Belonging Is Prevention: What a New Canadian Standard on Student Substance Use Teaches Us About Attendance

Key Points

Educators overwhelmingly say belonging matters for attendance and for substance use prevention, yet common responses to student substance use, like suspension, pull students out of school.
School connectedness is a strong protective factor against adolescent substance use, and school belonging is the strongest predictor of students’ social-emotional skills.
Anchoring Change, a new pan-Canadian K–12 standard, starts substance use prevention with universal, belonging-based practices that every adult in a school can act on.

“Sometimes we feel we need to suspend them from school. But for some students, that’s awesome. That’s what they want.”

That’s a Massachusetts school administrator, speaking in a recent study about how schools respond when students are using substances at school. It names a problem we keep coming back to: how well-intentioned school responses can sometimes make it harder for students to remain connected to the people, relationships, and supports that matter most to them.

One author, Tonje, brings more than a decade of experience co-developing social and emotional learning (SEL) curricula and later turned to research on school belonging. The other, Emily, brings a background in mental health nursing and population health research. For the past two years, we’ve worked with partners across Canada to build Anchoring Change and its foundational output: a new pan-Canadian standard for school-based substance use prevention, education, and intervention from kindergarten through Grade 12. Readers may be surprised by where it begins: not with drug facts, but with belonging.

The Same Paradox, in a Different Hallway

CASEL’s new report, The Attendance Paradox, found that 94 percent of U.S. educators agree that belonging shapes whether students show up, yet only 21 percent feel that improving attendance is “very much” within their control.

We saw a strikingly similar pattern when we surveyed 204 Canadian principals and vice-principals about student substance use. Nearly 90 percent reported frequent challenges, most often vaping. About 87 percent said they “often” or “always” work to build school connectedness and belonging. Yet many also upheld zero-tolerance policies, and nearly half of secondary administrators “often” or “always” used out-of-school suspension. Most were willing to change but lacked professional learning and a guiding framework.

In both cases, educators believe in belonging. What’s missing is guidance on turning that belief into daily practice, and support to let go of responses that undercut it, including through policy change.

Why Belonging Belongs in Prevention

A meta-analysis of 90 studies found that school connectedness was linked to lower risk across adolescent health concerns, most strongly for substance use. A new study of nearly 30,000 15-year-olds in nine countries found that school belonging was, by far, the strongest predictor of every social-emotional skill measured.

Students put it more simply. In Tonje’s focus groups with 114 students in Grades 6–8 in British Columbia, Canada, students connected belonging with showing up to school. A Grade 7 boy recalled returning after missing rugby practice: “Half the team was like, ‘Where were you?’ and stuff. And that made me feel, like, good.” A Grade 7 girl described the opposite: “You would have anxiety and wanna go home and stay home because you feel like no one likes you.”

Belonging helps students build social-emotional skills, and both protect against substance use harms. Belonging, SEL, and prevention aren’t competing initiatives. They’re the same work.

What the Standard Asks of Every Adult

Anchoring Change was developed with 30 experts, including educators, health experts, youth, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis members, and an Elder. Its first domain, Upstream Prevention and Belonging-Based Practices, sets universal, Tier 1 expectations for all students. Many of the domains never mention substances at all. Schools shall:

Lead a caring, inclusive school community built on positive relationships and positive discipline.
Explicitly teach social-emotional skills such as self-regulation, empathy, and problem-solving.
Embed daily SEL routines in the elementary years.
Offer inclusive physical activity and sport with adult coaching or mentorship.
Engage students in Grades 6–12 as partners in co-designing safer, more inclusive schools.

The Standard also calls for policies that minimize suspensions and expulsions, and for responses to challenging behaviour that preserve students’ connections with peers and staff. As one Grade 6 girl told Tonje, “You can do a million good things, but then sometimes, you do one wrong thing and you get called out for it, and then all the good things you do vanish.”

Keeping Students in the Building

This is where substance use prevention and attendance meet. Every suspension for vaping is a day a student isn’t in school building relationships with adults and peers. Exclusionary discipline doesn’t just cost learning time; it cuts the relationships that are protective for students, and it is associated with more substance use over time, not less.

The Attendance Paradox concludes that the climate educators build each day “is itself the intervention.” Anchoring Change applies that insight to substance use.

Where to Start

You don’t need a national standard to begin. Ask three questions:

Does this response keep the student connected to school, or push them away?
Are we explicitly teaching the skills we expect students to use under pressure?
Do students have a real voice in shaping our approach to well-being?

The Standard and a practice scan and implementation planning tool are freely available at anchoringchange.ca. CASEL’s Belonging & Engagement course offers practical classroom strategies.

Prevention doesn’t start with substance use. It starts with belonging, connection, and creating schools where students want to show up.

The views in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of CASEL.

Dr. Tonje M. Molyneux is a research scientist and preventive pedagogy specialist at Wellstream: The Canadian Centre for Innovation in Child and Youth Mental Health and Substance Use at the University of British Columbia, and a 2025–2027 CASEL Weissberg Scholar. A former classroom teacher, she spent more than a decade co-developing SEL programs at Committee for Children before turning to research on school belonging, SEL, and substance use prevention. She helped develop the Anchoring Change standard and its suite of implementation supports and resources.

Dr. Emily Jenkins is a registered nurse and professor in the MacIsaac School of Nursing at the University of British Columbia, scientific director of Wellstream, and Canada Research Chair in Population Health Approaches to Mental Health and Substance Use. A leader in youth- and community-engaged mental health and substance use scholarship, her work has shaped policy and practice to prevent substance use harms among young people, including invited testimony to the Senate of Canada on the Cannabis Act.

Related Posts

Write for Us

Are you interested in writing for CASEL’s blog, Constellations? Learn more about what we’re looking for and how to pitch your idea!

Learn With Us!

With Belonging & Engagement in the Classroom, you can provide your team with the foundational SEL knowledge to create a learning environment where all students thrive academically and personally. This comprehensive, self-paced virtual training series can be taken individually or as a group PD series. Group rates available!

CASEL Websites