom experiences influence their perception of school for years to come," points out an article from public radio's Mindshift website. "...a caring kindergarten teacher can help these children learn that adults, generally, are people who can provide support to them, even if their parent cannot."

This doesn't happen automatically, however, says Patricia Jennings, a college professor at the University of Virginia and author of a new book, The Trauma-Sensitive Classroom. She outlines five ways to create a caring environment for children who have adverse experiences such as abuse or neglect or parental addiction. These include leaving behind "zero tolerance" policies and other strict classroom discipline models, changing your perspective on challenging student behaviors, and putting on your oxygen mask first. In other words, focus on nurturing your resilience, self-awareness and self-regulation before you turn to the children's. 

"Ultimately, one of the most important brain-altering messages that trauma survivors can glean from school is simply this...I know there are people in the world who care about me." Read more.

Have you thought about how your own cultural values determine which social and emotional skills you seek to promote in your students? Are you curious about others' values?

Education Week recently collected a list of resources to support social-emotional learning, with  a focus on cultural awareness. Your upbringing affects everything from how you define success to what is considered appropriate when it comes to expressing emotions. Included is a downloadable  "Mapping Cultural Values' exercise from the University of Minnesota that can help you discover how your perspectives may be the same or different than your students'. For example, when it comes to conflict, do you prefer to bring up issues directly so problems can be solved quickly? Or, would you rather address differences indirectly to avoid upsetting anyone?

This exercise and most of the others in the Education Week resource round-up are geared to working with youth, but the principles are easily adapted. For example, the "Curiousity Playbook" offers scripts for supporting children's curiosity: "I don't know how to do that! Let's look it up together."  

Date: Thursday, March 28, 2019

AM Session: 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., Eastern Suffolk BOCES, Patchogue

PM Session: 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m., Western Suffolk BOCES, Wyandanch

Registration fee: $35 per person

Presenter: JoEllen McCarthy, literacy specialist, national consultant and Book Ambassador for The Educator Collaborative, a K-12 professional learning community.

Click here for details and to REGISTER NOW.