Hermosa schools’ latest tool in wellness effort: the book club
The newest summer reading assignment from the Hermosa Beach City School District isn’t a book report on “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” or an essay on “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In fact, it’s not even intended for students, at least not exclusively. It’s “Unselfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in our All-about-me World,” by psychologist Michele Borba. The book will be the subject of discussion for the Empathy Project, a community-wide book club that will kick off in the coming fall.
The Empathy Project is the work of the Hermosa district’s Social and Emotional Wellness Committee. The book club is open to members of the broader Hermosa Beach community. Four group discussions are scheduled throughout the school year.
HBCSD Board Member Doug Gardner, who sits on the wellness committee, said the book club format is to emphasize that this was “not just for second-graders, or not just for teachers or administrators.”
“If we want more empathetic children, we need to start with having more empathetic adults. Hopefully, this community-wide book club will begin that conversation. Like they say, ‘It takes a village.’ The idea is that if we can get that conversation going, it will lead to a better school environment,” Gardner said.
Although the district has launched past efforts focusing on students’ well-being, such as the award-winning MindUp program, the Social and Emotional Wellness committee represents the first district-wide entity dedicated to the subject. Districts throughout South Bay are devoting increasing resources to social and emotional wellness, in part because the pressure students feel as they attempt to deal with the high expectations typical of affluent communities.
Empathy, Borba argues, is the key to surmounting the negative side effects of self-obsession.
“While we may be producing a smart, self-assured generation of young people, today’s kids are also the most self-centered, saddest and stressed on record,” she writes in the introduction to “UnSelfie.”
Borba spoke at an event earlier this year at Mira Costa High School. Among those in attendance was Jennifer Buchsbaum, a Hermosa parent and member of wellness committee. Buchsbaum and HBCSD Superintendent Pat Escalante started talking, and developed the idea of using a book club on Borba’s work to communicate its lessons to Hermosa residents.
“She makes it easy to think I could apply this in my daily life: easy changes we could make that don’t seem too huge,” Buchsbaum said of Borba.
The Beach Cities Health District has joined in the effort as a partner. Ali Steward, director of youth services for the health district, said that Borba’s talk “triggered something for a lot of parents.” Even though concerns about stress may seem more common among high schoolers than the Hermosa district’s K-8 population, Steward said that the message will resonate for parents of much younger students.
“I think it’s universal. What she is talking about is emotional literacy, and how important that is to teach kids when they’re young,” she said.
The Empathy Project is expected to aid in developing “a school community that is physically and emotionally safe,” part of one of the seven goals identified in the districts Local Control and Accountability Plan, which board members approved last week for submittal to the state. In discussing the LCAP, several board members highlighted data from the recent California Healthy Kids Survey. The percentage of district 7th graders who feel safe at school dropped significantly last year, from 87 percent in 2016-17 to 74 percent in 2017-18.
The drop is likely due to high-profile school shootings that took place over the last year. Becky Scholten, a district parent who sits on the wellness committee, said that students in Hermosa generally feel safe, but acknowledged that the shootings had affected her children. Along with campus improvements the district is currently taking to increase student safety, the Empathy Project represents another way of helping students feel safe.
“I think that when kids are more empathetic, they are more secure in their own selves,” Scholten said.