BULLY PREVENTION AND SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL LEARNING Impact on Youth With Disabilities

While bullying involvement is a concern for many school-aged youth, students with disabilities are disproportionately involved within the bullying dynamic when compared to their peers without disabilities. Although a combination of factors, including disability label, disability severity, characteristics of a specific disability, comorbidity of multiple disabilities, special education services, and educational placement, contributes to this disproportionate representation, social and communication skill deficits are two of the most notable predictors of bullying involvement among youth with disabilities. Exposure to social and emotional learning (SEL) curricula and interventions has resulted in significant short- and long-term positive outcomes for all students, especially for students with disabilities. As schools’ emphasis on bully prevention initiatives increase, a promising approach is utilizing the Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) framework that embeds scaffolded SEL interventions at the school-wide, targeted, and individual levels. This chapter is designed to outline the intersection of SEL and bully prevention, provide guidance on embedding SEL within an MTSS framework to address school-based bullying, address data collection and evaluation of school-based bully prevention systems, and highlight interventions that are promising for all youth, with a direct emphasis on students with disabilities.