The “Issues & Choices” course aims to provide middle school students with age-appropriate lessons and activities to explore their identity, build relationships, and develop social and emotional skills. Activities include weekly community circles, team-building exercises, wellness exercises, and restorative conversations. A Future Success unit within Issues & Choices aims to help students explore college and career options, set goals, and identify a pathway to reach those goals, including middle and high school success skills, self-efficacy development, and connecting to college access resources.

Our program has short-term outcomes of students learning wellness tools, forming relationships with peers and adults, and increasing self-efficacy and awareness of college and career options. Long-term outcomes include improved academic success, engagement, attendance rates, and college enrollment, as students learn community structures, social-emotional skills, self-management, relationship skills, and critical thinking.