School District No. 48 is one of only six in the province taking part in a pilot project aimed at promoting students’ emotional and social well-being.
It’s called WellAhead, and the district is hoping parents, teachers or anyone will share feedback online in response to its proposals.
The ideas are simple. They really represent a new way of looking at everyday interaction in school communities in the hopes of understanding how these actions can promote students’ well-being. For example, these can include ordinary things like staff and students acknowledging each other on a daily basis with a smile or hello.
“They’re just looking at everyday practices,” said WellAhead liaison Sheena Cholewka.
Increasingly, traits like emotional and social well-being are seen as crucial to children’s development and their eventual success in school, work or life in general.
“If you’re not doing well socially or emotionally, it’s hard for you to learn,” Cholewka said.
Emotional and social well-being, in fact, represent key domains that researchers measure using the Early Development Instrument, a tool that examines the school readiness of children when they enter kindergarten.
For the Sea to Sky District, meetings in the fall generated a list of 21 everyday practices, which were narrowed down and listed on the ideas.wellahead.ca website. What WellAhead needs now is online feedback before the end of November from parents, students, teachers and others in the community on how they feel about each particular idea.
The next phase would involve each district bringing in one or two ideas to implement from January through June, at which time the WellAhead team will be evaluating the project. While WellAhead is voluntary, it will be brought in district-wide.
“For us, we chose to have it across all schools,” Cholewka said.
This evaluation will be important because, while a lot of these simple interactions might be commonplace in schools, little is understood as to how or why they might work.
“What we don’t have is the research behind it,” Cholewka said.
WellAhead will continue to work with the pilot districts to learn more before rolling out a plan for other B.C. districts.
The pilot projects are being sponsored by the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, which has identified children’s mental health as a priority.
Mail Bain, the provincial lead for WellAhead, said they want to incorporate simple interactions that promote social and emotional development into life for students.
“It’s really about integrating well-being into the daily life of schools…. It’s starting a conversation about these things.”
The project is part of a five-year national campaign that is starting in B.C.
Sea to Sky is seen as a leader on well-being within the province, which is part of the reason why it was one of the six school districts chosen among the 41 that applied to be part of WellAhead.
“There’s a significant momentum here,” Bain said.
