Bright Spots, Challenges and Opportunities for Growth as an SEL Specialist in a New York City Public High School
By Abigail Eveleigh
As an SEL Specialist at the Urban Assembly School for Performing Arts (SPA), I supported the school with SEL implementation, assessment and instruction. SPA is the only non-audition performing arts high school in New York City. Of the 247 students enrolled in the 2022/23 school year, 55% are Black, 42% Latino, 1.6% Asian, 0.8% white and 0.8% Multi-Racial, with 73.2% of students identifying as Female. I joined the school team mid-way through the academic year (February 2023) which came with the challenge of trying to implement new support and initiatives during an already high stress school year for teachers, where there was a lot of transition happening in the school building, including leadership changes. Advisory in the school was happening inconsistently, with not all students receiving the lessons focusing on SEL skills and some adult resistance to explicit SEL instruction.
In my experience, it was clear that students had strong relationships with adults in the building and the school has many student support initiatives, but these were often not cohesive and there was a lack of communication across the school on how they were supporting student social and emotional needs. At the end of the 22/23 school year, educators took the Educator Well-being survey (EWB), and they also rated their students’ social-emotional competencies using the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment (DESSA) tool.
The implementation of these SEL assessments is exciting as we were able to gather data on the social and emotional health of the adults in the school building, as well as the social-emotional competencies of all students. In the EWB data, we saw areas of strength (e.g. relationships with students and colleagues), as well as areas for growth (high stress and burnout, relationships with principal). The data from the EWB and DESSA provided a great stepping stone in planning for the 2023/24 school year in how to best support the adults in the building and better understand the needs of students and how to support them going into the next school year.
Through the relationships built during the 6 months of being in the school last school year, I feel positioned well to support adults and students in SEL implementation at SPA in the new school year.