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The authors take a deep look at Integrated Student Support (ISS), an approach to education policy and practice aligned with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in which schools focus on attending to students’ basic physical, social, and emotional needs before learning occurs. They demonstrate how the ISS approach is especially effective in educational contexts rocked by trauma and crisis.
The work draws on extensive research on the ISS model in theory and practice, as well as case studies of five very different communities across the United States—Berea, Kentucky; Salem, Massachusetts; Grain Valley, Missouri; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Frederick County, Virginia—that had been using ISS when the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools. It highlights how the planning, flexibility, and wraparound services central to ISS improve the capacity of education systems to confront a wide variety of emergency situations, from natural disasters to longstanding socioeconomic pressures such as unemployment, addiction, food scarcity, homelessness, and poverty.

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