Explore the Meaning of School Safety
School safety is everyone’s responsibility.
How might we remember our fundamental aim to nourish learning for all students? How can our safety plans contribute to the wellbeing of all our students?
This session explored a new educational tool for changing the conversation about school safety from “hardening" schools to a focus on community, equity, and wellbeing. We had seven participants who engaged and assessed the website version of “Questions To Your Answers About School Safety” which in its printed form is a deck of post-it notes each with a question to animate new conversations about school safety. This perspective was inspired by the overwhelming data that extreme school violence is rare while bullying, discrimination, and teen depression are widespread. Ideally, a wide cross-section of the school community is invited to dive into these important issues.
The aim of the tool is to prompt a shift in the traditional ways in which we think of school safety to suggest the following:
Any safety strategy should contribute to the overall quality of the learning environment.
School safety is a communal responsibility. Everyone can contribute. Everyone is called to collaborate.
Students need to be included in any discussion about school safety.
A greater sensitivity to issues of equity and inclusion needs to be nurtured.
Wellbeing must be at the heart of school safety strategies understanding that "being safe" and "feeling safe" are not the same thing.
The workshop revealed the following takeaways:
More guidance needs to be provided for participants in how they might use the tool.
Provide “guardrails” to keep the conversations open and respectful while allowing for creativity.
Dissemination of the tool could take advantage of video examples of how it is being used.
Social media might provide another context where these conversations could be expanded in both content and audience.
The notion of school safety is often only concerned with physical harm, but true safety is much more complex.
Explore additional materials to find questions to further the conversation – this could be alone or with a group of colleagues, students, and/or community members.