Shifting School Safety Paradigms with Students at the Center
Announcer: The Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety at WestEd. Shifting School Safety Paradigms with Students at the Center. Perspectives from Students at Bard Early College New Orleans, featuring Krystal Wu in conversation with Professor Rachel Nelson, Lacey Boudroux, Kolby Daniels, Jaleah Depron, Le’Shyra Gillum, Joshua Hudson, and Nicolas Williams.
Krystal Wu: I’m Krystal Wu from the National Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety at WestEd. In 2022, the Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety published “Reimagining School Safety: A Guide for Schools and Communities.” The guide discusses how the paradigm of school safety can be transformed by considering what safety is and is not, who gets to define it, how it is achieved, and at what cost to students, educators, and the communities they come from. In March 2023, I had the special opportunity to sit down with the teacher and students from Bard Early College in New Orleans, a two-year program for high school juniors and seniors to earn dual-enrollment credits. Professor Rachel Nelson chose to use the “Reimagining School Safety Guide” as a required text in her Leadership for Social Change class. In our film discussion, Professor Nelson and her students shared their perspectives with me about what reimagining school safety means to them. So let’s meet Professor Nelson and her students from the course before we dive in.
Rachel Nelson: So my name is Rachel Nelson, and I’m a professor at Bard Early College in New Orleans.
Le’Shyra Gillum: Hi, I’m Le’Shyra Gillum. I’m a senior at Frederick Douglass High School and a second year at Bard Early College.
Joshua Hudson: Hello, my name’s Joshua Hudson. I’m a senior at Frederick Douglass High School and a second year at Bard Early College.
Lacey Boudroux: Hi, I’m Lacey Boudroux. I’m a senior at Frederick Douglass High School and a second year at Bard Early College.
Kolby Daniels: I’m Kolby Daniels, and I’m a senior at Booker T. Washington High School and also a year two here at Bard Early College.
Jaleah Depron: Hi, I’m Jaleah Depron. I attend Frederick Douglass High School as a senior, and I am a second year at Bard Early College.
Nicolas Williams: Hi, I’m Nicolas Williams. I’m a senior at Frederick Douglass and I’m a second year at Bard Early College.
Krystal Wu: These students all chose to enroll in Professor Nelson’s Leadership for Social Change course, which was the first of its kind at Bard Early College in New Orleans. Here is Professor Nelson describing the origins of the class.
Rachel Nelson: So something we had been talking about in school leadership for the last couple years is really wanting to bring in a very cohesive way to bring student voice into the conversation about school climate and school safety. So I was given the really wonderful opportunity to design a class that addressed that. So all of the students that you will hear from today are part of the class that we ended up designing. And the class was very specifically designed to address not only student perspectives on school safety, but also, on-the-ground ways that we would be able to start to integrate some of their perspectives into the way that we write school policy, with the hopes that within a couple years it would be reflected very much in the school climate here at Bard.
Krystal Wu: Professor Nelson chose to use the “Reimagining School Safety Guide” in her class, because it offered an accessible way for students to explore school safety as not just the absence of a negative, but rather, the existence of positive elements like interconnection, belonging, voice, and agency. In our conversation, students identified some of the physical elements that made their school feel safe or not, such as metal detectors, security cameras, and having their backpacks searched. Although these practices made some of the students feel safer at school, Joshua disagreed, saying that these practices serve as constant reminders of the threats to students’ safety.
Joshua Hudson: There’s nothing wrong with preparing, but I feel like if you’re a student and all your stuff gets checked every morning and everyone, you’re always on guard in case this happens. Eventually I feel like people are going to question what is the real chance of this happening? And if so, what if this doesn’t work? Then what? Because you get reminded of it every time you walk in the building.
Krystal Wu: Kolby, however, acknowledged that a balance needs to exist between student sense of psychological safety and the existence of physical security measures.
Kolby Daniels: It’s like people became more focused on having unarmed security in schools to make, to prevent students from being constantly reminded that where we live in a city that is I feel like people kind of contradict themselves by saying they want this sense of security without the actual security itself.
Krystal Wu: As we talked, students continued to explore what it might mean to reimagine school safety as being about more than physical exclusionary measures. Here are Jaleah, Lacey, and Nicolas discussing school safety through a mental health and social and emotional lens.
Jaleah Depron: Well, what I can say that everyone, like teachers and people of authority, they want physical safety, and they’re stronger on that idea of physical safety, but they neglect the fact that we also have to be feeling safe emotionally. And that is a contradiction in itself, because when we think of safety, it has to be every aspect of safety.
Lacey Boudroux: I think about school safety from a mental perspective, meaning like, individuals feel safe in their environment, like in the classroom, to express a new idea that they just learned and want to create a conversation about with their peers.
Nicolas Williams: For me, personally, it’s kind of more like the people I surround myself with. I’m in a group of people, if I’m in a classroom environment where I can trust or I hear the ideas of other people around me. Be like, yeah, oh yeah, okay, I relate to that, or something of that nature, just being able to relate to or just feel safe around the other students in my classroom makes me feel emotionally safe. I feel like I could be more myself.
Krystal Wu: The more we talked about psychological safety, the more students opened up about what made them feel safe in schools. Joshua and Lacey spoke to the importance of teachers and school leaders really listening to student perspectives.
Joshua Hudson: Giving them the space to grow in a way that’s not so, I guess, heavily structured, because, and I’m not saying dismantle structure completely, but I’m saying give them the room to, one, express themselves; two, have their voice heard and actually be heard.
Lacey Boudroux: I would want them to know that when they’re thinking about reimagining school safety, it should automatically consider the current students’ perspective and their personal wishes, as well as the next generation’s. Because now you can tell that a lot of school leaders, when they’re thinking about implementing rules and stuff within schools, they think about their selves and how things were back in the day, quote unquote. Things back in the day, it was easy. You didn’t have to worry about students feeling unsafe mentally, because a teacher is talking to them this type of way, or you didn’t have to worry about a student possibly getting hit or caught by a stray bullet walking to their car.
Krystal Wu: The students also spoke to the relationships between teachers and students in the classroom. Le’Shyra and Joshua described emotionally safe classrooms as spaces where teachers recognize students as people who are worthy of respect.
Le’Shyra Gillum: I can name a hundred examples where I have seen teachers in our building just yelling at kids, and I think that, and then when the teachers yell at the students, then you have the students, they have to go back and forth, and I think it’s because everyone is on their toes trying to defend- they’re on defense mode, and everybody’s trying to prove that they deserve to be respected and they deserve to be listened to. Of course, the teacher is yelling because they want the student to do a certain thing, and they think if they assert their authority that maybe this will work. And then the student turns onto defense mode, because they need to show that they are human beings and they deserve respect. Now, I don’t think that the conversation really gets behind the meaning of what’s really happening, which is a disconnect, when it really just looks like a student being very combative, and a, an adult being very disrespectful to a student. So, I think that if we all just are able to think about everybody on an emotional level and how would someone react to me yelling at them, I think that we will be able to create better sense for each other. So, the big thing of that is to just be thoughtful of, whether you are high up in the job setting or you’re a student, everybody deserves respect, and everybody deserves a chance to be seen as a human being.
Joshua Hudson: Because in high school we go from being young adults to some people being adults, and we’re like 18 for some to graduate. Even though some people are adults, or really close to it, we are just becoming that. We still need to be treated just like we’re still high school students and just like people in general. Because I feel like from a mental and emotional perspective being in school and being, I guess, expected to behave the same way and act the same for four years and just listen to this figure of authority without really questioning it, eventually you’re gonna feel combative in the sense of when you aren’t a kid, and you aren’t 14 anymore, and you don’t need to listen to these things, but at the same time it feels like you’re being conditioned to act a certain way.
Krystal Wu: Kolby agreed that recognizing the particular developmental needs of students and recognizing their humanity is paramount to creating safe schools. He took it a step further by encouraging teachers and school leaders to consider the load that students carry outside of school that they might be bringing into the classroom.
Kolby Daniels: I feel like a lot of emotional support for students is swept under the rug or like there’s the bare minimum done to support it. I feel like it only- the resources that students are offered are like resources to just get them by, get them through the school day. I feel like there isn’t enough taken into account, like how much students may carry on their shoulders outside of school or in their households. So when they come to school they don’t really have the attention span to want to be taught, or be educated as fast as other kids. I feel like students go through a lot and teachers push them aside. It only makes them more embarrassed. I feel like there should be more done to build connections with students and understand who they are, how they like to be taught, what works for them. How can curriculum be centered around students, like they’re more used to? I feel like there isn’t effort put into supporting how a student- the student’s needs.
Krystal Wu: Finally, our conversation turned to punishment, accountability, and healing. Jaleah and Le’Shyra advocated for identifying the root causes of harm before jumping to conclusions and swift punishment.
Jaleah Depron: I want school leaders to know more about restorative practices that eliminate punishment as well as to the students. Because I do feel like the punitive systems are used more often in schools, and it can be detrimental to the students’ success, and overall keeping them in the classroom. And restorative practices are much more beneficial, because we work together to get problems solved while also keeping them in their learning environment. And it really benefits the students, because it removes that punishment and creates a space where it isn’t always the answer towards mistakes, while communication is the answer.
Le’Shyra Gillum: I feel as though everyone has a story and everyone has a reason why they do things this certain way. And I think in order to get that trust between students and faculty and school systems we have to do the work to understand students and get that emotional support within faculty and students, and not just being able to immediately jump to punishment, because I don’t think every situation needs punishment. I think there’s some situations, and most, nine times out of 10, most situations need more emotional support and emotional security for the students.
Krystal Wu: As we closed, Professor Nelson shared one of her key takeaways from teaching her course. She noted that although adults tend to think about school safety in abstract ways, for students, the implications of school safety are very real and present on a daily basis.
Rachel Nelson: One of the things that we had to hold a lot of space for in class that I wasn’t expecting was the emotional component of how it feels to talk about these things while you are a young person that is still experiencing them. It’s very different for us to talk about school safety and strategies and implications when you’re 36 years old and sitting around with a bunch of adults thinking about things in an abstract way. And it’s really different when it’s an active experience for you. And so, I think something that my students did a really beautiful job of teaching me is that this is not a neutral subject for them, and that often it needs a lot of support, and they did a really beautiful job, I think, building that support for each other and for themselves, and also asking really clearly for it when they needed it. So, I think maybe the big takeaway from that is just remembering that each individual’s lived emotional experience is going to be a part of working through issues of school safety when you’re working with young people.
Krystal Wu: Thank you to the Leadership for Social Change class for illuminating the inherent complexity of school safety and sharing what reimagining school safety can look like on the ground. We hope you are taking away ideas of how you might engage students in conversations to reimagine school safety. To learn more about Professor Nelson’s pedagogy, and for broader guidance on facilitating conversations about school safety with students, please scan the QR code to access “Reimagining School Safety: A Guide for Schools and Communities,” and the companion report for educators, detailing Professor Nelson’s approach to using the guide in her class. We invite you to visit selcenter.wested.org for additional information and resources. This video was prepared by the Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety at WestEd through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Education under grant S424B18004. Its content does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the funder, nor does mention of trade names, commercial products, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. government.