ISBE School Wellness Conference

While compliance with ISBE safety regulations—including crisis response, emergency planning, RTO, and mandated reporting—is essential, compliance alone does not create a safe school. This session reframes school safety as a holistic ecosystem rooted in strong relationships, trauma-responsive practices, restorative approaches, and consistent adult behavior. Participants will explore how emotional safety drives physical safety and how equity, predictability, and belonging reduce crisis behaviors.


The session draws on lived examples from therapeutic day schools that have eliminated RTO, increased attendance, improved student engagement, strengthened family partnerships, and created safer environments for staff and students. Participants will receive practical frameworks, tools, and ready-to-implement strategies to build a safer school culture without relying on punitive systems.

Teachers and school social workers are expected to provide emotional support to students while navigating complex demands and limited time. Over time, this emotional labor can lead to fatigue, blurred boundaries, and emotional overload. This session explores how school-based professionals can hold space for students with empathy and professionalism—without absorbing emotional weight that impacts their well-being or effectiveness. Participants will gain practical strategies to recognize emotional overload, maintain healthy boundaries, and release emotional residue throughout the school day.

The current landscape of youth mental health in Illinois has reached a critical inflection point. With nearly half of Illinois youth reporting worsening mental health symptoms such as anxiety, depression, and loneliness, rising hospital visits for mental health needs, and suicide remaining a leading cause of death among youth, the urgency for change is undeniable.

The "business as usual" approach characterized by well-intentioned but siloed agencies, fragmented community partnerships, and reactive school-based interventions is failing to keep pace with the increasing needs of our youth. This challenge is further compounded by the persistent and widespread shortage of mental health professionals and resources in both public agencies and school settings.

This session serves as a critical call to action, urging a shift beyond merely co-locating community mental health services in schools. Instead, we advocate for a true public health model that integrates the departments of education and public health. We will introduce the Interconnected Systems Framework (ISF)—a research-validated logic model and process designed to integrate systems into a single, cohesive continuum of support between schools and their communities. Participants will be introduced to and walk away with multiple resources to support your agency in installation of an ISF. This session will also share the design logic of the new ISF-SHINE (School Health and Interventions for Nurturing Excellence) research grant, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Education Innovation and Research (EIR) office and is implemented through the Lake County #34 Regional Office of Education (IL) in partnership with WestEd and the University of Illinois–Chicago.