Featured Speakers
- Dr. Angela Ward, Student-Centered Anti-Racist Educator, Transforming Education
- Rachel Nelson, Professor, Bard Early College New Orleans
- Le’Shyra Gillum, Student, Frederick Douglass High School and Bard Early College
- Joshua Hudson, Student, Frederick Douglass High School and Bard Early College
- Lacey Boudroux, Student, Frederick Douglass High School and Bard Early College
- Kolby Daniels, Student, Booker T Washington High School and Bard Early College
- Jaleah Depron, Student, Frederick Douglass High School and Bard Early College
- Nicolas Williams, Student, Frederick Douglass High School and Bard Early College
Host
- Krystal Wu, Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety, WestEd
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 a 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 filmed 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:
My name is Rachel Nelson, and I’m a professor at Bard Early College in New Orleans.
Le’Shyra Gillum:
I’m Le’Shyra Gillum. I’m a senior at Frederick Douglass High School and a second year at Bard Early College.
Joshua Hudson:
My name is Joshua Hudson. I’m a senior at Frederick Douglass High School in the 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. I’m a senior at Booker T Washington High School and also a year two at Bard College.
Jaleah Depron:
I’m Jaleah Depron. I attend Frederick Douglass High School as a senior. And I’m a second year at Bard Early College.
Nicolas Williams:
I’m Nicolas Williams. I’m a senior at Frederick Douglass. And I’m a second year at Bard Early College.
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, Josh disagreed, saying that these practices serve as constant reminders of the threats to their 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 like, on guard, in case this happens. Eventually, I feel like people are gonna question like, 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 students’ sense of psychological safety and the existence of physical security measures.
Kolby Daniels:
People became more focused on having unarmed security of schools to prevent students from being constantly reminded that we live in a city that is accustomed to violence, so 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 have 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 we take a 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 to create a conversation about with their peers.
Nicolas Williams:
For me, personally, it’s kind of more of like the people I surround myself with. Like, if I’m in a group of people, or if I’m in a classroom environment, where I can trust or I, like, hear the ideas of other people around me, and can be like, 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 like emotionally safe. Like as though 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. They 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 like dismantle structure completely, but I’m saying give them the room to one, express themselves, to have their voice heard and like actually be heard.
Lacey Boudroux:
I want them to know that when they’re thinking about reimagining school safety we should automatically consider the current students’ perspectives and their personal wishes as well as the next generations. Because now, you can tell that like a lot of school leaders, when they think about… when they’re thinking about implementing rules and stuff within schools, they think about themselves in 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. For them, emotionally safe classrooms are spaces where teachers recognize students as people who are worthy of respect.
Le’Shyra Gillum:
I can name 100 examples where I have seen teachers in our building, like just yelling at kids. And I think that… and then when the teachers yell at the students, then the other 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 is trying to prove that they deserve to be respected, and they deserve to be listened to. Of course, the teacher, 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 on to 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 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 a better sense for each other. So the big thing of that is to just be thoughtful, whether you are high up in the 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 you’re like 18, for some to graduate. Even though some people are adults or are 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 expected to behave the same way and act the same way for four years and just like, listen to this figure of authority without really questioning it, eventually, you’re going to feel combative, in the sense of one, you aren’t like a kid and you aren’t 14 anymore. You don’t need to like 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 there’s the bare minimum done to support it. I fell like it only like, the resources that students are offered are like resources to just get them by, get them through the school day. I don’t feel like there’s enough taking into account how much students may carry on their shoulders outside of school or in their household. So, when they come to school, they don’t really have the attention span to want to be taught, to be educated as fast as other kids. I feel like students go through a lot and teachers push ’em 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. Like, how can curriculum be centered around students or like they’re more used to. I feel like there isn’t an effort put into supporting the how student, like 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 opposed to the student. Because I do feel like the punitive systems are used more often in schools, and it can be detrimental to their students, their success. 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 to one’s 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 that 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:
And 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, you know. It’s very different for us to talk about school safety, and, you know, strategies and implications, when you’re 36 years old, and sitting around with a bunch of adults, you know, 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 look for 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 more 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 S424B180004. 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.