Scarlett Lewis is on a mission. She lost her six-year-old son, Jesse, during the 2012 Newtown school shooting that left 20 children and six educators dead. But somehow, through something barely short of a miracle, she’s been able to use that pain and turn it into something powerful.
Lewis created the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation to honor the message her son left on the family’s chalkboard the day he died – nurturing healing love. One of the things she’s trying to do is bring social and emotional learning into public schools.
What exactly is social and emotional learning? To some people, it might sound a bit, well, emotional. Perhaps it isn’t scientific, or just too subjective and lacking scientific merit.
But that’s a common misconception, according to Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.
“Emotions are often seen as idiosyncratic impulses,” Brackett said. “It’s considered a soft science. And until recently, no one really knew that emotional intelligence was a very hard skill that predicts things of great importance, like social skills, and relationship quality [and] mental health outcomes.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal is co-sponsoring a bill called the Jesse Lewis Empowering Educators Act, named after Scarlett’s son. The bill is a proposed amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and it would use existing professional development money to help teachers bring social and emotional learning into the classroom.
“Jesse had emotional intelligence way beyond his years – gifts of empathy, resilience, self-awareness, confidence and compassion, love and hope – which we can instill in students nationwide if teachers are given the right tools and training,” Blumenthal said in a statement.
Lewis’s foundation is also working to develop materials to directly help teachers develop social and emotional projects to use in the class. These tools can be brought home so that social and emotional development involves parents and family members, a key factor of determining the success of the program, she said.
Experts have pointed out that social and emotional learning could play a major role in preventing another tragedy like the one that took Jesse’s life. A report by Connecticut’s Office of the Child Advocate found that Adam Lanza had virtually no social and emotional education, either at home or at school. Lanza killed his mother in her home while she slept, and then went to the school and shot and killed 26 others before he killed himself.
“The report goes on to say, basically, if the shooter in our situation had had access to social and emotional learning, this tragedy might not have happened,” Lewis said. “I think that’s really an incredible statement.”
