Mara Schanfield
Mara Schanfield is a technical assistance consultant at AIR, specializing in social and emotional learning (SEL), chronic absence, and collaborative processes for using data to drive change. Schanfield provides guidance and professional learning for district and school teams to explore ways to enhance school climate, conditions for teaching and learning, and SEL to create positive school environments, increase educators’ capacity to integrate SEL into instruction, as well as foster developmental outcomes for youth.
Schanfield leads a team supporting “hard to staff” Chicago Public Schools by implementing strategies based on local data. She supports the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) in implementing evidence-based practices. In addition, she works with the Michigan Department of Education and Ohio Department of Education through the Great Lakes Comprehensive Center, in the development of their statewide process for leveraging early warning data to decrease chronic absence and improve graduation rates. She serves as a Massachusetts Monitoring Site Visit lead for the Boston Public Schools, collecting data for schools in level 3 & 4 under the statewide system of support.
Schanfield is a licensed school counselor and is the lead author of a forthcoming chapter, Chronic Absence: A Sign to Invest in Conditions for Learning, in the Handbook of Student Engagement Interventions: Working with Disengaged Youth (2019), J. Fredricks, A.L. Reschly, and S. L. Christenson (Eds), Elsevier.