The Office of Student Life held a kick off meeting with all 18 Project Prevent schools and their support staff members at Belmont Runyon Elementary School. Project Prevent Newark is a multi-tiered system of supports that create culturally responsive learning environments, build the social emotional learning capacity of teachers and students and increase mental health counseling services for students to ensure they are equipped with the tools to deal with trauma and break the cycle of violence prevalent in Newark communities. The primary objective of the meeting was to assess the achievements made, lessons learned, and to strategize the next steps for long-term sustainability.
In order to ensure the successful completion of their respective programs, each vendor/partner presented a comprehensive overview of their initiatives, highlighting the data collected since 2019 and outlining their goals for the upcoming school year of 2023-2024. The latter half of the meeting consisted of breakout sessions, which aimed to enhance planning, programming, and address sustainability concerns. These sessions involved collaboration with social emotional learning curriculum partners and mental health vendors such as Rutgers and Effective School Solutions, MAYASA Consultant, and Metis Evaluators.
The District is confident that, in the coming years, schools will be able to maintain the progress achieved through the implementation of their structured School-Wide Support and Intervention and Referral Services teams.