FALSE.  The school counselor’s mission was transitioned under Michelle Obamas First Lady Initiative. They now work as social justice agents of change and they have the authority to usurp parental rights under client confidentiality.

https://www.creators.com/read/michelle-malkin/09/22/exposing-the-woke-school-counselor-cabal

https://web.archive.org/web/20150221022419/https://www.schoolcounselor.org/magazine/blogs/november-december-2014/change-behaviors-by-changing-mindsets

FALSE.  Schools were mandated to meet the needs of students prior to this new requirement.

TRUE and FALSE.  These claims are deceptive in that they’re true if you understand the words in the right ways. SEL is partially “evidence-based” in small-scale, targeted implementation with legitimately at-risk kids where licensed therapists work with them in therapeutic spaces and teach them to take personal responsibility for their emotions. Systemic implementation of Transformative SEL is not evidence-based. This constitutes a bait and switch on SEL products. It is “data-driven” in that it works by collecting your children’s data through surveys, interviews, and tech, so it can be more effective at intervening in their emotions. These data are then sold to various entities for whatever purposes they might have with your children’s psychometric data.

FALSE.  From CASEL.org:  We’ve been at it for over 30 years.

FALSE.  From CASEL.org on “Systemic Implementation”: “SEL in Classrooms, SEL in Schools, SEL with Families & Caregivers, SEL in Communities, SEL in School Districts, SEL Policy at State Level, SEL Policy at Federal Level.”  But we’ll focus on the SEL that just affects your child in the course of their day.  They can be bombarded with SEL-laden curriculum, such as Wit & Wisdom.  They will encounter SEL-initiatives, should they happen to speak to their school counselor.  They will engage in SEL activities in the classroom, such as “Listening Circles.”  They will be asked to complete surveys in the name of SEL which is actually data-mining of public school students on a massive scale.

FALSE.  Schools implement SEL programs because massive amounts of federal dollars are tied to it.  (ESSA Act of 2015, ESSER Funding, Project Aware, etc).

FALSE.  From CASEL.org: “SEL can help address various forms of inequity and empower young people and adults to co-create thriving schools and contribute to safe, healthy, and just communities. …SEL can be a powerful lever for creating caring, just, inclusive, and healthy schools that support all young people.”  All the buzzwords of Critical Race Theory.  Rather, SEL can be thought of as the railroad tracks (credit PCTN) that facilitates the entrance of all other agendas and ideologies into our schools.  This includes Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Theory, Critical Queer Theory, Critical Feminist Theory, Restorative Justice Initiatives, and so on.

FALSE.  The primary entity pushing and implementing SEL is CASEL, with significant funding especially from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others. UNESCO (United Nations) promotes the implementation of SEL strongly, specifically for teaching children to overcome their cognitive dissonance as they lobby to change the purpose of education to teaching students to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations Agenda 2030.

FALSE.  SEL seeks to drive a wedge between parents and their children, because that is how you “transform a society’s values, attitudes, morals, and beliefs.”  From CASEL.org: “… when my daughter came home from fifth grade talking about how our brains respond to different things, I was taken aback. As I was getting angry because of a disagreement between her and me, she told me that I was “dysregulated,” meaning that I was having a poor time managing my emotional reactions and that I should probably take a break and collect myself. I didn’t know what she meant! Did my daughter just put me in timeout?”

FALSE.  SEL creates emotional beings.  When you turn on the news and see mayhem as people react emotionally to outcomes they don’t like, that is the end result of SEL.  Examples:  the bullying and attempted assassination of a Supreme Court Justice because they don’t like his verdict, burning down various cities, causing property damage and loss of life in the name of George Floyd, businesses proactively boarding their windows in a presidential election.  The Left feeds on emotion and eschews logic, rationale, and objective truth.  By starting our kids in SEL as young as Kindergarten, the Left is assured to get the emotional beings they desire by high school graduation.

FALSE.   SEL surrounds students with a culture and conversations based on subjective truth which causes students to question what their families have instilled in them. The unspoken purpose of SEL is to help manage the cognitive dissonance created by the various ideological programs in schools.

FALSE.  SEL is not a “feel good” methodology. It teaches students to manage their emotions in conjunction with the viewpoint that America is systemically racist/oppressive. The method of introducing this thought process to students includes introducing them to stories that take advantage of their natural empathy & innocence.  In Williamson County Schools, one of the most obvious is the Wit & Wisdom curriculum, which daily bombards students with highly negative, racially-charged, emotionally-charged, depressing, graphic, and often age-inappropriate content.  The age-inappropriate content for elementary school children includes, rape, murder, torture, scalping/skinning of humans, suicide ideation, gender fluidity, violence, gore, infidelity, and promiscuity.  This does not sound “positive” to the average parent.  Parents have also complained about the “Lifeboat Exercise” offered to high school students this year, in which there are more people than seats available in a lifeboat.  Students engage in the macabre classroom activity of ranking the value of individuals (deciding who lives or dies) based on a single sentence descriptor about that person.  Again, how does this uplift a student’s emotions?

FALSE.  The term Social Emotional Learning and its laboratory organization, CASEL (Collaborative for Academic Social Emotional Learning), were created in 1994 during a meeting at the Fetzer Institute. The Fetzer Institute’s mission is to create a worldwide new-age spiritual movement by transforming society’s values, attitudes, morals, and beliefs.  This transformation entry point into education was SEL. In 2015, Obama passed the “Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)” which required federal reporting of non-academic disciplines for any school receiving federal dollars. SEL from CASEL was highly promoted as the answer to these requirements and thus SEL was adopted by over 90% of schools in America.  Since then, federal requirements have only increased with ESSER funding and other mental health initiatives.