Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis says that the state’s schoolchildren must learn essential life skills to become successful adults: grit and perseverance to help them face adversity, problem-solving, and self-management.
It boils down to resilience, she said in a roundtable discussion at Florida State University on March 22.
Following the roundtable, the state’s Board of Education adopted revised Resiliency Standards, which moved to define the term, elevate mentorship, and create new school roles for parents, the governor’s press office said.
The mother of three said that in talking about mental health with parents and teachers around the state, she learned that students experiencing hardship “felt that they were damaged goods” and that they couldn’t overcome their situation.
“And that was, of course, the farthest from the truth. A lot of these students just needed someone to confide in.”
She said many don’t have adults available in their lives, and they need good mentors. The parent community in schools can serve as “resilience coaches.”
DeSantis said the state is authorizing more than $21 million to create a resiliency curriculum, a tool kit available to parents and teachers, and a website to centralize all resources for them to access.
The state funds will train parents and teachers how to teach resilience to children and pay parents willing to step up and help out that way at their children’s schools, she said.
State Education Commissioner Manny Diaz said the state was creating four new pathways for parents to get involved: as resiliency coaches, mentors, school counselor apprentices, and resiliency educators.
The first lady said, “We’re really excited to be continuing our march as the first state in the nation to reframe the way we approach mental health.”
“We are rejecting the stigma of mental health and replacing it with resiliency,” she said. “We have an obligation to teach and to empower our students to learn how to persevere and to overcome life’s inevitable challenges.
“It’s not a matter of if you are faced with a challenge or a setback in life—it is a matter of when. And what are we doing to prepare our students to be successful in the face of adversity?
“It’s not about being a victim, relegated to a set of circumstances that you cannot overcome. It’s about learning to persevere, to never give up, to overcome and become triumphant, living up to your God-given potential.”
DeSantis said the goal was to “teach kids key foundational skills that will help them all throughout life: skills like problem solving, critical thinking, grit, perseverance, empathy, responsible decision making, self management, mentorship, citizenship, and honesty.”
Children should be taught volunteerism as well, she said.
“We believe if kids get away from their electronic devices—they get out into society, they are serving other people—not only are they getting good content and perspective, they’re also helping themselves because they feel good.”
Public school mental health counselors are overburdened, she said. Many children have problems that need a sympathetic guiding hand rather than a skilled mental health professional, and the program would free up counselors to address the most acute cases, she said.
‘Resiliency Education’
DeSantis said she wants to avoid the term “mental health.”She noted that in October 2022, the state board of education approved an amendment to the 2019 rule requiring five hours of mental health instruction. She said it had been renamed “resiliency education” and incorporates essential skills like problem-solving and critical thinking.
Last year, her husband, Gov. Ron DeSantis, signed legislation authorizing nearly $70 million to promote fatherhood. The funding supports mentorship programs through the Department of Juvenile Justice.
State Education Commissioner Manny Diaz spoke about the importance of mentorship.
“When a student has issues or adversity in their life—and remember that adversity for a student in elementary school or high school ... to an adult, it can seem like it’s nothing. But to a teenager (or) an elementary school student, it could mean the world at that moment.
“And just having a person who’s a mentor, who can have the conversation just out of life experience, gets them over that speed bump, and you don’t need to bog down the mental health professionals with that,” Diaz said.
One of those involved in the fatherhood initiative, former NFL player and philanthropist Jack Brewer, also spoke.
“There are 2.5 million babies in the state of Florida that are fatherless” or who may be living in families of 13 or 14 people in a two-bedroom home, Brewer said.
“The fact that we’re able to put resiliency coaches in our schools: think about what that’s going to do to empower our teachers. Our teachers are (having to raise) kids; kids that are on their cell phones half the time, kids that are three and four and five grade levels behind, kids that don’t have parents that are involved in disciplining them.”
“Right now, we do have a crisis on our hands. They don’t have discipline a lot of times. They don’t have that manly influence in their lives. I'll say that again, that manly influence in their lives. We have had enough of that soft approach to raising our kids. Our kids need to know how to fight back.”
Casey DeSantis introduced Florida State University (FSU) sophomore Jaime Ferrer, who was diagnosed as a diabetic at age 3.
“A lot of people were thinking when you were younger, you wouldn’t be able to play sports. And not only are you playing sports, you’re playing Division One sports,” the first lady said of Ferrer.
Ferrer plays baseball for FSU, and as a freshman, won All-ACC awards both for baseball and academics, DeSantis said.
Ferrer said he realized that he, as a successful athlete despite his disease, could be a role model for children in overcoming adversity.
“I wake up and I realize how lucky I am to be where I am. Yeah, I have Type One diabetes, it’s the cards I’ve been dealt, but it could be a lot worse. I get the opportunity to wake up every day and go to the field and play the game that I love with the people that I love,” he said.
“My parents always told me that, to be successful in life, you have to fight for what you want and you can’t let one ‘No’ crush your dreams. So keep fighting for your dreams,” Ferrer said.
State Board of Education Member Ryan Petty lost his 14-year-old daughter Alaina in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. He learned resilience from his own father and had to apply what he'd learned the day after the shooting.
“February 15 was the day I woke up and had to make a decision. What do I do with this tragedy?”
The lesson he'd learned in his youth, he said, was “that I needed to get up and try to make a difference and try to change these things.” Petty ran for the Broward County school board. He lost the primary, but helped pass one state and two national bills to improve school safety. Gov. DeSantis appointed him to the state board in 2020.
Monica Colucci, a teacher for 26 years who was recently elected to the Miami-Dade County School Board, said she’s called for a comprehensive review of all social-emotional learning “to make sure that there are no ideologies being infused into these students.
“Because it is counterproductive when we put kids into a victim category; it undermines exactly what we are looking for, which is perseverance.”
Parent activists in Florida and nationally have identified social-emotional learning as a vehicle for teaching and incorporating critical race theory in public schools.
