Thank you for the chance to comment.

Like quite a few well-intentioned governmental social policies, this one has gone astray.  Implementation should be paused and more fully considered.  The standards seem unrealistic, unmeasurable, age-inappropriate, possibly invasive, and too burdensome to impose on teachers.  Yes, those words are harsh.

Children need to be nurtured with compassion and respect, and instructed in morals, ethics, manners, and proper behavior.  In other words, they need civilizing.  This is a chief role of parents and the extended family, augmented by close friends, religious and community elders, including teachers.  The way to encourage positive attributes these SEL standards seek to foster is through good leaders interacting with young people, one-on-one and as team members, in pursuit of knowledge and mastery of skills, as well as doing good deeds for the community, NOT via formal social re-education sessions.  Students need to acquire a sense of positive agency, the ability to act with confidence and integrity; this won't happen if too much attention is trained on their feelings, which might prove inhibiting or antisocial, and should be allowed to remain private.  One learns to counteract and conquer negative feelings by accomplishing difficult things, ideally with adult and peer support...but sometimes without them.  Autonomy, self-reliance, independent mindedness, civility, and public spiritedness can be built in the context of inspired, minimally tendentious pedagogy.

Open support for Christian moral values was banished from public school classrooms.  Yet this document is replete with value-laden matters best answered by religion.  If VA DOE could step back and think more deeply about the outcome of idealistic societal re-engineering  experiments--whether utopian socialist, fascist, or communist--particularly vis-a-vis youth conditioning in those societies, you might understand the skepticism and opposition many of the commenters convey here.  (As a former official in controversy-wracked Federal civil rights and arts agencies, I can see why the proposed program might be interpreted by a large segment of the public as usurpation of parental and religious authority by a politically suspect, elite, unaccountable bureaucracy.)

Virginia's educators primary focus should be challenging youngsters through academic rigor in the classroom, lab, studio, workshop, and fieldwork, with a secondary emphasis on adult-guided extracurricular activities.  Pupils' development of desirable character traits and personal values will be influenced more by the high caliber of adult role models than humanist preaching or nonprofessional group therapy.

PLEASE don't redirect any more time and money away from precious opportunities for  academic learning, thereby robbing EVERY STUDENT of greater possibility to achieve her/his potential.  If the State government has money to spare, revive the civilizing endeavor of system-wide, professionally-led arts education:  music, drama, visual arts, creative writing.  Such an effort would constructively channel students' expression of feelings, with the bonus to them of work products!