Top District Priorities for Spending on Social-Emotional Learning

As the social-emotional needs of students continue to develop, school district demands for the products and services that address those needs are evolving too.

Though EdWeek Market Brief research has shown that spending on SEL has been reduced from pandemic-era highs, it still remains a major priority for investment in many school systems, despite cultural/political pushback in some communities.

In a recent survey EdWeek Market Brief looked at how school systems across the country will make purchasing decisions about SEL over the next few years, whether they intend to rely on external providers or materials developed in-house, and the focus of the products they’re looking to buy.

The nationally representative, online survey was administered by the EdWeek Research Center from March 27 to April 14 and included 258 district and school leaders.

Many of the results are highly consistent with survey data collected by EdWeek Market Brief from K-12 officials two years ago, a reflection of how core market dynamics around SEL, and district needs, remain unchanged.

Build or Buy?

Interest in social-emotional learning has surged over the last decade, as district and school leaders became more attuned to the benefits of building students’ skills in areas such as social awareness, responsible decision-making, and self-management.

School leaders came to see support for SEL as connected to student academic outcomes and engagement in schools — a link backed by research — and tied to overall student well-being.

At the same time, districts have had to navigate political trap doors, as Republican leaders in some states and districts have raised concerns about SEL and claimed that it was linked to lessons on race and gender identity they find objectionable.

One of the EdWeek Market Brief survey questions asks K-12 officials a fundamental question about where they look for SEL support — specifically where they obtain content and services.

Most respondents indicate that they use a mixture of products from external vendors and material that they create in-house, at 63 percent.

There are significantly fewer district and school leaders who only use one or the other, with 19 percent who say they create all of their SEL resources in-house, and just 9 percent who exclusively use outside vendors.

 

The survey results on external and internal resources are nearly identical to those taken when EdWeek Market Brief asked the same question on a survey two years ago.

Sixty-three percent of respondents back then said they used a mix of external and internal resources, for instance, and 19 percent said they produced all their SEL materials in-house.

For the Lisa Academy, the largest public charter school system in Arkansas with 4,500 students K-12, they’ve found that a combination of external vendors and in-house materials have helped them serve their diverse population of students.

Unlike traditional public school districts, students can come to Lisa Academy from anywhere in the state, meaning that there are a variety of different needs. The school is the most diverse in the entire state, with 50 different languages spoken and 63 percent of students on free- or reduced-price lunches.

That means while some vendors and materials could meet the SEL needs of various groups of students, others will require totally different kinds of support, said Beth Ratermann, senior communications director for Lisa Academy.

“I’ve found that it’s more effective to have many, many resources on ‘go’ to meet the needs of our children,” said Ratermann, a former principal and teacher.

 

The way the academy differentiates between external resources and what needs to be created in-house is generally based on a behavioral need, she said.

Leaders will go to an external vendor first, but when those materials don’t meet the demands of the behaviors that students are exhibiting, or the schools don’t see the return on investment, they’ll try to fashion materials internally.

For instance, the school has needed to create a behavior chart for a particular student who was nonverbal, she said.

External SEL providers offer advantages, however. Some of them can tailor their online SEL content to students at different grade levels, she said.

Some students arrive at the school not functioning at the same SEL level as the rest of their peers. Since the pandemic, for example, they can arrive in kindergarten never having been around a group of children, the academy official said.

“Socializing with 20 other 5-year-olds was traumatizing for them, so going back to the skills they should have come to [our school] with would have really helped,” Ratermann said. Those students are often “trying to deal with the fact that the children around them don’t understand them.”

Even for middle and high school students — some are coming from a homeschool background, some are in the gifted program — so having online access to materials at different grade levels to address different students’ needs is critical for leaders, she added.

What SEL Products Are in Demand?

When asked about the specific types of SEL-related products and services that leaders plan to purchase from external sources in the next two years, survey responses varied, although professional development for teachers tops the list.

PD for teachers is a high priority, with 52 percent of respondents choosing that need. Professional development for administrators is also a high priority, at 37 percent.

Lessons that can be taught as a stand-alone unit are also seen as an important product/service, at 40 percent.

Purchasing priorities that rank lower on the list include items such as SEL measurement capacities embedded in data analysis platforms (12 percent), learning management/data management systems with capacity to deliver/assess SEL (12 percent), and SEL for after-school/out-of-school programs (8 percent).

District and school leaders’ purchasing priorities largely mirror the results of the same survey question that EdWeek Market Brief asked two years ago. Professional development for teachers was the top need then, chosen by 56 percent of respondents.

 

A school can have the best SEL products, but without professional development and training, those tools will not be effective, said Marie Giancarlo, director of curriculum and instruction at Charter School of Inquiry in New York.

Her school has invested in having an outside consultant come in to train their leaders on specific SEL products, and that support will continue to be a focus, she said.

The administrators who have gone through advanced training at this point have the ability to, in turn, provide turnkey training to the rest of the staff, and to provide ongoing coaching and support.

“That’s a huge piece of professional development — it’s not a one-and-done kind of situation,” Giancarlo said.

Challenges in providing social-emotional support for students are complicated and can emerge suddenly, but “if you have a team of people who have enough training in how to manage those situations, then you can work together to try to find the best way forward.”

 

The survey findings about district and school leaders’ biggest SEL needs do not come as a surprise to Rista Plate, senior researcher at the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL, a nonprofit that works to advance the development of SEL for all students.

Plate has also seen K-12 school districts putting a bigger emphasis on professional development in SEL for teachers and administrators.

That’s not only because of a recognition that educators need help in cultivating social-emotional skills in students, but also that teachers and others need grounding in relationship skills, decision-making, self-awareness and other areas, in their personal and professional lives, too.

“[Professional development] is really important for teachers and leaders to be able to support students and model SEL, as well as for their own roles in promoting wellbeing and preventing burnout and turnover — things we know are big challenges in the teaching profession,” Plate said.

Other top responses reflected in the survey also track with what she’s been seeing, she said, including a need for districts to use surveys to gauge students’ self-perception of their SEL/well-being. Thirty-six percent of respondents in the survey pointed to that purchasing need, up from 29 percent two years ago.

“A big issue in the field is, what are the best measures to assess SEL and to evaluate the needs within a school or district to particularly target an objective?” she said. “How do we measure that, how do we use that to track and promote continuous improvement of SEL programming?”

The challenge for K-12 officials is to “think about their unique objectives and try to align the products and services with those goals,” the CASEL researcher said, “because there’s no one-size-fits-all approach even though folks are looking for a diverse set of offerings.”

Where’s the Money Coming From?

The EdWeek Market Brief survey also asked about sources of funding that districts will likely tap into to support their SEL needs over the next two years.

The most common sources are local district funding (39 percent), state funding (39 percent), the federal Title I program (33 percent), and the federal Title IV program (29 percent).

The portion of district/school leaders who say they expect Title I, a program that supports students in poverty, to cover SEL costs has fallen a bit, from 41 percent in the EdWeek Market Brief survey two years ago. Local and state funding sources were seen as important sources in the 2022 survey, as they are today.

Federal emergency funding is seen as a likely SEL funding source by 4 percent of respondents, down sharply from two years ago, when 23 percent say it will be a source of aid. That’s a clear signal of districts’ preparation for the impending end of federal stimulus aid.

 

The top ways that survey respondents are planning to fund SEL over the next few years are on par with the approach of the Boonton Public Schools, a district of 1,500 students in New Jersey.

The district’s SEL programs will mostly be supported by state aid and local funding, as the majority of its budget comes from local tax levies, said Steve Gardberg, the district’s school business administrator.

State funding for programs like SEL is more uncertain depending on what district you’re in, he added.

In 2018, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed landmark legislation to fully fund the state’s school funding formula for the first time, bringing about $3 billion in new state aid and updating the spending blueprint for the first time in 10 years.

Over seven years, aid to overfunded districts would be reduced, and aid to underfunded districts would be increased to meet their appropriate funding amounts based on the state formula.

Gardberg sees the potential for new opportunities to support SEL and other programs in his system and others like it.

“Boonton has historically been underfunded, so we’ve been going up over the last seven years and seen these big increases,” Gardberg said. “But a lot of districts have seen very large decreases, so there’s a lot of strife in those districts about having to cut.”

Takeaways: Education providers who offer SEL as a core or ancillary part of their products can come away from the EdWeek Market Brief survey with a few potential strategies in mind.

First, they should know that a strong majority of school systems are choosing a mix of external and internal SEL products. That means if districts cite their use of home-grown approaches to SEL, there’s a strong chance they’re open to bolstering those materials with those from an outside provider.

Many K-12 officials see PD for teachers and administrators as a major need. That’s probably because of the overall challenges district and school leaders see in getting SEL right — and the potential value in doing so — as well as the risks in a divided political environment with educators not knowing how to respond to challenges with SEL content.

Districts and schools continue to rely heavily on state and local funding to support SEL, but numerous federal sources — particularly Title I — also matter. Those funding streams are where vendors would be advised to look, when trying to make a case for a district finding money for an SEL program.

Source: https://marketbrief.edweek.org/education-market/top-district-priorities-for-spending-on-social-emotional-learning/2024/08