Our Community, Our Pride-“Social Emotional Learning”

Dear Editor,

This letter is to draw awareness to our education system as the current system is focusing too much on statewide assessments and quick to label our children as behavioral problem, saying they don’t care, or these students are incorrigible.  Our community needs focus on social emotional learning with a holistic teaching approach that supports the whole child.  Our children in our community have to learn and understand what is means to be social and emotional before academic learning can be assessed.  Recognizing their emotions, learning their strengths, building confidence, expressing empathy, and managing their stress of everyday life has to be addressed early throughout elementary.

Majority of our children come from low-income communities and broken families with one or both parents having been incarcerated.  These children have a huge disadvantage with increased risk factor and making it to school daily should be noted as a positive.  Bringing social emotional learning to every classroom these children will learn the tools and skills that will prepare them to deal with the stress of their daily life, they will improve academically, the will improve behaviorally, they will learn how to management their attitudes and learn everlasting life skills.  Now, we can teach our children how to set basic realistic short term goals-then long term goals and model responsibility.

We don’t want to eliminate all assessments, we intentionally what to bring a focus to social emotional learning.  It’s time to reform the current educational system.  It’s time for new energy in Texas politics.  My name is Carey Lashley and I want to energize and empower my community and support change.

Respectfully,

Carey Lashley

Houston, Tx- (Central Southwest)