Supporting the implementation of social and emotional learning: County office goals to promote wellbeing in schools

CalHOPE Student Support was enacted as an emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic and racial reckoning of 2020. In an attempt to minimize trauma, center equity, and build the resilience of California's young people, CalHOPE offers statewide funding and support to County Offices of Education (COEs), such that COEs can provide implementation support to augment the delivery of systemic Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) in their regions. Each participating COE reported their implementation support goal(s) for the project. The text provided was coded to determine which domains of Systemic SEL (i.e., building foundational support, strengthening adult SEL, promoting student SEL, and building continuous improvement processes) and implementation support strategies (i.e., tools, training, technical assistance, and quality improvement/quality assurance) were represented. Results indicate that COEs were most likely to reference the systemic domains of building foundational support and strengthening adult SEL in their implementation support goals. COEs were most likely to reference the implementation support strategies of tools and technical assistance in these same goals. These results describe the naturally occurring variation among COEs in the focus and strategies of implementation support envisioned to improve the delivery of SEL throughout California.