Connecting hearts and activating potential.

For district and site leaders

Character education. Not another module to click through.

A twenty-minute daily practice your teachers will actually run, with a reporting story that fits the goals your board already reviews.

Who wrote it

Geri is the founder of Blooming Lotus Learning. Twenty-four years teaching elementary school, a Master's Degree in Education Leadership with a focus in Curriculum and Instruction, and five school years running this practice daily in her own classroom before any of it was offered for sale. It was designed by somebody who had to make it work at 8:00 in the morning.

All of it at the same time. While teaching full time, she also ran afterschool programs in affordable housing communities for nine years. In 2013 that work won her category in a community award for Outstanding Service to Youth, and led the City of Sacramento to create a role for her as Affordable Housing Liaison — which she held while still teaching her own class everyday. Three jobs at once serving the same community. The children this program was built for are not a demographic she read about. Geri proudly lives and teaches in a district that has consistently been one of the most diverse school districts in the U.S. Currently, it is the most diverse district in California.

Where it fits

Illinois — this is already required of you.

Illinois requires character education by statute. 105 ILCS 5/27-12: every public school teacher shall teach respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, trustworthiness and citizenship. 405 ILCS 49/15 requires every district to hold a policy incorporating social and emotional development. 23 Illinois Administrative Code 235 sets the SEL standards themselves.

Four of the six traits the statute names are categories our students write on the wall themselves in the first week. The question is not whether you need this. It is what you are using, and whether you can show it happened.

Michigan — fold it into the improvement plan, fund it from 31a.

Michigan's SEL competencies are guidance rather than law, and they belong in your School Improvement Plan through MICIP. Section 31a At-Risk funding names behavioral and social-emotional supports as an allowable use, and it targets regular attendance — which is one of the things this practice moves, and one of the things our pilot measures.

California — school climate, and the board cycle you already run.

Daily practice tied to the climate and connectedness measures already in your accountability reporting, with a crosswalk you can attach to the plan.

All three — federal. Title IV-A. Student support and academic enrichment funding many districts already hold and underspend.

And in every state: a consumable at classroom-set pricing, not a per-seat annual license that renews forever.

What a pilot in your district looks like

  • Two to four classrooms, one semester
  • Baseline and end-of-semester climate measure, your instrument
  • Teacher fidelity log, one line a day
  • Student work samples as the artifact, because the journals are the evidence
  • A written summary you can bring to the board

The journals themselves are the data. Every child produces sixty dated, handwritten pages in a one-volume pilot, and a hundred and eighty across a full year. Nothing else in this category leaves that kind of trail.

Budget conversations start a year before the money moves.

If you are building next year's plan, now is when a pilot gets scoped. A twenty minute call is enough to tell whether this belongs in your planning at all.

Book a 20 minute call