"We're moving forward because now is not a time for small plans. It's not a time to pause, to be passive, or to wait around for our problems to fix themselves." President Barack Obama, May 8, 2009.

Midwood High School, a Brooklyn NY SEL high school, has begun implementing a new SEL curriculum for five of its Fall sports teams starting in August, 2011 (Girls soccer, boys soccer, boys x-country, jv football and girls swimming). Midwood is an award-winning SEL high school and sees the need to reinforce its general SEL mission through its sports proram. The program, called SEL for Sports, is being implemented cooperatively with the Morningside Center for Teaching Social Repsonsibility of New York City and GetPsychedSports.org. It is the first SEL sports program in the country as more and more schools turn to SEL as a way to increase academic scores and improve behavior.

Some of the comments after the ten-hour workshops were, "It is critical that we recongnize that we can control our emotions and not have them control us."; "This has been an eye-opening experience for me."; "Really reminded me of the significance of mental strength."; "I learned of the importance of incorporating social-emotional learning (SEL) in the lives of youngsters."; "I learned a lot and am excited to implement."

A new economic study The Economic Burden of Substance Abuse and Crime in Massachusetts and the City of Boston was funded by GetPsychedSports.org and was released on March 31, 2010. It shows that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts spends $5.87 billion on substance abuse treatment and $1.68 billion is spent on crime annually. Less than one percent is spent preventatively despite the fact that 22% of the state budget is spent on just these two issues.

How can we afford to not teach social emotional learning (which addresses both of these public health issues) in our schools?

The whole community suffers when schools, as well as youth and school athletics, are not considered a place to address community issues such as violence, addictions, eating disorders, obesity and depression. Schools and sports teams are ideal places to teach mental health skills because they shape young minds into habits of thinking that lead to emotional health, self-control, academic achievement and long-lasting relationships.

Schools, and sports teams, need a curriculum that teaches the very same skills preventatively that are found in anger management and addiction programs after the fact when the damage is already done. If we teach these skills before the fact, imagine the impact on our society.

There is such an educational plan that has proven to be effective in changing behavior and improving performance in academics. It is called Social-Emotional Learning or SEL for short. (See http://sel4mass.org for lots of information about SEL here in Massachusetts.)

In sports, that same plan is called sport psychology, albeit that the goal in that science has always been improving performance and only lately have sport psychologists realized that they are teaching social and emotional literacy.

The effects of SEL have been measured so they are evidence-based. For instance, teaching social-emotional skills in Seattle, a longitudinal study of 808 elementary school children who received a comprehensive SEL intervention in the first through sixth grade starting in 1981 by the Seattle Social Development Project — participants reported significantly lower lifetime rates of violence and heavy alcohol use at age 18 than no-intervention controls. In other words, teaching kids results in changing adult behavior that costs us both financially and in human terms.

GetPsychedSports.org educates and advocates for the use of schools and sport teams as place to teach preventative mental health skills. In so doing, students are learning habit-forming ways of thinking that can improve academics and reduce incidents of violence, addictions, eating disorders and other societal ills.

For an executive summary of the concept to reduce financial and human costs of social ills like violence, addictions, eating disorders, obesity and depression, see here.

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Social Emotional Learning (SEL) has proven to improve behavior and academics. See this clip from PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer about the effect of such teaching and think how it could reduce behaviors that cause so much pain and cost so much money.

The piece was produced by Learning Matters at http://learningmatters.tv/