National Coalition for Safe Schools

What can you design today to create a change in the community, locally and nationally?

With great power comes great

Responsibility.

We want to create safe schools.

We need to create safe schools.

With great responsibility comes Great Power.

Which is it?

Jim Kwik talks about ways to learn a subject or skill in half the time. We all came into this Summit knowing it is a massive undertaking. We know there is a lot we need to learn, and quickly. We don't have the luxury of time.

We need to act. FAST.

It's an emotional topic. The stories in the room are heartbreaking traumas ranging from violence toward students and violence toward educators, whether it is physical (including a range of abuse from beatings, stabbings, trafficking, assaults and rapes), or emotional (in isolation, bullying, depression, mental health, neglect), or a combination of more factors - many of which we cannot identify on our own. There is no really good way to capture the heaviness in the room as we shared our realities. These are the realities we face as educators on a daily basis. But, in the room, you can see it in our eyes, in our furrowed brows, and in the tensions we hold in our necks and shoulders. "Children are dying every day in Miami. The perception is no one cares. It's not getting coverage," said Rosemine Federl, as she shared challenges in her school with our team. Some days, it's hard to hold your head up and put one foot in front of the other.

The Teams

Each of the participants invited to be part of the National Coalition on Safe Schools Summit applied to be part of this Summit. Despite our busy lives, we decided coming from across the nation to meet here was worth our time, and we are grateful to National Life Group for sponsoring this beautiful location to substantially subsidize the cost so we could make it here. It's different than meeting online, co-authoring a document, or social media presence. Many of us have connected with each other online, but this is the first time we've really talked. Each of us have something to offer, in a different way, a different story, a different time and place.

We were grouped by suburban and urban schools and districts, and then divided into 5 teams to get working immediately on empathizing first, defining the problem, ideation, prototyping a concept or solution, and testing it at a thought experiment level. My team includes urban schools from Miami, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles. We worked on a Design Thinking Challenge to find similarities and differences, then cross-cutting actions we could take. We know this is a first step. We're laying the foundation for futher action.

We were given resources, frameworks, and statistics that show the reality of violence across the United States across time. If you're not familiar with certain types of violence that have occurred in schools, The Final Report on the Federal Commission on School Safety has broken it down.

The Absolute Worst

Sherry Earle spoke from an inside perspective of what it was like to live Sandy Hook. The impact of seeing a teacher who used their own body to shield a child, but the automatic weapon went straight through both, the trauma of the first responders seeing so many young children, the principal and the school psychologist gone first - the details in a way you didn't hear in media - provided a much different lens for us. What plan is there in place? What training do we have? Are we prepare for the absolute worst?

My school has been working with New Dawn Security as a consultant for years as they helped us develop a personalized security plan and training for our school, then updating plans. We also had a comprehensive anti-bullying protocol and training. Our school, even with all of that in place, has still experienced violence. Those traumas led us to revisit our training, protocol, and focus an even more concerted effort in strengthening school culture across our entire staff and defining values for a stronger foundation before it reaches a point of violence.

It meant creating a new 10-Year vision plan in the summer of 2016. It meant speaking with people around the world, talking with consultants, attorneys, and taking school law seminars from Karr, Tuttle, Campbell. We needed to help our faculty know how important developing trust, relationships, and training for students at all levels is. We knew we couldn't just wait and assume things were okay if there was no physical murder. Some in law enforcement say that, legally, nothing can be done unless violence reaches a certain level. Legally, even though law exists, unless precedent is already set, attorneys hesitate to want to be the first to set the precedent.

We see through the media that when people think a defamation case is won, and legally over and done, it's not time to let down guard and assume it's over. What do schools do in those spaces, where violence continues, cyberattacks and stalking continues, students are still under threat of an imbalance of power and there is repetition that causes young people fear (a definition of bullying whether in person or cyber, where it is persistent, permanent and hard to notice)?

We know that such extreme behaviors and acts of violence, whether physical, or cyber attacks and stalking, are symptoms of a deeper concern with mental health. We know that means we need to start training and intervention earlier, and with children when they are younger. We need to get to the core of social and emotional learning as part of a prevention strategy. That means using all tools that are accessible, and it means finding things that already motivate kids. It means finding ways to train children what TO do, instead of just telling them what NOT to do. This needs to start even before there appears to be a problem. It needs to start now, in all schools.

Modeling Positive Social Media

Consultants from New York suggested that after a traumatic incident, one method to help rebuild community is to share out as much of the positive that is currently occurring at the school. By giving young people voice, and the ability to share their work with others, they regain a new type of power, especially if control was taken away from them in their lives.

This is the same with educators. We have decided in my school to make a concerted effort to highlight the great things occurring in the classroom everyday. We have encouraged our educators to take control of their own narratives. Just as Sherry Earle said when talking about the aftermath of the tragedy at Sandy Hook, you cannot control what people will say, what propaganda and negative uses of media will occur, but you do have some control in the story you share.

At the same time as you choose the narrative you take control of, doing this can be used to model for students positive ways to use social media to spark ideas, to inspire, to encourage, uplift, and become a voice of advocacy. Our school has taken intentional steps to model positivity in social media and have new protocols in place. This is a glimpse of our school Instagram:

Intentional Social and Emotional Learning in Practice

We are using Technology for Good. We have become a WE Movement School for students to look outward at how they can support others, locally and globally. This is real-life social and emotional learning in practice with empathy for others first. It brings a different perspective and a joy. We are also building social and emotional learning through all aspects of learning (not just a separate class), including through intentional play.

Here is an example with Minecraft in collaboration with Getting Smart (you can find the full report that I contributed to in the podcast description in Getting Smart link), and with a Snow Day in collaboration with KCSARC. Dance education becomes part of respect, Global Goals for Sustainable Development advocacy, and another way to practice social and emotional learning.

The still shots of our entire school engaging in dance isn't about a club, an extracurricular, or an opt-in. It's part of everyone's curriculum. Students don't just learn steps. They create using Design Thinking. Last year's show, "Beyond" allowed students to go beyond the school and imagine how dance could become a form of advocacy to bring awareness through art. Their job was to help create the message they chose to send. Each dance connected with a class-chosen Global Goal.

Each class aligned their chosen focus on a Global Goal with a class STEM challenge that extended the idea into taking action. That culminated in a STEM Fair at the end of the year where families saw the connection between the advocacy and awareness through the arts, into a tangible prototype, project, or concept. Then they took it a step further to take action on that cause, either locally or globally. From affordable and clean energy, to clean water, to sustainable cities and communities and various forms of equality, these students were part of something bigger than turning in an assignment to a teacher.

This is their show:

Act I

Act II

Intentional training in etiquette has also been part of our school for years. It has been a training in how to value and respect others, how to show gratitude and appreciation for others, and how to respect their immediate environments, inside the school building and out in the community. Etiquette training came up in the National Coalition for Safe Schools as a method for training in social and emotional learning and as prevention strategy for school violence. When a school culture is strong in respect, it also makes it easier to identify adverse behaviors that are not demonstrating respect. Students start helping to identify behaviors that are misaligned with the school's values and culture.

We need to think FAST and act FAST.

It's too late if we are only talking about gun control. It means we've missed something serious along the way. The violence enacted with weapons is a symptom of something much deeper with mental health, with relationships, with feelings of hopelessness, isolation, and rage that originated somewhere first. Although loneliness is normal to experience, one of the Student TED-Ed talks cited it as one of the leading causes for suicide.

School Safety isn't about putting a cast on a broken limb. It's not about amputating or removing life support and donating organs to someone else while still alive. That's equivalent of taking the life out of schools or removing the humanity from the heart of a school. Some strategies to stop school violence have taken extreme measures that are not fixing the root cause of the behaviors that lead to violence. Such extreme measures that leave out the social and emotional impact often miss the violence, and social and emotional trauma that happens to educators in the process, or how to help maintain the heartbeat of the school, or how to bring a school back to life. Student trauma becomes our trauma. A 2017 Edutopia article by Emelina Minero talks about the impact on educators as well.

A segment of the video below was part of the National Coalition on Safe Schools Summit, today, March 2, 2019. Jim Kwik says to think FAST. Each letter stands for something to help reorient thinking to achieve more effective outcomes for learning. Learning how to make schools safer is no different.

Forget what you already know about the subject on School Safety and envisioning school so you can learn something brand new. Don't assume that you know it already. Look at new approaches like the Transformation Framework: Intelligent environments include safety. We're part of this transformation from the ground up.

This is a challenge to forget what we already know, especially since all of us in the room have been impacted deeply by school violence, loss, trauma, and have at some point felt helpless to stop it. All of us have an image of what "school" looks like, how it runs.

Forgetting about what's going on in the world to be present is also hard. But, you can't make effective change if you are distracted by everything else. You're using a fraction of your potential when you're distracted.

Active. Trational schools trained us to be passive and receive information to repeat it. Your brain learns through creation, through asking questions.

State. What is the current mood of your mind and body. Information and emotion becomes a long-term memory.

When we take responsibility for something we have great power to make it better. We're back to the opening line - with great power comes great responsibility, and with great responsibility comes great power.

This relates to us, as education leaders. Right now, we need to trade our cleaverness for bewilderment. We need to understand that previous solutions haven't solved the problems. It means we don't know as much as we think we did about how to stop the problem of school violence. It means we need something different.

Teach. We need to learn this to teach it. When learning it to teach it, you're making it your own. When you teach something, you get to learn it twice.

It's not enough for us to teach it. Our young people need to learn to teach, to become advocates, to learn how to be effective parents, to know how to care about people of different ages, to care deeply about other humans...starting in their own schools and communities. When students learn to become teachers, they begin to develop another kind of social and emotional skill set. It helps build relatedness, autonomy and competence. When those three innate psychological needs are met, humans are more likely to persist when things get difficult instead of giving up. This is internal motivation. There's a theory on that. It's called Self-Determination Theory.

This is what we need - internal, or authentic motivation.

Because things will get hard in life. It is a given.

We need to accelerate our learning, and teach others to teach it to others. It needs to start young and we need to re-think the way student advocacy can be part of the solution as they learn to teach and develop strong relationships, ownership in the community of their school and help build school culture. We need to model it for them and show postive ways to use technology because technology isn't going away. Even in areas of high poverty, there are an increasing number of mobile devices. If we don't teach them positive things to do with them, who do we expect will? Who will become their models?

A Historic Moment

This is historic. A group of committed educator leaders and Varkey Teacher Prize finalists and winners gathered last year to make change.

They were not willing to stand by and watch school violence continue. Not under their watch. They brought together critical friends to help guide the conversations.

Today, we are here.

We are taking action.

Join us.

#NotInMySchool