Seymour High School principal Greg Prange and the school’s Director of Counseling Randy Fife recently asked the Seymour Community Schools board of education for approval to purchase Social-emotional learning curriculum for the high school.

The board gave that approval during a recent meeting for the curriculum aka SEL, which describes the mindsets, skills, attitudes and feelings that help students succeed in school, career and life.

At its core, SEL focuses on students’ fundamental needs for motivation, social connectedness and self-regulation as prerequisites for learning according to the wallacefoundation.org.

Fife told The Tribune school officials are excited to put the curriculum into play and have it available this coming school year.

“Social-emotional learning encompasses a lot of things, but I like to see it more as the skills that our kids need to help them be successful,” Fife said. “Not only in school but in life and it’s the things they need that are not reading, writing and math.”

He said kids these days face a lot of challenges and many are the same things many others have faced in the past such as peer pressure, bullying, eating disorders, alcohol, drugs and tobacco.

“Those things are still there, but today’s teenagers have a lot of other things going on like post-COVID issues, anxiety, isolation issues and instances of depression,” Fife explained. “It’s a different world today so if you take all of those issues and add all the digital communication, social media, body image issues, sexting and online bullying and all those things are on the rise.”

He said almost every teenager has a cellphone so they’re exposing themselves to those things.

The curriculum is new and will not be replacing anything else, and Fife said what schools officials are planning to do is come up with a series of lessons.

“We’ll sort through and see what would be the most appropriate lessons for our students and then we will create a master calendar for the school year,” he said.

Fife said the high school has Student Resource Time (SRT), which is a 30-minute window from 10 to 10:30 a.m. every day that has been built into the schedule and has been there for several years.

“This time slot allows students to go visit a teacher, get help with homework or make-up a quiz,” he said. “It’s also club time for any student groups that want to meet during the school day and we have SRT five days a week.”

Fife said they haven’t come up with an exact SEL schedule yet, but once they do, they’ll take a day where the high school teachers will provide that curriculum to the students during SRT time, so no new staff will be needed for the program.

“We’re looking at topics like how to problem solve, conflict resolution, impulse control, empathy and things that our kids need to help them build successful relationships and communication skills,” he said.

The corporation is funding the curriculum this year, and Fife said they’re going to try to find money to carry this program into future years.

“There is some grant money I could petition some groups for in the future if the high school or Seymour Community Schools Corp. were unable to fund it,” Fife said. “So there are some options out there, but right now Seymour Schools is funding it this first year.”

He said high school counselor Nikki Storey, who also is the school’s mental health coordinator, has been the lead person for the SEL curriculum and as helped research three different curriculums.

“She put together a committee and basically recommended that we implement the Can Do U curriculum and she will be the lead on rolling this out to our teachers,” Fife said. “She’ll also be the lead on selecting lessons and evaluating effectiveness of the program and then she’ll be looking into future funding sources.”

He said the Can Do U curriculum uses a lot of videos and doesn’t take a lot teacher preparation, it just takes teacher time to deliver within the 30 minute SRT window.

“The program will be for all grade level of the high school and everyone will get the same lesson on the same day,” Fife said. “We believe this program has value and hope to fund it for years to come.”