Alternative Learning Center ’22-23

Goal (Critical Practice Area 3) Create safe, supportive, equitable learning environments that promote all students’ SEL and CP&I skills.

Our campus will develop students’ emotional intelligence by establishing and building school and classroom communities designed to equip students with SEL tools that focus on holistic wellness practices, resilience, mindset, social justice, compassion, and leadership.  Students will lead and participate in SEL sessions Monday through Friday, commit to a No Place for Hate Resolution of Respect, receive coaching on SEL leadership from adult SEL facilitators, and be recognized for their efforts through certificates of admiration. By the end of their stay at ALC, students will have led at least one SEL discussion or peer circle. As a result, the percentage of students at our campus who complete the year-end Student Climate Survey and answer that they feel more comfortable practicing SEL competencies in school and in their communities will increase to 90-100%.

        Once again, I am humbled and appreciative of the journey that staff, students, and families have taken this year at our campus.  We developed our sense of community by increasing our emotional intelligence.  Thus, we now understand how to make these same impacts in our communities outside of school, and are empowered to develop such patterns of thinking and behavior.

        As a result of being a community of students who have been displaced from our home schools, we have experienced ruptured connections, distanced routines, and abstract senses of belonging.  The ALC restores resilience and well-being by teaching tools to foster real alignment and real power.  The students become the teachers – they teach their families about integrity, directly and indirectly.  They teach their neighborhoods how to bond through being an example and modeling.  They teach themselves how to feel whole again.  A person with a sense of wholeness teaches everything how to feel interconnected.

        Art healed us most this year.  We found our voices as students and staff in our self-expression.  We heard our own voices in peer circles of no judgment.  We understood each other’s voices, whether those of our families, our neighbors, or ourselves.  Mindset and compassion became our microphones.  We finally heard the common harmony behind all of our dialogue.  We understand the flow now.  We know how to hear.

        Our growth was perfect – a perfect match to our current capacities for expansion and understanding.  We became convinced of our perfect unfolding.  No one wants to eat all their favorite food for the rest of their life in one day.  We became satisfied with our daily portions of development.  We became used to ourselves being emotionally nourished.  We realized how much that meant to us.

        We incurred some barriers in our work towards awareness and control of our emotions.  The masks we have learned to don for acceptance and survival became noticeable roadblocks.  We were grateful for noticing, though.  Sometimes it was hard for us to want to lead peer circles on Mondays.  Sometimes it was hard even just to share when we were handed the talking piece.  We were so in our own heads listening to the voice of self-judgement and assuming everyone else agreed with that gnarly internal message.  

We have always heard people call classrooms and schools “safe” spaces.  We never believed that until we realized that SEL was helping us create a community within our classes and campus where we actually could be safe to take that mask off.  We were not only worried what others would think of us, but we were just plain scared to find out for ourselves what might really be there.  Fortunately, with the help of our facilitators, our art, and our opportunity to be at ALC, we found that hiding within ourselves was the spark, the innocence, and the trust we thought had abandoned us.  Turns out, it was just hiding – and it needed a “safe” space to reemerge.

Expectations – they continue to be a barrier for us, also.  There are a lot of expectations on our identities.  Our families want us to be a certain way, society “thinks” we are a certain way, and most times, we expect just more of the same from ourselves.  Teachers and staff play a vital role here, though.  Every day is a new day with each other – they really do believe that.  That means we all have the freedom to remake, discover, try out, and ultimately, believe in our actual selves.  That’s quite a journey to undertake, quite a process to be an active participant in.  School had a new purpose for us this year.  We liked that.

        Our social-emotional learning will continue to evolve; and we will let it.  We all just want to be happy.  We all just want to feel good.  We realize a lot of people use very misguided ways to find those feelings.  We won’t accept temporary relief anymore.  We won’t accept non-acceptance of ourselves.  We will accept mistakes.  We know “mistakes” are the valuable experiences we need to create the satisfying reality we all deserve.  We know how to make a community now – and be a vital part of one.