California educators, this is our moment to reinvent our schools as centers of wellness for students, staff and families. The world changed forever when our schools physically closed in spring 2020. Two and a half years later, we are working to repair the harm the COVID pandemic had on our students’ mental wellness and academic readiness, while also healing ourselves. We can do this.

We have decades of research showing that a Whole-Child Design, Community Schools approach removes many of the barriers to on-time attendance and increases the opportunity to intentionally build the Social Emotional Learning competencies and academic confidence students need to access a basic civil right in our country — an excellent education. We will never adequately support our students with Tier 3 mental health needs if we don’t have a schoolwide approach to mental health that infuses Transformative Social Emotional Learning into daily academic instruction and into all students’ interactions across the school day. A focus on mental wellness and teaching students emotional regulation strategies allows students to learn, retain and apply knowledge. A focus on TSEL is not “fluff” or something extra. It’s brain science.

I’m a school social worker and administrator who in 2020 was serving as a vice principal at an amazing Title 1 school in Sacramento. Our staff partnered with families to embrace a Community Schools and Restorative Practices approach to creating the conditions for mental wellness and learning. We didn’t have the language of “Whole-Child Design” at that time, but that’s exactly what we were doing. We supported Tier 1 mental wellness by building community in our classrooms and actively welcoming families and community partners onto our campus. As a staff, we were having tough conversations about race, class and bias and how our privilege impacted the largely Black, Brown and immigrant student body we served.

Our primary goal was to have our students in class daily, receiving grade-level or above instruction, from a fantastic team of teachers and classified staff who genuinely embraced a trauma-informed and Warm Demander mindset. In our first year, we reduced the use of suspensions by 80 percent, improved attendance by two full percentage points, and increased our English Language Arts scores by more than 10 percent by implementing a whole-child mindset. We sought to know each of our students “by need and by name,” as Dr. Jessica Djabrayan Hannigan and Dr. John Hannigan coined in their book, “Don’t Suspend Me! An Alternative Discipline Toolkit,” and created engaging instruction to support our diverse student body. Our school truly became a safety net for our 550 students and their families. In March 2020, we were exhausted and counting the days until spring break, but we were also energized by the progress we were seeing. Then COVID took over the world.

Let’s be honest. Even before the pandemic, there was a lot out of our control as educators. Stress in homes and in the community, ever-changing state and federal mandates, inconsistent school budgets and a shrinking middle class, to name a few. The mental health needs of our students were on the rise pre-COVID and are now at a crisis point. We knew the return to school would be challenging for students and for adults. That turned out to be an understatement.

As educators, we are faced with the historic barriers that a 180-day school year and a master-schedule, credential-driven school system present. We have more than 150 years of predictable opportunity gaps for our low income and BIPOC students who disproportionately feel the impact of an economy where inflation is on the rise and the pathway to the middle class is largely disappearing. We cannot waste the painful lessons of the COVID pandemic and return to “business as usual” in our schools. It’s time for adults to shift our mindset and structure our schools with mental wellness as our foundation. Here are evidence-based and low-cost strategies that we can start implementing today.