The months since the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Marshalltown have been challenging for everyone. The children within our community are facing unprecedented situations, which can easily create a lot of social, emotional, behavioral, and mental health challenges in their lives. Each day, the dedicated educators at the Marshalltown Community School District diligently work to teach our students the specific skills needed to manage these types of challenges through social-emotional learning, or SEL.

Our focus on social and emotional learning helps children understand how to manage their emotions, set and achieve positive goals in socially appropriate ways, learn about empathy, develop positive and healthy relationships with adults and other children, and learn how to make responsible decisions. These skills are valuable for every person, both in school and beyond. In this time of the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of the August derecho, the district is increasing our efforts to meet the social-emotional needs of our students and their families.

An important part of our SEL work is an approach called Collaborative Problem Solving, an evidence-based approach developed within the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. It has been successfully implemented to support children of all ages in homes, clinical settings, foster care agencies, therapeutic programs, and residential treatment centers across the country for more than a decade.

Collaborative Problem Solving emphasizes two primary beliefs:

• Challenging behaviors are best understood as a side effect of a child’s lagging thinking skills; in other words, they struggle to meet the expectations placed on them in the immediate moment.

• The best way to address challenging behaviors is through teaching children the thinking skills they lack so that they can meet the expectations placed upon them.

Further developing our understanding around these two beliefs places MCSD staff in a better position to support our students and their families.

In addition to our work in SEL, the district has also continued to grow and develop our community partnerships with local mental health agencies. This is a crucial step in supporting our students because it is vital that our students receive consistent social, emotional, behavioral, and mental health supports both during and beyond the school day. Our partnerships with local mental health providers allows us to provide consistency throughout a child’s life.

Through CARES ACT grant funding, the district is enhancing our partnership with the passionately focused mental health professionals at Center Associates to learn about the Collaborative Problem Solving approach. Our continued teamwork will allow both of our organizations to continue developing a common language and to learn from one another when it comes to serving students.

By providing social emotional learning opportunities to Bobcat students, we are helping develop healthy, resilient, confident members of the Marshalltown community. We are honored to collaborate with Center Associates and all of our community partners to meet the social, emotional, behavioral, and mental health needs of our students and their families.

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Matt Cretsinger is the director of Special Services for the Marshalltown Community School District.