Jessica Rose Mathy, Ed.D. Candidate, is an educational leader and researcher whose work focuses on MTSS, adult capacity-building, social-emotional learning, relationship-centered practice, and the conditions that help schools translate evidence into sustainable action. Since 2014 her career has spanned the classroom to the district office and back again: Spanish teacher, WASC coordinator, and restorative circles facilitator at Southwest High School; Assistant Principal of Special Programs at Central Union High School District; and, from 2023 to 2025, MTSS District Coordinator at Calexico Unified School District, where she led districtwide PBIS, attendance, and SEL initiatives across eleven schools — seven elementary schools, two junior highs, a comprehensive high school, and an alternative high school.
In September 2025, she made a deliberate choice to return to the classroom as a Spanish teacher at Indio High School. It was a full-circle moment — teacher, to site administrator, to district administrator, and back to teacher again — and one that mattered to her professionally as much as personally. Her last sustained stretch in a classroom had been before the pandemic; the return to in-person teaching in 2021 lasted barely six weeks before she moved into administration. Being back in a classroom full-time has sharpened her perspective in ways no district-level vantage point could: the real, everyday texture of what teachers are feeling, what students are experiencing, and what actually happens on the ground. That return to the classroom is also what gave her the space and clarity to finish her dissertation.
Her doctoral study, Professional Development (PD) & Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Post-COVID: High School Teachers' Perspectives, completed at Grand Canyon University, examined how high school teachers experienced professional development in integrating CASEL's SEL Framework after the return to in-person learning. The study reinforced a concern that continues to guide her work: educators are frequently expected to facilitate student social-emotional growth without receiving sufficiently practical, sustained, and job-embedded opportunities to develop the adult competencies that work requires.
Jessica develops research-informed tools and public scholarship designed to make complex ideas accessible without oversimplifying the evidence. She is the developer of The SSCC Practice™, a daily practice for building connection through intentional, dignity-preserving, everyday interactions. It's informed by her doctoral research, social-emotional learning literature, relationship science, implementation science, educational leadership, and years of professional practice supporting educators — and it is currently undergoing systematic evaluation.
