LYNN— In the second year since the school district began its expansion of social emotional learning, education that addresses a student’s mental, social, and emotional needs alongside curriculum, Lynn Public Schools (LPS) named Tina Hoofnagle Executive Director of Social Emotional Learning.
Hoofnagle, who served as the assistant social emotional learning director for about two years prior to her promotion, joined the Public School System at a time when her line of work was at the forefront of the school district’s post-pandemic vision. In the 2021-2022 school year, the district met the American School Counselor Association’s (ASCA) recommendations for student to school counselor ratio of 250 to one, surpassing the national average that year of 415 students for every counselor.
Lynn’s push for adoption of a “clinical model” for education was born, primarily, out of the pandemic. At a school committee meeting Oct. 13, Mayor Jared Nicholson, referencing the model’s success, said that it played a significant role in addressing the “social emotional needs and particularly the mental health behavioral needs that were aggravated by the pandemic.”
Hoofnagle, in an interview last week, said that among the most common social and emotional issues in adolescents were high levels of depression and anxiety exacerbated by the impacts of COVID-19.
“We have high levels of depression and anxiety in our society and with students, as well as across the board with adults, and so, the isolation of the shutdown, and the fears associated with getting sick and people dying and losing loved ones that didn’t help an already fragile kind of situation with high numbers of depression and anxiety,” Hoofnagle said. “It’s been tough to come back.”
Hoofnagle started her career as a social worker when she interned at a psychiatric facility as a freshman at UMass Amherst in 1976. When she realized she wanted to dedicate her life to helping people, Hoofnagle transferred to University of Maine, where she could work towards a bachelor’s degree in social work. Her first job after graduation was at a juvenile justice program, where she assisted children who committed low-level crimes with making restitution to victims.
“It was a diversion program so that kids wouldn’t have to go on probation or the detention center which at the time, was up in Maine. But if they could pay back for the damage that they had done, mostly property crime, it was, in a sense, the early days of restorative justice,” Hoofnagle said.
Hoofnagle went on to earn three Master’s degrees, one of which was in social work. She worked as a clinician offering child and family therapy before she made the switch to social work in schools, which she said play an essential role in a child’s social and emotional development.
“I see schools as secondary learning environments. The primary emotional learning environment is the home in schools are the next place that kids hang out. So they kind of act out some of their home stuff within the schools. And we have children that function at all different levels. I see schools as perfectly poised to try to help support kids to learn socially and emotionally,” Hoofnagle said. “Schools are a nice place as a hub for supporting kids, not just academically, but socially and emotionally as well.”
Social emotional learning, Hoofnagle explained, is often mistakenly seen as a synonym for mental health support. While mental health and social emotional learning sometimes overlap, she said that social emotional learning is a broader form of education centered around a student’s overall wellbeing and development.
“A big misconception is that social emotional learning is equal to mental health. Social emotional learning, and mental health, they’re different, but they overlap in areas,” Hoofnagle said. “We’ve always been involved in character building and value work in the schools and so forth. Social emotional learning is equipping students with the applied knowledge to develop healthy relationships, and to have the skill sets to achieve the goals that they have for one another.”
As the district’s executive director of social emotional learning, Hoofnagle will play a critical role in overseeing the rollout of LPS’s clinical model. She said that she would like to establish a team of school social workers and teachers to integrate social emotional learning (SEL) within the system’s academic curriculum.
“I’m specifically looking at getting a team together to talk about embedding signature SEL practices within the disciplines within you know, what’s already operating within the schools, in math and science and ELA and in all the other it’s I think it would be more organic, to embed SEL practices in resources into the existing curriculum,” Hoofnagle said.
Some signature SEL practices, which might seem simple, but that Hoofnagle said can play an essential role in fostering emotionally and socially adept students, include having school staff greet students as they enter and leave class, or allowing students brief breaks in the day to reset their brains.
“Sometimes children don’t have the ability to sustain for long periods of time. They get the wiggles or distracted, and so having a little bit of a brain break in between a long block, or in the middle of a class just for kids to get up and possibly do a stretch, or have a turn and talk to a neighbor just for a couple of minutes to kind of reset the brain, that helps,” Hoofnagle said.
Through decades of social work, Hoofnagle’s main attraction to her profession has centered around a general passion for guiding others through their struggles. She said that as a school social worker, she feels a sense of joy and pride when students have “a-ha” moments. She said that as executive director, she hopes to see school clinicians and counselors find that same sensation with their students.
“I just loved being with the kids. And I love when they have those a-ha moments that they would kind of get something or they would practice a skill that you were teaching them. They would come back and report that, you know, they felt like they wanted to hit that student at recess, but they use their words instead,” Hoofnagle said. “Now because my role has been supporting the team, it’s when I have an opportunity to provide supervision to one of the clinicians or one of the clinical supervisors, and they’re having some of those a-ha moments about students gaining skills and in doing well, that really is still very, very important to me.”
