Updated, Monday, Dec. 11: The Choose Love Enrichment Program now has a private Facebook group for educators to meet and engage with fellow educators who are using the program. There, educators may share their experiences with the program, their enthusiasm for SEL, and to gain insights, best practices or concerns with one another. 

Scarlett Lewis began her presentation on social and emotional learning by showing her audience of teachers a photo taken of her son, Jesse, hours before he was fatally shot.

The picture shows a 6-year-old boy standing in the driveway on a wintry December morning, waiting to get into the car for his trip to Sandy Hook Elementary School.

While waiting for his mom, he used his finger to etch “I love you” and little hearts into the thin coat of ice formed on the car windows.

When Lewis came outside to get into the car and saw what Jesse had done, she told him to stay right there while she went back inside the house for her camera.

“The key is to be in the present, and available,” she told the DHS faculty on Nov. 7 during a day of professional development. Because she was in the present, and available, she was able to capture a photo of her beaming son.

On this day, Dec. 14, 2012, Adam Lanza would enter Sandy Hook Elementary and fatally shoot Jesse and 19 of his classmates and six educators.

“This whole tragedy started with an angry thought in Adam Lanza’s head,” said Lewis, explaining the theory behind her program that promotes teaching social and emotional learning in schools here in the United States and across the globe.

“We have 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts a day, and 60 percent of those are negative,” she continued. “Every single thought we have impacts us on a cellular level. It impacts us physically, mentally and emotionally.”

At Jesse’s funeral, she told family and friends what she had been thinking about angry thoughts, and that she had come to the realization that angry thoughts can be changed before they lead to damage.

She told those gathered: “There is something you can do, and that’s to begin thinking about what you are thinking about. Think a positive thought, and it will be impactful. So, everybody leaves and returns to the four corners of the country and I start hearing from them; that this one simple act had completely changed their lives. It was then that I knew I was onto something.”

From this was born the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Enrichment Program, a free pre-K social and emotional learning program that “teaches educators and students how to choose love in any circumstance and helps them become connected, resilient and empowered individuals.”

Vikki Carlson, who is in charge of DHS counselors, invited Lewis to speak to the faculty after listening to, and being moved by, her message.

“I believe she leaves listeners feeling hopeful and I wanted others to have that experience,” said Carlson, who sees the benefits of the program.

“It teaches kids how to be a compassionate person,” Carlson said, “which I feel can be a benefit to all of our students.”

Fred Merrill Jr., a special education teacher, agreed, saying he could see using Lewis’ materials in class.

“The techniques she espouses have been around for a long time, but the present climate in our culture makes these ideas particularly prescient,” said Merrill, who found the presentation “incredibly powerful.”

Merrill added: “The fact that we have an advisory period once a week that is meant to help students feel connected to the school makes for a perfect launching pad to try her program or something like it.”

Lewis at one point showed another photo of Jesse’s handiwork. Shortly after the tragedy, she and her other son discovered a chalkboard with the words: nurturing, healing, love.

The photo shows the words scrawled in chalk, written phonetically and in the unsure hand of a first-grader just learning to write. “This is not the vernacular of a 6-year-old,” she marveled, unable to explain what he was thinking when he wrote it.

But she took those words as she was forming her ideas and realized “if Adam was able to give and receive nurturing, healing and love, that the tragedy would have never happened. It is a profound formula for choosing love.”

She said it takes courage to choose love. She broke it down into a formula: Courage plus Gratitude plus Forgiveness plus Compassion in action means one is choosing love.

Lewis stopped for a moment to acknowledge what some in the audience may have been thinking: that this all sounds “hippy-dippy.” She has heard it before.

“There is decades of research to show that this works,” Lewis she countered. “Science is what led me to choosing love.”

The presentation came just two days after another mass shooting, this one in a church in Texas that claimed the lives of 25 people and an unborn child. One week after her presentation, on Nov. 14, a gunman in northern California fatally shot four people after unsuccessfully trying to shoot his way into an elementary school.

“The implications are huge,” she said. “We are in fear. I talk to people all over the country: kids are afraid, parents are afraid, teachers are afraid. We have to get away from fear and get to choosing love.”

SEL, she said, is the No. 1 way to get there. She cited statistics of SEL benefits, saying schools have reported improvements in academic performance, SEL skills and graduation rates.

“Most students in the building would benefit from identifying their emotions, and learning techniques to better self regulate,” Merrill said. “Also — and perhaps most important — they would benefit from learning how to more clearly and constructively articulate their feelings so as to get their needs met.”

Near the presentation’s end, Lewis returned to her son, showing pictures of him at birth and as a little boy riding a pony, and wearing a toy army helmet around the house.

“He lived his life in capital letters,” she said, adding that her son was given a hero’s funeral because he saved the lives of nine classmates by yelling to them to run. “We all have this courage to choose love.”