The in San Diego鈥攁 public school that serves homeless students and their families who live in the area鈥攈as been providing support in academics, social-emotional learning, and life skills for those students for more than three decades.
The K-12 school operates under the San Diego County Office of Education鈥檚 Juvenile Court and Community 69传媒 educational program, and is a public-private partnership between the county and the nonprofit Monarch School Project. On average, students attend Monarch for 11 months, but many students are enrolled for years and even attend until graduation, according to its website.
When KishaLynn Elliott first started working at the school she was in charge of college and career development programming. But while students regularly receive feedback on their academic performance, 鈥渢here wasn鈥檛 really any way to show the impact of what else they were learning in terms of life skills or social-emotional growth鈥攁nd Monarch School does all of that work here,鈥� she said.
To better understand how the school is helping students in their social-emotional development, Monarch School partnered with the University of San Diego鈥檚 Jacobs Institute for Innovation in Education to conduct assessing the social-emotional learning of 3rd through 12th grade students from 2016-2019. The results were publicized in May 2023.
The Jacobs Institute and Monarch School are also conducting a companion research study to assess students鈥� social-emotional learning from 2020-2023, but those results aren鈥檛 ready, yet.
In a Zoom interview with Education Week, Elliott鈥攏ow the vice president of operations and evaluation for Monarch鈥攄iscussed the study鈥檚 findings, why this matters, and what advice she has for other school and district leaders.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did the study measure students鈥� social-emotional learning?
It started by looking at the social-emotional learning programs and opportunities that Monarch provides and figuring out what social-emotional factor it connected to. We came up with about 12 different social-emotional learning factors that we decided to measure in our study, and we put those factors together in a survey that is administered to our students in grades three through 12 twice a year鈥攊n the fall and then after about six months, which is the amount of time we determined it takes for us to have a measurable or tangible impact in the implementation of our programming, but also based on how long students will be a part of our community.
[The 12 factors are: restorative mindset, social awareness, belonging, emotional regulation, school value, grit, social navigation, self-esteem, agency, collaboration, student engagement, and school safety.]
Why is it important to measure these skills?
These are the skills that are really going to impact whether or not they鈥檙e able to thrive in life and potentially break the cycle of homelessness. I鈥檓 not saying academics aren鈥檛 important. I鈥檓 just saying that we鈥檙e teaching more than reading and math, and we should be held accountable to being as effective on the SEL side as we are on the academic side.
What were the study鈥檚 findings?
We found that across all of these factors, students were averaging about 3.5 out of 5 [on a scale in which 1 is poor and 5 is good]. When you think you鈥檙e going to be looking for growth, you鈥檙e expecting to see lower scores when you start and then you鈥檙e starting to see growth over time. Instead what we saw was that students were already coming in [to the school] quite high across most of these research-based factors. And they are either sustaining or growing from there, which is just a wonderful story to tell about the capacity for social-emotional learning of this population.
We thought we were going to be talking about growing social-emotional learning in this population from a deficit place, and now what we鈥檙e learning is that we鈥檙e actually talking about sustaining an already high social-emotional learning.
Why might this student population already have above-average scores on SEL skills before they come into the school?
These students are coming into their classrooms with a good amount of social navigation skills because of what they have to do just to survive when they鈥檙e not here. They already have a good amount of grit from having literally been worn down by the circumstances and conditions. Perseverance鈥攋ust the fact that they showed up and were in class on that day, they overcame those obstacles to get here to learn.
But they are able to come into this building every day and work with this team of teachers and staff. All they have to worry about once they get here is to receive the learning, to be safe, and to grow. And that has amazing benefits on their self-esteem, on their outcomes. But it鈥檚 not because we did it to them or for them. It鈥檚 because they already had it. They brought it in the doors and we work together with them to sustain or to grow them even stronger.
What advice would you give other school or district leaders?
There are unhoused students sitting in almost every public school classroom in the nation and so what we are planning to do is to scale our [whole-child] approach. Monarch School has a proven approach to helping these students thrive in terms of their social-emotional learning capacity, and there are definite correlations to academics in that work.
