Whole School Prevention Planning

Attendance Works

July 28, 2025

As a nonprofit initiative, Attendance Works partners with schools, districts, states, communities and organizations to ensure that chronic absence is recognized as a serious issue that can be addressed through proactive, supportive strategies. Their website offers resources for monitoring, understanding, and addressing chronic absence beginning in the early grades through secondary school. These strategies can be implemented at the school, district, and state level. You can find resources to help develop:

Positive Engagement with families and students
Actionable Data to help you identify students with too many absences
Capacity Building to help build a culture of attendance in your classroom, school or district.
Find toolkits under Capacity Building.

All tools can be downloaded and used without express permission from Attendance Works.

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SEL Staff Survey Needs Assessment Facilitator Guide

July 15, 2025

This is a complementary, step-by-step guide to completing CASEL’s SEL Staff Survey Needs Assessment tool, which is used as a starting point in supporting schools and districts in creating a safe, supportive school environment. Indicators guide how schools may demonstrate success in each area within the nine domains of SEL Staff Survey. Overall, the assessment tool provides suggestions for action planning that can be adjusted to meet the needs of the school and/or district using it. Resources to further support action planning can be found through the RSSI system as well as the Action Plan Facilitator Guide found here.

The School-based Staff SEL Implementation Survey is a tool used in the SEL pillar of the Resilient Supportive Schools Illinois (RSSI) initiative, and is designed to be taken by staff members working in one school setting. The data and results will support school-based SEL teams in collecting data on staff SEL implementation practices and perceptions.

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Trans Inclusive Schools

July 15, 2025

This 30-minute podcast includes information on how to create trans-inclusive schools and build more gender-inclusive school climates.

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Building a Trans Inclusive School Environment

July 15, 2025

Transphobia, or discrimination against transgender people, can and does occur in spaces where youth deserve to feel safe and included, such as school. School staff are responsible for fostering a school climate that supports learning and healthy development. Research shows that a student’s sense of belonging improves academic outcomes, increases continuing enrollment, and protects mental health.

This course provides steps you can take to help make your school more safe and inclusive.

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Are You an Ally? Try Taking on These 5 Roles

July 15, 2025

This short course provides an overview of what we mean when we use the term “ally,” which is a person who uses their privileged social identity to empower, support, and defend individuals and groups who are being marginalized. Learners gain an understanding of the different types of allies: a confidant, champion, amplifier, sponsor, or upstander. Allies play important roles in school environments, helping children, youth and staff members feel safe and included, leading to a more positive culture and climate.

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Social and emotional learning is hegemonic miseducation: students deserve humanization instead

June 30, 2025

This article examines the pedagogy and psychology of humanization as a viable framework to confront systemically imposed self-hate, divide and conquer, and sub oppression if it teaches students knowledge (and love) of self, solidarity, and self-determination. The ahistorical objectives of social and emotional learning fall short of repairing the cultural contempt of hegemonic miseducation and does not address the primary social forces negatively impacting the health and wellness of communities of color – their colonial relationship with inequitable social systems. In this article, it is posited that humanization be put in place of social and emotional learning because SEL’s inadequate analysis of intersecting oppressions justifies existing power relations in communities and schools.

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Principals’ Social & Emotional Competence: a Key Factor in Creating Caring Schools

June 30, 2025

School principals have substantial impacts on many aspects of their schools, including school climate and culture, teacher well-being and retention, and students’ school success. As such, the personal and professional development of principals is a key element in creating a caring school in which adults and children feel welcomed, cared for, and challenged. It is now recognized that principals experience substantial job-related stress which can compromise their personal well-being as well as their leadership. Surprisingly, the social and emotional development and well-being of principals has received little attention.

This brief provides a conceptual model of the Prosocial School Leader, which has two components. The first is the principal’s own social and emotional competence (SEC) and the ability to handle stress and model caring and culturally competent behaviors with staff and students. The second component is an enhanced model of leadership in which principals are the prosocial leaders whose responsibility is to ensure that all staff, students, parents, and community members feel safe, cared for, respected, and valued. Principals’ SECs, well-being, and leadership form the foundation that influences the effective implementation of social and emotional learning (SEL), school climate, teacher functioning and well-being, family and community partnerships, and downstream student outcomes.

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Center of Wellness in Schools: Case Example

June 30, 2025

This school district is transforming schools into centers of wellness by placing mental health teams in every school in the county. No longer do students need to be in crisis to receive the mental health supports they need. This approach acknowledges that everyone can benefit from mental health support and emphasizes the importance of accessing these services before a crisis occurs.

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Healing Centered Framework

June 30, 2025

This framework is designed to articulate what it will require to be a school district that centers healing and wellness in its work. The information aims to clarify what being “healing-centered” looks and feels like for the different members of the CPS community in different roles. It also outlines five different components of a healing-centered district that apply, in unique ways, to each stakeholder.

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School Climate and Social and Emotional Learning: and Integration of Two Approaches

June 30, 2025

This brief reviews research on how positive school climates support SEL and how improved SEL contributes to improved school climate in elementary and secondary schools. The brief discusses school climate, SEL, and blended models that have effects on school climate and social and emotional competence.

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Whole School Prevention Planning

Start Building Resilience and Healing in Schools