Angelique Shorty-Belisle, M.Ed.

“We are respectfully requesting funding to provide a designated mental health professional who will facilitate in person support for our children and expand all of our social emotional support services and programming for students, families, and staff members. Scientific research highlights the critical link between chronic toxic stress and developmental and long term outcomes in children. Learning to manage stress and adversity is a natural part of healthy child development. Without the support of adults who are equipped to guide children through adverse experiences, however, children's stress-response systems remain activated for prolonged periods, which leads to toxic stress. For children either living in poverty or facing an average of two major life events annually, these effects can compound to have devastating long-term consequences. ENO provides this needed social emotional support to students and has been able to maintain excellent results and transition students to kindergarten on grade level despite the many challenges that our children and families face. In fact, ENO has made great strides in early childhood outcomes. For example, there is a 54% increase in common early language assessment scores in children overall and among children who started below average, there is a 30% increase to average or higher. Further, evidence shows that children benefit from participation in our program almost immediately after starting. There is a 16% increase in language assessment scores amongst children who started below average and had been in the Educare program for less than 1 year.”