The Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement is offering a free social/emotional wellness program to support educators and students returning to school this fall.

According to a release, the special reentry unit, Choosing Love in Our Brave New World, is designed to help transition students back to class or to support them during distance learning. Individual teachers, parents, or districts can sign up for the program.

“Choosing Love in Our Brave New World” will help students and teachers find their way into the new normal of education, according to the release. This special back-to-school unit was created with particular awareness of the current events and environment, and fosters the development of a growth mindset and perseverance. Lessons incorporate trauma-sensitive, healing-centered language and practices based on the latest neuroscience and post-traumatic growth research.

In a recent phone interview, Scarlett Lewis, who founded the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement to honor her son Jesse, after he died in the school shooting on 12/14, said the new program is “trauma-informed and infused with social/emotional wellness.” It was specifically designed to help teachers, children, and students integrate into the new school year amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

With the many different models for the return to school, whether in class, distance learning or a hybrid model, lessons in the program can be taught as a whole or in smaller parts throughout the day or throughout the week, according to the release.

Lewis said the new program is free and available online at chooselovemovement.org.

The Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement, according to the release, is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization with a commitment to reach students, educators, and individuals, nationally and internationally, and provide them with a simple yet profound formula for choosing love. Its signature program, Choose Love For Schools, is a no-cost infant/toddler through twelfth grade curriculum that contains the simple universal teachings of courage, gratitude, forgiveness, and compassion-in-action — the foundational concepts of social and emotional learning (SEL). Choose Love For Home, Choose Love For Communities, and Choose Love For Athletes are also available programs.

Lewis explained the formula for the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement — “Courage + Gratitude + Forgiveness + Compassion-in-Action” — was created based on a message Jesse left on a chalkboard of, “Nurturing, Healing, Love.”

After “COVID hit,” Lewis shared, the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement team pivoted from working on a “version two” of its main program to focusing on how to reintegrate children. Lewis said she was inspired by work by Allegra Jordan on helping soldiers returning from war.

Everyone, Lewis said, is experiencing trauma now. And with students who are traumatized, Lewis said, “you have to address their trauma first” in order to allow them to “get back to being in the present so they can learn.”

One of the partners in creating the new program was the Tapping Solution Foundation, a Newtown-based foundation that is “committed to spreading a message of health, healing, and support by sharing the power of EFT tapping,” according to its website, tappingsolutionfoundation.org.

“I’m just so happy that we have partnered with them, and we have really deepened our partnership as well over the Brave New World [program],” Lewis said.

Some highlights of the Choosing Love in Our Brave New World, according to the release, are:

•A personal video message for educators from Lewis.

•A welcome letter for teachers to read to their students that research shows will improve their academic and social-emotional skills.

•Grounding and mindfulness practices for students presented in videos and lessons for EFT (emotional freedom technique) tapping by Jessica Ortner, the Tapping Solution, and Healthy Compassionate Connection by Kate MacKinnon.

•Strategies to help students identify and recognize somatic cues, feelings, and emotions.

•Skills and tools to manage the underlying feelings of fear, uncertainty, and anxiety and practice responding in healthy ways.

•Growth mindset as it relates to the COVID situation and how we can move forward.

•Slides in each lesson for ease of access and to facilitate distance learning.

“Before any other learning can be effective, students and educators need to feel safe, a sense of belonging, cared for, and loved,” Lewis said in the release. “The goal of this special back-to-school unit is to provide transitional support from any trauma or stress that students may be bringing back from an extended break as they begin to immerse themselves in a new year of learning.”

According to the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement, the new program was created as a gateway to the Choose Love for Schools Program. These lessons are foundational and provide students with skills and understandings that will transcend the units to follow in the rest of the Choose Love for Schools curriculum, which focus on courage, gratitude, forgiveness, and compassion-in-action.

All no-cost programs can now be accessed through Choose Love Connect, a community and program portal that also includes the ability for educators to exchange program and SEL tips, resources, and best practices with each other. Choose Love Connect now serves as the “digital heartbeat” of the Choose Love Movement, offering anyone the ability to join the movement and become part of the solution for the problems our society is experiencing, through chooselovemovement.org.

“You can’t always choose what happens to you... but you can take your personal power back in how you choose to respond when you respond with love,” Lewis said.