COVID-19 is Testing Our Nation’s Resiliency

To meet this challenge, the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence (YCEI) is seeking to enlist philanthropic support to help preK-12 schools—in the amount of $10,000 per school—to adopt RULER.

The Case for RULER

RULER is the YCEI’s comprehensive, evidence-based approach to building emotional skills in school leaders, educators, students, and students’ families. To date, over 4,000 preK-12 schools have received training in RULER, helping adults and over 1 million students understand the role emotions play in teaching and learning, strengthen their skills in recognizing and regulating emotions, and use the power of emotions to create safe and supportive school communities. Evidence has shown that the skills of emotional intelligence improve academic performance, enhance decision making, promote engagement, and offer a range of preventative mental health benefits.

Download and share our informational brochure here. 

Support Our Nation's Schools

The need for emotional intelligence in schools was evident prior to the pandemic to reverse downward-trending mental health indicators:

  • 25% of children have school adjustment problems (up to 60% in disadvantaged areas)
  • 25% of teens have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder
  • 53% of students in grades 5 to 12 are disengaged at school
  • 46% of teachers report excessive daily

Now, these skills are needed more than ever as students and the adults in their lives struggle to adopt distance learning, adapt to social distancing, and manage the financial and public health uncertainties and challenges around COVID-19. In fact, a March 2020 YCEI survey of 5,000 teachers revealed that the number of educators reporting anxiety had reached over 90%.

To respond to the needs of school communities during the pandemic, we have expanded our capacity to offer virtual RULER training to schools across the country — an option we first piloted successfully in 2019 and have since used to train a growing number of schools.

How You Can Help

Now is the time to try to reach more leaders, educators, students, and families to build the skills of emotional intelligence that will help them manage through this crisis and beyond. Schools typically pay $6,000 to be trained in RULER. This fee, along with Center philanthropic support, covers expenses for YCEI to develop, refine, and deliver RULER programming to schools, including training and implementation support. Unfortunately, in the face of unprecedented budgetary constraints, many schools that wish to adopt RULER cannot afford to pay a fee, especially those in the most vulnerable communities. Your sponsorship of $10,000 per school will allow us to train them in RULER and continue to make necessary investments in improving RULER services and supports.

Learn more about our RULER offering here. 

Donate Now to Our Center

There are two ways to support.

  1. To sponsor a school or district looking to implement RULER, please contact James Hagen directly at at 203-432-6802 or james.hagen@yale.edu.
  2. To support the efforts of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, please visit this direct link. The secure site gives you the option to designate the amount of your donation and select where you would like to direct your gift. In the dropdown box, scroll down until you see “Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence,”‘ and click this option.

Alternatively, checks made out to: “Yale University/Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence” may be mailed to: Yale Child Study Center, Office of Development Box 7611 New Haven, CT 06519-0611

For questions, please contact James Hagen at 203-432-6802 or james.hagen@yale.edu.