Tahoe Truckee Excellence in Education Foundation

What is Emotional Well-Being?

It is the state of being well, happy and connected. For our children, it means feeling like they have people they trust at school and adults they feel connected to. It includes the whole spectrum from having self-esteem and self-respect to not being bullied on the schoolyard. We want our children to feel excited about coming to school and to feel like they are part of a community.

Why are we looking at it?

Emotional Safety has emerged as an issue in our community. Last spring, over 700 community members identified it as one of their top concerns. Recently we reached out to parents at school site PTO and ELAC meetings and heard their concerns around this issue. Many parents are concerned for their childrens emotional safety and are interested in getting involved.

In addition, the Healthy Kids Survey points to this as being an area of concern:

• 63% of 5th grade students feel very safe at school; 27% feel safe; total 90%
• 26% of 7th grade students feel very safe at school; 37% feel safe; total 63%
• 18% of 9th grade students feel very safe at school; 40% feel safe; total 58%
• 30% of 11th grade students feel very safe at school; 41% feel safe; total 71%
• 19% of 7th grade students, 27% of 9th grade students, 28% of 11th grade students responded to the question did you ever feel so sad or hopeless almost every day for two or more weeks that you stopped doing some usual activities?
• 100% of 9th and 11th grade students wanted more information on depression.

How we plan to improve the emotional well-being of all students:

This Spring, we facilitated conversations at Truckee Elementary, Kings Beach Elementary and Truckee High School to engage parents, youth and school staff in how to improve the emotional well-being of all children. We strive to create a unified vision, beginning with a select group of pilot schools, from which each school may facilitate individual conversation and action steps. Our goal is to:

• Build on all the great work that is already happening in the schools
• Start with peoples passions at their school sites
• Recognize that we may not need another program, instead we may need to shift our thinking from it being the schools responsibility to the community taking ownership working together to create a emotionally safe environment for all our children. How can the community support the schools?
• Open dialogue and reframe the conversation in a new way

The following attachments are the notes from the three school conversations. We will be following up with each school site in the Fall. For more information, please contact Kim Bradley at educationmatters @ttcf.net