The Move Towards a More Comprehensive Approach to School Safety in Ohio
Shaun Ali: Hello, everyone, welcome to our session: “The move towards a more comprehensive approach to school safety in Ohio.” My name is Shaun Ali, from WestEd, and I’m joined by my colleague, Dr. Joe McKenna. We’re going to move into some quick introductions before we get into the substance of our presentation.
So, just a quick background on myself: I’m a Senior Justice Technical Assistance Specialist here at WestEd, in the Justice and Prevention Research Center. I work on a project called the Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning in School Safety — it’s a Department of Education-funded center. Through that center, I have been providing technical assistance to state education agencies and some local education agencies on various topics around school safety, social emotional learning, and as we’re going to get into in this session, a comprehensive approach to school safety. Prior to that, my background is in juvenile justice and violence prevention, gang prevention, and things of that nature. Joe, I’ll pass it over to you to introduce yourself.
Joe McKenna: Yeah, thank you, Shaun. Again, very happy to be able to give this presentation today and appreciate the folks in Ohio and the High School Safety Center for giving us this opportunity.
Just a little bit about myself: I’m currently a Senior Research Associate here at WestEd in the Justice and Prevention area. Like Shaun, I also do some work with the Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety and have had the opportunity to work with Ohio and a few other states providing technical assistance around school safety. But prior to coming to WestEd, I was an Assistant Superintendent at a school district in Texas, over health and safety, mental health safety, in those areas.
Prior to that, I was at the state level in Texas as a member of the Texas School Safety Center which is a part of one of our state universities here in Texas, Texas State University, and was responsible for overseeing the research side of our center as well as the education and training side where we did statewide trainings, development of resources, and technical assistance, in those areas. So, some practical experience and state experience as well as now a little bit of a more national perspective. So, we’re looking forward in this session to share some developments, I think, pretty important developments, in school safety, that we’ve been working with Ohio on.
Shaun Ali: Yeah, appreciate that. Joe, thank you very much for setting the table for that. So, just a very quick overview of what this presentation is going to be. As Joe highlighted, we’re going to touch on the background, like on the evolution of school safety approaches, and how that has changed over the years, over many decades, touch on the existing comprehensive approaches to school safety that exist either as best practices or resource guides as well as an example from a state, and then last, in the third bullet, as Joe mentioned, what brings us here to this presentation is our work with Ohio in this regard.
So, we’ll explain a little bit about what’s going on in Ohio, that work we are still very much in the midst of. We’ve been really fortunate to work with such a fantastic team from Ohio from many state agencies, and we’ll explain a little bit about what that process has been like. We want to explain a little bit for our attendees here, what this means for your work and what some potential next steps could be for you. We wanted to leave, at some point, some time for questions and answers, if there are any. So, with that, Joe, I will go ahead and pass it back over to you to take us through the evolution of school safety.
Joe McKenna: Yeah, thanks, Shaun. So, this first piece that we wanted to share today was a little bit of background knowledge to set some of the context that we think is important for understanding the main point of today’s presentation: focusing on this idea of a comprehensive school safety program or approach specifically aligning that to some of the work that’s already occurring in Ohio. So, this evolution section ideally would have been presented as some nice, neat, clean timeline where these things happen sequentially. It just has not happened like that. I don’t think it’s practical to assume that it even could so envision this as I go through some of these high-level evolutions, as we call them here in school safety. Just think of them as not necessarily mutually exclusive as they didn’t occur at one point in time. These are really highlights. They are blips on a timeline where these things became the prevalent topic in school safety. But the other topics in some way, shape or form existed, perhaps they were enhanced over time or more attention was given to them over time. But in most cases, all of these areas of school safety that we’ll touch on here briefly have occurred in conjunction with one another, which as I’ll share in a little bit, has probably contributed to where we’re at today.
So, the first big sticking point, with school safety for me was kind of in the 80s. We were doing school safety before that, I certainly wasn’t, I’m not that old. But school safety was occurring, we cared about the safety and the welfare of children at school. We’ve been doing fire drills since the 1960s. But I chose to start here with our response as a country to weapons, violence, and drugs in schools, because it was, in my experience, the first big push. From a national level, we saw policy, we saw legislation, we saw funding that really highlighted the need to respond. And so, it was really driven by the public’s perception of school safety and crime and violence in those times, especially with younger populations — middle school, high school aged students. Interestingly, many of the school safety measures actually show that schools were even at that time, much safer than many other places They were and consistently remain to be some of the safest places. There was this perception in the in the 80s, in the 90s, that there was an influx of young offenders that were carrying weapons, using drugs, and engaging in violence.
What this did was lead us to that influx of law enforcement in schools, although again, they existed before to some degree. Well before that, the 50s and 60s are some of the first occurrences that we talk about police in schools, but certainly there were new programs that made it more likely that a school may adopt a law enforcement program. There were also a lot of educational programs that started to pop up and many were combined with law enforcement, in that law enforcement would have to be the instructor of those courses. Things like D.A.R.E. and G.R.E.A.T. We also saw the shaping of some of our discipline policies, and some of our discipline policies that arguably we’re trying to undo or work through nowadays are things like zero tolerance policies. Obviously, some of the first zero tolerance policies were around drugs and violence, and those became federal policies. States had to adopt those policies, because in many cases, and still to this day, there’s funding attached to having those policies in place from a state level, that then gives you access to federal funds. We saw, again, a substantial increase in federal funding for programs, for personnel. So, this was a good starting point. We’ll progress and see this come back here in a little bit.
Shaun Ali: Joe, while I transition to the next slide, I just wanted to quickly add: this particular topic at this particular point in time, also mirrors, the broader discussion around justice and crime and law and order in the country where the tough on crime approaches from politicians from both sides of the aisle became a really big talking point. Schools were not a setting that were exempt from those changes at that time. I just wanted to point that out as well. It was a very, very interesting time in schools and beyond.
Joe McKenna: Yeah, that’s a great point, Shaun. I think much of the public’s perception had to do with just seeing things in the community, and that’s really that kids spend the majority of their day in school so this must be occurring in school. So, let’s target schools as a way to address this community wide issue.
The next big area for me — and remember that these are not sequential — was doing emergency planning, which we were doing to some degree before in the 80s and the 90s. Emergency planning for schools really took shape after events like Columbine and 9/11, where schools had to interface with community first responders whether police, fire, or other response agencies. We saw these large scale, natural disasters, human disasters that required schools to plug into a larger planning structure. To Shaun’s point about violence in the community earlier, 9/11 obviously had huge impacts for the responder community in terms of how emergency planning was done, in terms of how responses to large scale events were done.
So, this wasn’t just kind of a carve out, or schools did this, this was happening community wide, where after these events, we realized that we needed to do some things differently in order to be able to respond effectively and ensure that people are safe. So emergency planning really took shape. Again, we saw lots of federal funding, we saw centers, like the REMS TA Center that focus specifically on emergency management for schools. In most cases, it varies quite a bit, but there’s now in most states, in most local jurisdictions, if not a requirement, an expectation that schools have a plan. In most cases, we call those plans multi-hazard. Now, where we’re not just planning for one type of incident, right after Columbine, obviously, the focus was on active threats, so that became the focus.
Now we’re saying, schools are really susceptible to anything that our communities are susceptible to, so we need to be prepared to respond to all of those. Schools should be planning for those and working with their community partners because I think the realistic expectation with emergency planning is not that schools are going to become first responder agencies, but that they’re going to have measures in place to ensure the safety of their staff and students, but also be there to interface and provide first responders with what they need. So, this became a big topic, early 2000, and to this day, in many states, there are certain requirements for states to submit plans for review. Counties have been doing this in most states for a long time. Counties submit plans every year, to be reviewed in most states, and now schools are doing similar. These plans being multi-hazard are supposed to address everything from what do you do before an emergency, to during an emergency, to how do we get school back to normal because we’ve learned in disasters and emergencies that schools are a critical piece to a community and getting schools back up and running.
Having some experience with Hurricane Harvey in Texas, one of the biggest things when we were working with communities was parents just wanted their kids to go back to school so they could deal with the messy insurance stuff, and looking at their home and just things like that were just so much harder to do when schools weren’t in session because they had to care for their children. So, there’s so much overlap here, and we’ll talk a little bit more on this. We started with putting the plan together, in most cases. Now this has translated to well, if you’re going to have a good plan, people need to be trained on that plan. So, we’re seeing a lot more requirements in states, expectations, that staff are trained on the plan to the appropriate level that they’re expected to perform.
Preparedness: you could probably put preparedness and planning together, but I chose to separate them because I do feel like there was, in this evolution of school safety, a little bit of a distinct difference. We focused on planning first because you had to have a plan. We’ve been doing preparedness for a long time. We’ve been doing fire drills since you know the 1960s which is a way of being prepared, ensuring that our communities and our students and our staff in our schools know what to do should something happen. This, in my opinion and experience, has been drastically expanded over the last 20 years as we identify different aspects of school safety or different hazards or emergencies that schools may encounter. The expectation is that they’re going to be prepared for those. So, we’re seeing again, and I’d say this is less prevalent, but certainly something that is developing and many states do have requirements to practice their plans, right, whether that be through drills or tabletops, or exercises where they work with first responders.
There are some expectations now, and there’s certainly been a lot of conversation around drills and emergencies. I have a colleague who very simply put that the need for something like drills and exercises can be done very wrong, and they can be done in a harmful way. I’ve done a lot of research on this, that show that if they’re done, right, they do make kids feel better, and they do make staff feel better. But that colleague of mine said, you know, it’s like being on an airplane, they talk through what we’re going to do, should an emergency happen, every single time, even though you may have flown hundreds of times. That doesn’t mean we need to simulate what it’s like for the oxygen pressure to go down, right, and actually drop the mask in front of you. We talk about it, we go through what the procedures would be, but what we don’t know in most cases need to replicate that. There is some level of expectation now that communities are prepared, and schools are prepared, should something happen.
That’s not just active threat situations: there can be fires at school, there can be floods at school, there can be, I’ll tell you, my time at the school district, one of the most common things and some of our campuses were in rural areas, animals getting in the building, and making sure that kids are not going near an animal that could potentially be dangerous. There’s a host of things that happen on a daily basis that are pretty, pretty expansive in terms of the list in the types of preparedness drills that are common now. Schools prepare you for all those things. The wild animal that gets in the door from the playground, all the way to a potential worst-case scenario that we hope never happens. This probably could have been lumped in with preparedness, but I thought it was helpful to maybe parse this out a bit because I do feel this maybe came at a different time or came later.
I do think there’s some level of evolution here with these, these things build on each other, these major categories. They’re very much so they’re interrelated. So, I do feel like now schools are not only expected to be ready to be prepared and respond to emergencies, but there’s now some level of expectation. Again, you see this in legislation, you see this with grant funding, there’s been grants to schools to focus on prevention, what can we change? What mitigation strategies can we put in place? So, in many states, being most familiar with Texas legislation, there are expectations at the district or campus level or combination of both to do things like inspect their playground equipment. So, when we’re talking safety, there’s such a wider gamut of what’s expected to keep kids safe. That means not getting hurt in the playground, just as much as it means not letting bad people in our buildings. So, there’s this wide gamut. Some states, they’re called inspections, some states, they’re called audits or assessments, but there’s some level of expectation that we’re being proactive in the school community to identify concerns or areas that we can address.
The problem becomes some of those areas are very easy to fix. It’s, “We’re going to put a staff member here at dismissal to make sure this problem doesn’t occur,” but some of them are very complex. How do you take a building that was built in the 1960s, that, honestly, were they not thinking of safety at the time? How do you rework that building to eliminate some of the potential safety concerns? That becomes a much different question, but those are the types of questions that I think for a period of time, and still to this day, we’re kind of considering.
I will say, one of the other areas here, is the design of schools, in my opinion, has changed quite a bit, an area that I didn’t have a lot of experience in until I went to an actual school district and worked with some of our facilities folks, our construction folks, just some of the simplest things that we were able to change in the design of the building. I’ll give you an example: we want natural light into classrooms, we want to be able to see in classrooms. A huge glass wall that looks into the classrooms is not conducive anymore, and honestly, parents are smarter now and they get concerned with something like that, so we were able to put windows along the top of the building. It was a balance. We could probably all agree that we’re not trying to design prisons here, or we’re not trying to design buildings that aren’t conducive to learning. There are very, very minimal, in the grand scheme of things, from a construction standpoint that we can change and so I do say I do feel as if in a lot of cases, at least in my experience, architects, the facilities, and construction folks at schools are much more aware now of how to design buildings from a safety lens which is a good thing.
One more thing then we’ll get to kind of transition into where we will go for the rest of the conversation. Physical safety is probably embedded in all of those conversations, but there have been multiple kinds of points in time where physical safety has become kind of the overarching area. I think of these areas, like at any point in time if you ask someone you know, what is school safety? Depending on that point in time, you would have gotten any one of these responses. So, in the 80s and 90s it probably would have been violence and drugs in schools. In the early 2000s if you asked someone, what is school safety? It would have been more of an emergency planning type lens. There have been multiple times throughout history that physical safety has been the thing, but we’ve always as school folks. I consider myself more on the school side, and I do the safety side.
We always have that balance by nature of school. They’re supposed to be open-welcoming environments. If you take just a physical security lens, the theory behind a good, physically secure place is much different than what you would expect a school to look like. So, I do think there’s been a considerable amount of work done to balance those two perspectives and find common ground where we can make school safe and secure but not impede the learning environment by doing things like fencing. I often got the question at the school district like why don’t we need this big 15 foot tall fence? Why are we only putting up a four-foot fence? The only purpose of the fence is not to keep people out. It’s to define a boundary, a perimeter that helps with safety. Seeing someone jump a fence as opposed to drift into a field that’s the school property are two different things. I’d rather if I see someone jumping the fence, that’s probably going catch my eye.
There are some different ways that physical safety, obviously the way you get into a school, has changed. When I went to school, you opened the door and you were in the cafeteria. All the kids were there, then we got into vestibules, some of you may be experiencing this. It’s now these more high-tech access controls where you’re on a speaker or a camera, and you kind of get some level of interaction before you’re even led into the building or perhaps past a certain point. So, these things evolve over time quite a bit. So, balancing that physical safety need with an open welcoming conducive to a learning environment is definitely important and a big piece of school safety.
I wanted to spend some time talking about where we’ve been. I do think now school safety is much more multi-dimensional. It used to be maybe one or two things: if someone said “Hey, what is your safety schedule?” It was almost very narrow. If you asked, “What is school safety?” It was narrow. I think the expectation around school safety is that we do all of those things I just talked about and more. There’s not a person that I think would disagree that keeping our kids safe at school is the number one priority. A previous Superintendent that I worked for said the number one question he gets from parents is not, “What did my kids score on the test?” It’s, “Are my kids going to be safe in your school?” Then it might be you know, “Are they going to learn something? Do they have friends? Are my kids engaged? Are they making friends socially?” Those are the questions that are more on parents’ minds. Doing well in school is like a third or fourth now. Knowing that your kids are safe at school is critical. So, I think we’ve moved toward what we’re calling a multidisciplinary approach.
My guess is, if you’re working in school safety or student support roles, you’ve heard the term multidisciplinary used in the context of safety now. It’s to bring and streamline a lot of what we just talked about, into a more formalized way. So, we break down some of the silos where I’m not your physical safety person, and this person over here does the social emotional side of safety. It’s really, we need to all be working together, because there are important interconnected pieces.
I’ll give you a quick example. Someone shared this with me, and I’ve since adopted it as my own. Someone asked me, “How does physical safety and mental health or student support work together? Why do we need to work together?” I was talking with an elementary principal, and she told me, I was working with a good deal of “runners,” elementary kids that would just take off and run out the door randomly at different times throughout the day, for whatever reason. One student we were working with was doing that. The principal said, how do we solve this problem?
It was two-prong; it was a physical safety approach, and we had to make sure that certain doors were locked, so that students couldn’t get out when it wasn’t appropriate. But that wasn’t going to address the underlying issue of why the student was running out of school. We had to bring in a counselor and a therapist and our social worker to really understand why that student so badly did not want to be at school? So it was really the intersection of two very different thoughts, but ones that kind of had an aha moment for that group that says oh, we do need to work together. So I think this is where we’re at today, and we do want to focus now, much of our time, the rest of our time on talking about what comprehensive school safety looks like? But keep in mind, we’ve been doing a lot of this for a long time. It’s just now how do we bring it together to be most effective?
Shaun Ali: Thanks, Joe. I think we have one more [slide] just to really illustrate how those can be brought together.
Joe McKenna: Yeah, and this is just the kind of a slide that might illustrate it. What we’re seeing now is that multidisciplinary approach, that connected interrelated safety approach, that I was just kind of describing, being reflected in legislation policy. Even we’re starting to see funding streams where it’s like, you must be multidisciplinary in order to access funding from, say the Department of Ed or Department of Justice. There are several grant opportunities, the ones most fresh on the top of my head are the STOP Act grants out of the Bureau of Justice Assistance. If you did a search of “multi-disciplinary” in that RFP, it probably would have been on over 100 times. It was just kind of repetitive, but these are policy examples from Texas, Ohio, Kentucky, and Florida. There are many, many more than if you look at any one of these bills, recent bills, all of these are from kind of 2018 up until today.
If you do a search of these bills, you’re going to find words like multidisciplinary, integrated mental health, student support — yet these are considered safety bills. Back in 2000, a safety bill would have looked much different, but again, being most familiar with the one in Texas, I had some folks read that bill in 2018, and say, this isn’t a safety bill. When the legislature categorized that they categorized it as a safety bill. There wasn’t a lot of the emergency management stuff in there because that had already been put into legislation. It was much more around, how do we support students? How are we going to be preventative? How are we going to support them with mental health resources as they need them? Very, very different language. In all the free time that you might have, I’m sure, go look at some of the other states’ legislation, it’s actually pretty interesting. Ohio has some of their own, that you’re probably more familiar with, but it is a common theme across the country that I’m seeing right now.
Shaun Ali: And I’ll just tee up here, what we’re going to do now is just, as I referenced at the beginning, there are a few existing comprehensive safety models that we wanted to sort of highlight. Some of these are sort of just presentations of the research on what best practices could be. There’s an example from Minnesota where they aimed to integrate all the stuff that Joe just touched on.
Joe McKenna: I think Shaun, and I won’t spend a ton of time here. I kind of wanted to illustrate that, this isn’t just conversation at this point, you’re seeing legislation, but you’re also seeing actual, you know, think of again, for those who have been doing this for a little bit, think of the comprehensive guides that came out on how to do emergency planning for schools in the 2000s, the REMS TA Center, these are now the comprehensive guides on how to do comprehensive school safety. So, we’ll hit a few, and touch on some high-level points.
But NIJ has put one out, I’m sure many of you have heard of what’s called their “comprehensive school safety initiative” that was really kicked off following Sandy Hook with some funding that was made available from Congress, same funding stream, to some degree, that is funding the STOP Act grants through BJA, which still does retain a piece of that. They put this model out, and they based it on a lot of the research that they were seeing in that Comprehensive School Safety Program. The important piece is to look at the components of it. Physical safety, student behavior in school climate, the historical, or the evolution piece that we just talked about, can be reflected in each one of those to behavior, discipline, that climate perspective is more of the conducive learning environment to feeling safe, then obviously the physical safety, access control, security, those kind of pieces. So, this is based on a lot of NIJ research, they have funded.
I think the main point here is to look at those categories that they’re saying need to be intertwined and working together. Some quick guiding principles. In this little section here, on some existing models, we probably put more text on the screen than we would have liked, but my hope is that as this presentation is made available you’re able to maybe take a read over some of this, if it interests you, or you think it’s relevant to your work. The guiding principles are very upfront. There’s no one size fits all, there’re some broad buckets. There’s no one model that they can put down that’s going to work for every local school district in the country.
Those three components of the framework are the important pieces. They’re interrelated with one another. Physical safety is interrelated with discipline, and both are interrelated with climate. We know that when we look at things like school climate, I don’t know of a school climate measure that doesn’t ask about safety or feelings of safety, or feelings of connectedness or support. All of those things are influenced by other areas of safety, like physical safety that we use at schools. You’re seeing more proactive policies. Proactive approaches to addressing safety. It’s that preventative nature that we’re starting to see more of now. We can probably mitigate, or maybe even to some degree, prevent, some of these potential safety issues if we work on it ahead of time as opposed to responding. I think they’re very clear in this guide that policies have to be balanced and reasonable. In some cases, you have to take local context into consideration, it goes back to there being no one size fits all model.
The one that I think is most, most extensive and may resonate with some of what we know, in Ohio, I will, I will say it’s called the “framework for safe and successful schools.” It was put out jointly by all of those organizations you see listed on the screen. One fascinating thing with this model is that they got this many organizations to sign on and agree to one document. Some of you may remember they put out a comprehensive guide for emergency planning in schools years ago, and they got like five seals on it, the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Ed, Department of Justice, and to get that many people to agree on an approach was pretty remarkable.
So again, here, I think you see that there’s a wide array of associations, social workers, psychologists, administrators, law enforcement associates, that all agree that this is a good approach. So, one of the big things I took from this model and still use is that we can’t look at school safety and school climate as separate from learning. They’re interrelated. So, climate and safety are going to influence learning, and learning is going to influence climate and safety. So, we can’t treat them as their own buckets, and that they’re independent. So, I thought that was a very, very well put together point. This guide is very, very much focused on building collaboration, interdisciplinary-, multidisciplinary- collaboration, not only within the school, but externally as well with community partners.
I think there’s some expectation at school, there’s some understanding, really, that schools cannot do what we think of as school safety now all by themselves. We need experts that are external, especially in more rural districts that just don’t have the staff or the expertise. We need a little bit more support from our community that may have those with expertise. So, I think that’s an important piece. Here we have eight framework components, we won’t go through all of them. It’s good material if you’re interested in how we build a comprehensive model, it talks a lot about integration and balancing physical safety and psychological safety, talks a lot about discipline and how discipline impacts or influences safety. There’s quite a focus on mental health support, how do we support students, that come to us in times of crisis. Very comprehensive, organized around what they call components, and there are eight of those.
Last one, we’ll touch on. It is a state example. The other ones are kind of more global, they’re their national and context. They’re kind of talking to states, in terms of what states should do this, this one from Minnesota was a bit more of a state perspective on a house sub one state. There are others, kind of operationalized, what does comprehensive school safety look like, for the folks that are more Emergency Management background. Even now becoming common language in schools is kind of those phases of emergency management, preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation.
So, they did focus or organize their content around that, but they talked quite a bit about a multidisciplinary team and how district administrators, principals, teachers, nurses, everyone food service, really had a role in safety. They take the approach of outlining the roles of each of these groups. We often forget that some of the most important people in school safety are the transportation folks, and the food service folks who see our kids every day and certainly can pick up on some things that might be helpful from a safety context. So, they do a great job outlining in this comprehensive guide. So, you have them to refer back to them, they kind of define each of their areas. So, I thought this was helpful, if you have some experience in emergency management or response. These are a bit broader definitions, I don’t know anyone admitted, started, that has worked on this, but my guess is they took some definitions that were maybe a little bit more narrow in an emergency management-physical safety focus and broadened them, to some degree to incorporate more.
I think there’s a whole bunch of stuff that schools are already doing in the efforts of safety that could fit in these buckets. A lot of our educational programs could be considered preparedness type activities or prevention type activities. It just doesn’t necessarily preclude itself to only being the physical nature. If you brought in these definitions just slightly, they do encompass quite a bit that schools are already doing. So, just to kind of close this out, before I kick it over to Shaun, to talk a little bit more specifically, now about Ohio, now that you have some of this background, there are some major themes that really, in all the comprehensive models, are popping up or coming out from different states, federal agencies, associations.
There are some common themes, multidisciplinary, it’s no longer you know, this person or group does this, this person or group does this, there’s talk now that all of that has to be integrated, and should be the same group of multidisciplinary people that are kind of involved. You all probably know this if you’re doing this type of work, but you can see it from the evolution of safety now, is the expectation that safety is multi-dimensional. It’s not just physical, it’s not just social. It’s not just emotional, it’s all three of them. There’s again, an expectation in most communities that we’re taking care of their kids, in all three of those respects. Safety being delivered in multiple phases.
The big one I highlighted from the second framework there is that there’s an inherent connection between learning and student success. We’ve known this for a long time, kids that feel safe do better in school. Some folks have done research that shows even when a school from administrative data is showing as safe, if kids don’t feel safe, of their own personal perception, even though every measure may tell you that that campus is safe, if the kid doesn’t feel safe, they don’t do well in school. That’s important to remember, lots of talk in these models about tiered and customized interventions and responses. No more one size fits all programs is going to catch anyone that might be one level of your tier, some general programming for an entire elementary campus or middle school campus. There is a need to customize and tiered responses and interventions to adequately support students. There’s never going to be a one size fits all flexibility in terms of local decision making.
There needs to be a model, a structure, but it needs to have flexibility in order to allow for these models to fit the students, to fit the staff, and to fit the campus that they’re being in. I worked in a somewhat large district, our campuses were different from each other in terms of demographics, needs, or a whole host of things. So, there shouldn’t be some flexibility. When approaching safety, you need to have some standards. There should be some flexibility to make sure that we’re supporting that campus and those students and staff as best as possible.
Shaun Ali: Wonderful. Thank you, Joe. As you mentioned, that sets the table so nicely to talk a little bit about what’s going on here in Ohio, the work that Joe and I have been fortunate enough to be a part of with some of these state agencies. So, I want to highlight what’s going on here. So, what I was going to do is highlight the process of how Ohio got to where we are now, and where we’re hoping to go. So, the Ohio Department of Education, Department of Public Safety, and Department of Mental Health and addiction services came together as three state agencies who were working in various capacities on the whole spectrum of supports that Joe just highlighted, and how it’s changed over the years.
Those three states, those two agencies from a state level, were the ones that were primarily if not fully, sort of in charge of school safety efforts. So, they had the goal of wanting to collaborate more meaningfully, more effectively, among one another since we’re working with the same population. We’re working to solve the same problems, we’re working to really serve the whole child. So that led them to come to our center, they applied, and were accepted to be a part of this collaborative for the Center to Improve Social Emotional Learning and School Safety. That’s the long CISELSS acronym that you see here in the second block.
So, through the CISELSS collaborative, we had this student safety and wellness group of states that came in that really wanted to focus on that. So, under that umbrella, Ohio was really asking itself, how do we collaborate more meaningfully? They went back to what that goal was. So, we started digging into that of what are you doing now? What are you hoping to get out of it? How do you get there?
At the same time, our director of our center, Natalie Walrond, and another brilliant colleague of ours, Dr. Natalie Romer, authored what they have here in the third block, alignment and coherence. So, they developed a really, really amazing Practical Guide, called an alignment and coherence guide for state education agencies focused on serving the whole person. So, that has many components. It’s that guide, along with the previous models that Joe just mentioned, we’re going to make available to you all here. Whether in our presentation room here or afterwards, we’ll make sure you all get copies of that.
What I really wanted to start off by highlighting was what we meant by alignment of coherence and how that applied to Ohio. So, my colleagues, Natalie Walrond, and Natalie Romer defined it as alignment being all policies, practices, processes, and roles in a system working together in similar or consistent ways. The analogy they gave that really brought this home for me was if you think of a jigsaw puzzle. Alignment describes how each of those pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fit together, and coherence is defined as the integration and interconnection between the parts of the system in a way that mutually reinforces shared understanding and overall progress toward a clear vision instead of goals. In the jigsaw puzzle analogy, it’s the full recognizable picture that the jigsaw pieces put together.
So that really hit home for me, and I think, really, really struck with the Ohio team as well from those three state agencies. As Joe was highlighting, the point in time that we’re at now is, we’ve realized, both in schools and in community safety, and just in violence prevention in general, and crime reduction, all of those efforts, we’ve really come to realize that there are things you can do to the settings, you can make the buildings safer, you can do the crime prevention through Environmental Design, whether that’s in neighborhoods or schools, but these are really human issues. These are really human challenges, challenges to some degree that we all face no matter where, what school we go to, what neighborhood we grew up in.
So, it’s how do you best support the young people, the students, as they are in that phase? How do you keep them safe physically? How do you keep them safe emotionally? And how do you get on the same page as the state agencies in order to do that? So, with the alignment and coherence guide that we developed, started with Ohio, was having that shared vision, and then closely coordinated efforts to serve the whole child so that the guide we developed, just coincidentally, at that time worked perfectly for what Ohio was trying to do.
So, the first step of that guide, and you are more than welcome to take a look at the full document, was setting that vision and having that shared goal. So, once we did that, the next step was to inventory, which we have here, and the fourth step in the process for Ohio, to actually get down on paper, what it is that we’re doing across agencies with regards to school safety. So, the Ohio team really dug deep, spent a lot of time getting on an Excel file, everything that they’re doing, what the name of the initiative was, what agencies were involved, who’s doing what, is this mandated by policy? What are the funding streams for it? What are the activities through it?
So, it was sort of just a brain dump of okay, let’s get the full landscape of the school safety efforts from the state’s perspective across these three state agencies. Let’s just get them down on paper, then you can start to identify what the gaps are, is there any duplication of effort? Are there any redundancies? Are there any efficiencies to be gained? Back to the main goal, if you can do that, if you can identify those, tighten up those gaps, and do it all correctly, you’re going to be more effective in serving the whole child vote of all the students across the state.
So, we did the inventorying. We started sort of sifting through the categories that Joe mentioned a few slides back about prevention and all of that. We decided to categorize these into Ohio, we decided to categorize them in three categories as prevent, protect, mitigate, respond, and recover. So, of all the school safety initiatives, they each should fall into one of those things. So, we started to count, to rise it to more to help us see more closely what’s going on, who’s doing what, and who should be doing what.
So, with the actual alignment and coherence guide itself, there are many more steps if you really start to analyze those interrelationships and whatnot, but the guide was made in a way that was meant to be flexible. So, what we did after creating the inventory was representatives from each of the agencies in Ohio started really trying to talk through what was next after we got everything down on paper. So, after a lot of thinking, we realized, well, there was nothing from the state’s perspective, that really set the table for everything going on within the state. That’s where we start talking about these Comprehensive School Safety models. So, we looked into what other states were doing like Minnesota, what NIJ is, but I really dug deep and looked at everything. Ohio had a similar effort. Back in 2018, that wasn’t meant to be a comprehensive school safety plan, but it covered a lot of it.
So, we took what was done previously, we took what the best practices were out there, and where we are now is trying to build a strategic framework for the state level for these three state agencies, Ohio Department of Education, public safety, and mental health and addiction services have to set what Ohio’s best practices are to set what Ohio’s goals are, what their principles are, what their outcomes hope to be. So that from a state, there can be something for all of the school safety efforts across the state at the school and the district level, to fall under. Everything should be able to go back to this sort of state level guide.
I want to just illustrate here is where we are now, the Ohio folks will hear a lot from our attendees, we’re going to hear a lot about this in the coming months about this state led comprehensive school safety. So, we’re still very much in the midst of it. As I’ve mentioned, there’s going to be a state framework with the state agencies of the organization, the oversight, the coordination that the state level does, and another component of that is going to be more of a practical implementation guide for schools and districts, those are two different roles. The state provides what it provides, but then ultimately, school safety is within the school. So, another component of this will be that real hands on, step by step guide.
Once that has been completed and starts to be implemented, we don’t know what could come of that, there could be one comprehensive policy that comes out from the state or multiple policies that feed into it, there could be funding streams, the possibilities are really endless, but you have to build it from the state and local level first, to get everything in order, then continue on from there. So, as we wrap up here, we wanted to really ground all of this presentation with what this means for you. So, Joe, I can turn it back over to you for this. For these first points here about how this would apply to our audience.
Joe McKenna: Yeah, we just have a few minutes left. So, one of the most important things I think we can do in a presentation such as this, is not only give you information or update you on some of the work that’s being done, but give you at least some opportunity, it’s certainly better in person, but some mechanism to reflect on. So, what does this mean for me, and my guess is that many of you are in different areas in and around school safety. So, I’ll give you some high-level points, but then also some questions to maybe take and reflect on maybe immediately as we move into a question-and-answer portion of the presentation.
So, every indication tells us that we’re moving toward more comprehensive approaches, funding legislation, guidebooks that are coming out, states doing different work. I don’t know that this has been written down anywhere. We’re essentially bringing together a lot that’s being done already, and trying to categorize it in a more uniform succinct way so that these components can work together, and not maybe accidentally counter each other or duplicate efforts. When I looked at this, as at a local district that I was at, we found a lot of duplication of efforts at the district level, like everyone was doing something towards this aim, but in a slightly different way. All that did was create immense confusion for campuses, they felt like they were doing the same thing over and over, when we should have been working more cohesively, comprehensively as different departments, to say, “Okay, you need someone on this team, you need someone on this team that can do the same work together which is not only a reduction in duplication, but likely more effective.”
So, I think the end goal here is that we expect these models to produce better outcomes, and Ohio’s moving in that direction. So here are some questions. We won’t go through all of them. Some items for you to ponder, we’ve come across or we’ve heard as challenges, but think about your region, your district, your campus, wherever you sit in this school safety space. What would that look like? What would an integrated approach be? What are some of the mechanisms to facilitate that? Are they meetings? We did a lot of meetings with community partners with first responders, just not necessarily every meeting had a huge to do, but it was more of like, here’s what we’re doing on the school side. Does that work with what y’all are doing? And conversations around those things.
Look at gaps in programming. Are there not gaps that are being duplicated that could be reduced? Are there areas that nobody’s touching? Sometimes we think, oh, that department is doing that, or that agency is doing that, and they’re not, they’re thinking you’re doing that. So, it’s a good process, to kind of think through other issues, again, maybe minor, but maybe not, terminology is different in some of these different buckets. We use acronyms, and we use different terms. Those things to be comprehensive and cohesive need to be integrated, who are the right partners that can work at the table? Who needs to be there?
I will tell you one of the ways we move toward some of this in one of the districts that I was at. Most recently, I started doing quarterly meetings with all of our social workers, nurses in law enforcement. So, it was about 85 people. Some of them have never met each other, and some of them had been working in that district for a decade. So, it was very, very important that they got to know each other. I’ll never remember when this social worker and this SRO met each other. They had offices next to each other for years. They had an aha moment when the social worker said, “Well, when I have a student come in, who’s talking about suicide, it takes me forever to get a mental health officer for the county to show up.” The SRO said, “You do know he’s my brother?” And so things like that, these aha moments really, again, make us better, and I think, make us better in the sense that we’re here to make sure our kids are safe. So again, just some questions to ponder. Shaun, I’ll leave you a couple minutes here. If there’s anything else before we go to Q&A.
Shaun Ali: Sure, sure. No, thanks, Joe. Yeah, no, the only other thing I wanted to point out was that, the beauty of it is, when you are working in a way that is collaborative, and, really, truly multidisciplinary, and there’s that coordination and connectedness between state agencies or between disciplines, you can ask these questions, and do something with them. Whereas if that were not the case, these questions would sort of be dead ends to each of the respective sort of siloed areas of this, you may not be able to reach out to somebody across disciplines, you may know of terminology issues, you may know duplication of efforts, but that’s it. You may be able to point issues out, but you may not be able to get them resolved.
So, perhaps you know, the most important takeaway here is when there is that coordination and that collaboration, when you have an issue, as you know, the people providing for the students, there is an avenue to resolve that. So, with that, we wanted to just leave some time for questions and answers. We’re going to leave our contact information slide up here for just a moment for you all to take a picture of or whatever. If you wanted to get in contact with Joe or myself, please feel free. We’re always willing to talk about this. So, we’ll leave this here for just a moment as we wrap up, we look forward to any feedback from you all or any questions. We welcome any questions or comments that you will have. We so really appreciate you all joining us here today. Thank you so much.
Joe McKenna: Yeah, and Shaun, I’ll just echo that real quick before we wrap up, I appreciate you attending our session. Hopefully this was useful. Hopefully it gives you just maybe some thoughts around where the safety space is going and what your work may or may not look like or how you may be able to move the needle toward this kind of goal. So hopefully again, it was useful. Hopefully, you can refer back to this PowerPoint. As Shaun mentioned, we’ll share some other documents that might be useful to you all, I think I can speak for both of us that we’re more than happy to have a conversation, or share anything else if you have any questions.
Shaun Ali: Absolutely. Thank you very much for listening.