When Scarlett Lewis returned home in December 2012 to pick up clothes for her six-year-old son’s funeral, she noticed three words he had written on their kitchen chalkboard shortly before he was shot and killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School: ‘nurturing,’ ‘healing’ and ‘love.’
Lewis, who spoke to a group of about 20 adults at Concord High School Friday about the experience of losing her youngest son, Jesse, and finding forgiveness in the aftermath, said those words inspired her to begin a journey focused on social and emotional learning.
“The whole movement started at Jesse’s funeral when I got up to speak,” Lewis said. “Everybody had been asking me, ‘what can we do?’ And I said, ‘there is actually something that we can do. Everything starts with a thought in our head.’ I asked everybody that day to start thinking about what they think about and to change one angry thought a day into a loving thought.”
Lewis is the founder of the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement, a nonprofit organization that offers free social emotional learning programs designed to give students and teachers a figurative ‘tool belt’ of skills they can use to cope with anxiety and trauma in a positive way. There are versions of the curriculum for K-12 students, infants and toddlers, athletes and workplaces.
The State of New Hampshire adopted the year-long Choose Love Enrichment Program in 2018 at the recommendation of Gov. Chris Sununu and his School Safety Preparedness Task Force, to promote social and emotional learning in New Hampshire schools. So far, 548 New Hampshire schools have used the curriculum in some way, including K-8, high school, higher education and adult education institutions. Concord’s Abbot Downing and Christa McAuliffe elementary schools use the method fully, according to Shannon Desilets, Choose Love program director for the State of New Hampshire.
In her talk, Lewis spoke about experiencing grief and finding forgiveness in the aftermath of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, where 20-year-old gunman Adam Lanza killed 26 students and school employees and then himself at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Police said at the time that Lewis’s son Jesse may have saved the lives of many of his first grade classmates by shouting “run,” before he was shot.
“The only way I could take my personal power back was through forgiveness,” Lewis said. “Absolutely takes courage, but worth it because for some of us, it’s the only way to let that kind of pain go.”
Now, Lewis holds online events to discuss wellness and self-care techniques and travels to different states in the colorful “Choose Love bus” to speak and hold community wellness events.
“I knew immediately that if Adam Lanza had been able to give and receive nurturing, healing love, the tragedy would never have happened,” Lewis said. “It was so simple.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a negative impact on children’s mental health in the U.S. according to the CDC, with the number of mental health-related emergency department visits increasing sharply beginning in mid-March 2020 and continuing to October 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic years have been emotionally challenging for students and teachers, many of whom have had to navigate remote learning, physical and social distancing and personal tragedies.
Many New Hampshire school districts have declared social and emotional learning to be one of their top priorities for the 2021-22 school year, as students adjust to being back in the classrooms. Here in Concord, several schools have experienced behavior issues including vandalism this year, which principals have said might be due to students having difficulty adjusting to classroom learning.
“There’s a big push when we see interesting behavior, disturbing behavior, to ask the question, instead of ‘what is wrong with you?’ to say ‘what happened to you?’” Lewis said Friday. “Because really, that behavior is really just an expression of emotion, but not able to verbalize it.”
Lewis’s nonprofit organization has designed a social emotional learning unit called “Choosing Love in our Brave New World” for helping students and teachers navigate the return to school after the 2020-21 pandemic year. In the unit, students learn self-regulation, calming and grounding techniques, labeling feelings and identifying emotions that can appear on both masked and unmasked faces.
Lewis believes that choosing how to respond to unexpected tragedies and personal challenges is a way of finding power amid the difficulty.
“I would never have chosen to have my six-year-old son brutally murdered in his first grade classroom, and collectively we would never have chosen to be in the middle of a global pandemic, but we can take our personal power back in how we choose to thoughtfully respond,” Lewis said.
Lewis is holding more community events at Gill Stadium in Manchester on Nov. 13, and in Nashua on Nov. 18.