State To Launch 'Choose Love' Conference In Effort To Tackle Behavior Leading To School Shootings

By Ethan DeWitt, New Hampshire Bulletin

The Department of Education will host a conference in August designed to train students and educators in techniques to “disrupt the pathway to violence” and engage in conflict resolution, two months after a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, spurred outrage.

The Executive Council approved the “New Hampshire Choose Love Statewide Conference” Tuesday, opening the way for the department’s Office of Social and Emotional Wellness to hold the event next month. The state is partnering with the “Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement,” a nonprofit founded in the wake of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, named after Jesse Lewis, a 6-year-old who died in that attack.

The event continues the state’s partnership with the Choose Love Movement that first started in 2018, following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that February. As part of that collaboration, the state provides a curriculum rooted in social and emotional learning free to schools.

Gov. Chris Sununu has maintained repeatedly that he does not see a need to change the state’s firearms laws to protect against school shootings.

The agenda for the daylong conference includes a talk from Scarlett Lewis, Jesse’s mother, and a series of breakout sessions teaching compassion, mindfulness, and “emotional freedom technique,” which uses tapping on the body to reduce stress. The program will also include breakout sessions to learn about “havening,” an alternative therapy technique that uses touch to address anxiety and stress.

The conference will be open to students, families, and educators. “This event will celebrate our educators, nurture them, help to reduce educator fatigue, help to ‘reset,’ and bring reinvigoration to them before the 2022/2023 school year,” the department said in an explanatory letter to the council.

Educators will be joined by chambers of commerce, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, and family resource centers “for a roundtable discussion on how the Choose Love program can be incorporated for the well-being of the students and community,” according to the letter.

The program comes as the state is working to strengthen school security, with around $30 million in infrastructure funding for security upgrades disbursed since 2018. More funding, totaling $13.3 million, was released this summer.

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