This special issue of JEiE contributes to the evidence for the need to incorporate PSS and SEL programming into EiE responses. It presents examples of the progress being made toward developing, validating, and using new, culturally relevant tools for measuring mental health and wellbeing among students experiencing crisis and conflict, and the teachers, parents, and caregivers who support them.

Ragnhild Dybdahl and James Williams, the lead editors for this special issue of JEiE, elaborate on the aims of the issue, its key messages, and the contributions made by the many authors of JEiE Volume 7, Number 2.

Authors Ha Yeon Kim, Kalina Gjicali, Zezhen Wu, and Carly Tubbs Dolan report on the psychometric soundness of TOOLSEL, an instrument for teachers to use to assess students’ social, emotional, behavioral, and cognitive competencies. They share lessons for its use in the field, based on their experience validating it among 3,361 Syrian refugee youth living in Lebanon.

Authors Moses Olayemi, Melissa Tucker, Mamour Choul, Tom Purekal, Arlene Benitez, Wendy Wheaton, and Jennifer DeBoer collaborated with NGOs and educators to determine the core wellbeing and resilience domains for evaluating a PSS intervention and key local nuances. Their efforts resulted in an instrument that the authors found to be relevant among a sample of students and teachers in South Sudan.

Authors Lina María González Ballesteros, José M. Flores, Ana María Ortiz Hoyos, Amalia Londoño Tobón, Sascha Hein, Felipe Bolívar Rincon, Oscar Gómez, and Liliana Angélica Ponguta highlight the impact of an innovative skills-building and psychotherapy program. They show that it improved resiliency among parents and caregivers in 14 municipalities most affected by the armed conflict in Colombia.

Taking a family systems approach, authors Raija-Leena Punamäki, Kirsi Peltonen, Marwan Diab, and Samir R Qouta find that child-parent attachment, parenting styles, and sibling relationships may mediate the perceived benefit of a group therapy program among a sample of children from 325 Palestinian families. They base their findings on family-type data and self-reported PTSD and mental health data.

Arguing the practicality of group-based psychotherapy approaches for humanitarian settings, authors Gloria A. Pedersen, Manaswi Sangraula, Pragya Shrestha, Pooja Lakshmin, Alison Schafer, Renasha Ghimire, Nagendra P. Luitel, Mark J. D. Jordans, and Brandon A. Kohrt describe GroupACT, an observational tool for assessing facilitators’ capacity to provide effective and safe group sessions.

In this commentary, authors Rebecca Winthrop and Helen Shwe Hadani reflect on the social and psychological toll the COVID-19 pandemic has taken on students, including those in high-income countries, as school closures deprive children of opportunities to play and form vital early relationships with classmates and teachers.