SAFETY
FIRST
Safe Schools For All Task Force Report
School safety is more than being prepared for emergencies. School safety is a day-to-day concern that should be addressed proactively rather than reactively.
Educators, school leaders and policymakers must create a positive school safety climate and culture that supports student needs, guarantees adequate staffing in schools, improves communication among stakeholders and keeps children and staff safe from threats.
Schools should bring together the people in the building who work most closely with students to address these concerns. Together, we can find solutions that restore a sense of safety and well-being for students and staff in our schools.
For Educators and Local Union Leaders
For State and National Leaders
For School Districts
The first and greatest responsibility of schools, administrators and educators is to keep their students safe.
Our schools should be sanctuaries for learning. Secure, welcoming school environments are essential for effective teaching and learning, and every school should have what is needed to keep everyone safe and meet students’ needs. Sadly, disruptive and violent episodes are commonplace in classrooms across the country, and New York is no exception, with school safety concerns on the rise. To compound these issues, the threat of mass violence has increased as the scourge of mass shootings continues to infiltrate our schools.
To address this current and escalating crisis of safety in our schools, NYSUT convened a task force of educators — including teachers, school-related professionals (SRPs) and other support staff — charged with building a list of recommendations for how national, state and local leaders can best support safe public schools at the center of every community. The group focused on several key areas most crucial to building safer school environments including:
- Addressing social-emotional needs of students
- Ensuring appropriate staffing levels
- Fostering community partnerships
- Confronting the crisis of mass violence in schools
The task force identified key concerns and made several recommendations for how local, state and national leaders should address these pressing issues.
Task force members report that the social-emotional impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have led to an increase of students acting out, classroom disruptions and violence in our schools. But we can’t ignore that this escalation in student behaviors was prevalent before the pandemic.
This increase in classroom disruptions and students acting out is evidence that kids’ needs aren’t being met. Schools must place providing what kids need above everything else. Educators, including the teachers and SRPs who work most closely with students, want and need these serious concerns addressed for the sake of their students. Chronic disruptions have a cumulative impact on the education of all students in the classroom over time — both the students in need and their peers.
Supporting students’ social-emotional needs is the best way to prevent crises in our schools. Relying solely on punitive measures only harms students in the long run and exacerbates the problems we seek to solve. Programs that implement therapeutic services and restorative practices are finding success in schools across the state. But implementing such restorative practices doesn’t mean there are no consequences for inappropriate student behavior; watering down the school code of conduct doesn’t work either. Temporarily removing students from crises, only to return them to the classroom without interventions or support, perpetuates negative behaviors and fosters a culture of mistrust among students, staff, parents and school administrators. Successful programs bring together all the people in the school building to find solutions and make sure there is buy-in by all stakeholders.
In order to address student behaviors and create a healthy learning environment in schools, we must support educators and schools with the resources they need and, most importantly, the time to implement these initiatives. This includes regular and ongoing training in social emotional learning, violence prevention, mental health and proven prevention and intervention strategies. If school staff aren’t trained properly and involved in the development and implementation of these initiatives, they just won’t work.
The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the New York City Department of Education developed the Positive Learning Collaborative (PLC) program which partners with educators and administrators to provide the training, tools and support needed to ensure every school is a nurturing, joyful place to learn and grow.
The model incorporates restorative practices, therapeutic crisis intervention for schools (TCIS) and positive interventions and supports to counteract the impact of punitive school discipline which disproportionately affects students of color.
PLC equips school communities with the skills, knowledge and confidence they need to safely and effectively respond to challenges in their schools, help prevent crises and ultimately help students focus on academic goals. All school stakeholders receive intense training and direct consultation. Teachers and SRPs learn techniques to help prevent minor conflicts from happening and keep those that do from escalating. And additional training and support is brought in to prevent biased-based bullying and promote gender-inclusive schools.
The PLC’s successes speak for themselves. In one case study, school staff reported a 50 percent reduction in suspensions, 32 percent increase in staff’s ability to manage challenging behavior, 33 percent increase in open communication and an 85 percent increase in staff feeling valued.
The Positive Learning Collaborative has been implemented in large and small public schools in 22 communities across all the city's five boroughs.
Learn more at PositiveLearning.org
For far too long, schools have been the sites of mass murder events. The list of schools and towns made infamous by mass shootings is long and grisly. Our educators have been thrust to the front lines to help students and families process horrific events while simultaneously trying to cope with the unthinkable themselves. No student, educator or parent should live in fear of this scourge infecting their communities. This ongoing violence, and the profound threat it poses to the lives and learning of our children, is a national embarrassment that must end.
The COVID-19 pandemic derailed many safety protocols previously established by schools, such as fire and lockdown drills. As a result, many students and staff are not prepared to the same degree they were pre-pandemic. Additionally, in the wake of recent mass casualty events, many schools have adopted active shooter and other highly sensorial drills to simulate real-life events. New York state requires lockdown drills in schools, not active shooter drills. The task force recommends avoiding these highly sensorial drills that involve simulation activities to mimic a real experience as they can cause increased and unnecessary trauma to students — particularly those with special needs. Schools should not use simulation techniques with students and exercises should be appropriate to the participants’ developmental level and physical abilities.
Task force members report widely varying safety procedures across districts and sometimes differences between individual buildings within the same district.
Security on school grounds and at school events — including school resource officers (SROs), school security guards, and contracted services — remains varied across the state to meet the needs of individual districts. Task force members support the current practice of maintaining local control of these important services in order to properly meet the needs of the individual district and reflect the priorities of the surrounding community.
Local unions should support the development of school safety initiatives — including district codes of conduct, safety incident reporting, instructional initiatives, social-emotional learning and restorative practices, and crisis response — and monitor their implementation by the district. Where unions are not included in the planning and development of these practices, unions should lead by implementing effective strategies to address school safety.
Local unions should establish health and safety committees within the union to support members’ health and safety concerns. Unions should designate a chief safety officer to assist leadership in the communication of membership concerns and the development of solutions to everyday safety concerns. The development of union-led training and health and wellness programs is a proactive way to give members a voice in the workplace.
New York state should establish recommended staffing ratios for school social workers, counselors and psychologists and fully support these important positions in every school building. Schools must employ sufficient numbers of these specialists to ensure student and staff access during crisis response as well as daily crisis intervention.
Every school in New York should have a school counselor, a school psychologist, a school social worker AND a school nurse.
These requirements were included in a package of bills introduced during the 2022 legislative session and should be reintroduced and passed in 2023.
New York state should require district-wide school safety committees to include representatives of staff unions. In many districts, they are not included in important decisions related to school safety. This will improve communication with school personnel and strengthen the implementation of school safety initiatives. Additionally, district and building level teams should include at least one staff member who is familiar with the needs of students with disabilities, and those needs should be considered in the safety plans.
The state should support proven prevention and intervention strategies in school districts to implement therapeutic intervention and restorative practices. This includes increasing the existing appropriation in the budget for community schools, restorative justice programs and supporting the expansion of schoolwide collaborative programs, including the Positive Learning Collaborative, outside of New York City.
The State Education Department should issue comprehensive, updated, uniform school safety guidance to include specific actions for schools to undertake. For example, earlier this year, SED issued field guidance on acceptable door hardening products to meet the need to secure a classroom door quickly and easily from inside the classroom. Additionally, single entry doors are essential, with all other exterior doors locked and monitored throughout the day.
State guidance should address concerns over inaccurate reporting of school safety incidents. Parents, students and school staff should be assured that incidents relating to School Safety and the Educational Climate (SSEC, formerly VADIR/DASA) are complete and accurate and are collected in a consistent and reliable manner.
State guidance should include budgetary recommendations for what schools should invest in versus what is considered frivolous and ineffective.
The federal government should strengthen gun safety regulations in accordance with a recent report from Everytown for Gun Safety, in collaboration with the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. These recommendations include eliminating access to military-style weapons and weapon modifications, such as high-capacity magazines (70 percent of voters support banning assault rifles), establishing universal background checks (nearly 90 percent of voters support them), restricting gun purchase for those under 21 (74 percent of Americans support raising the age to purchase a firearm to 21 years old) and establishing federal red-flag laws (84 percent of voters support preventing firearm sales to people reported as dangerous to law enforcement).
School districts should support students with prevention strategies to reduce the need for crisis intervention. These proven practices — including Therapeutic Crisis Intervention Services (TCIS), Restorative Practices and social-emotional learning (SEL) initiatives — are research-based, effective tools to support student learning. Character education programs that tell students how to act but don’t develop students’ SEL competencies or provide therapeutic support, are useful but are no replacement for quality SEL and therapeutic intervention services.
School districts should reduce class sizes as an effective, proven measure to support student needs and reduce incidents of school violence. Smaller classes improve the learning experience for students and improve the quality of interventions when they are needed.
School districts should ensure that they provide training for all school staff — not just small groups of administrative, special education or security personnel — so that students’ needs are met at all levels of their school experience. In the case of individual student or cohort group needs, all staff who work with the students in need should be trained and supported, including teachers, school-related professionals and bus drivers.
School districts should establish mental health programs for school personnel in order to support educator mental health and well-being. Programs should include professional development training and support for self-care, coping with stress and peer mentoring. School-based and community partnerships can be leveraged to support educator mental health.
School districts should hire new staff to serve as dedicated student support specialists whose primary responsibility is supporting the day-to-day school and student safety. Districts commonly employ specialists to support academic initiatives, such as curriculum coordinators and literacy coaches, but they rarely dedicate staff to coordinate and support the social-emotional needs of all students.
Improve preparedness and give students and staff confidence in their safety. With adequate training, students express less fear of harm after participating in drills. Self-reported anxiety is lower and well-being is higher. Training also fosters an overall culture of preparedness — students report feeling significantly more prepared to respond to any emergency, not just those that would necessitate a lockdown.
Schools should avoid highly sensorial drills, including simulations of an active shooter or armed assailant. These drills can cause increased and unnecessary trauma to students — particularly those with special needs. Exercises should be appropriate to the participants’ developmental level and physical abilities. Additionally, schools should adopt recommended best practices to reduce student and staff trauma including:
- always calling drills a drill,
- teachers/staff modeling calm behavior during drills,
- debriefing at the end of drills so students have a chance to ask questions, and
- pairing the drills with actual training on the school's protocol.
Conclusion