Seven Steps to a safer School

STEP 2: ASSESS YOUR SITUATION

• Conduct a Safe Schools Checklist using the downloadable Safe Schools Checklist PDF, or other on-line forms
• Examine the existing school records, including office disciplinary records using The Disciplinary Record Review Form
• Conduct Listening Sessions for all major stakeholders
• Identify and evaluate existing  programs and procedures

Expanded Explanation:

The first action task of the School Safety Planning Team is to take stock in the nature of the current situation in the school.  The central questions are: What are our problems? What are we currently doing about them?   For some, the scope and nature of the problems may seem obvious, but team members should resist the urge to start “doing something” before systematically gathering useful data.  It is particularly important in short budget times to be able to point to the results of a well-conceived assessment when vying for limited resources. In addition, assessment data are very important when it comes to evaluating program progress.

What Are Our Problems? Safe Schools Checklist and Climate Surveys

What is the current reality in our school, and what is the desired reality? The answers to these questions will provide a focus for the plan, and those answers lie in the personal experiences and opinions of the people in the building and in the archival records of the school.  Of course, the best way to find out the opinion of the people in the building is to ask them.  A Safe Schools Checklist is a simple but systematic method to gather this important information. By clicking on this link, you will be taken to a downloadable Safe Schools Checklist PDF that is suitable for use by staff and parents in all educational environments. Notice that the survey is organized around the Pyramid of Prevention that recognizes that school safety is the business of everyone, not just an identifiable few. The Safe Schools Checklist provides a series of positive school conditions that have been established in the literature and in practice to be associated with safe and effective learning environments. The checklist asks the respondents to rate whether they perceive that a particular positive school condition exists in the building (Implemented, Partially Implemented, Not Implemented), and also asks them to put into priority their sense of its need. The data from this checklist can be easily entered into a spreadsheet program or hand-tallied, and the results can provide the School Safety Planning Team with guidelines for action.         

The California School Climate and Safety Survey – Staff Form is a 62-item survey that examines school staff members’ opinions and experiences with safety-related issues.  The measure is comprised of three major sections: Perceptions of School Climate, Perceptions of School Danger, and Reports of Victimization. This instrument is available for download at http://www.education.ucsb.edu/school-pscyhology/.  The California Healthy Kids Survey (http://www.wested.org/pub/docs/chks_home.html) has a Staff School Climate Survey that examines a broad range of potential staff concerns, including those related to school violence and student discipline issues.

The California School Climate and Safety Survey – Short Form is a 52-item scale for students.  The scale yields self-report information from students in three principal areas: School Danger, School Climate, and School Victimization.  This measure is available for download at http://www.education.ucsb.edu/school-psychology

Archival Record Review :

A second method for assessing the problems is for the School Safety Planning Team to examine the existing school records. Disciplinary office referrals can be an informative measure over time of those student behaviors that may contribute to an unsafe learning environment.  These records may contain answers to questions such as:

• What is our current weekly frequency of fistfights between students?
• Which group of students is most at risk for this behavior? 
• What areas in the building or on the grounds tend to occasion this behavior? 
• How many bullying complaints have been received since the beginning of the year? 
• Which staff members refer the most students for disciplinary complaints?   

The Disciplinary Record Review Form provides a useful template for assembling this information.  Accuracy and consistency in the reporting and retrieval of this information are essential to its usefulness as an index of school safety.  The School Safety Planning Team may find a document from the National Center for Educational Statistics entitled, Recommendations of the Crime, Violence, and Discipline Reporting Task Force (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs/97581.pdf) useful in their efforts.  If the school does not already have well-delineated definitions of persons, incidents, and consequences associated with school discipline, an excellent model is described.  In addition, Software-based reporting systems can be found at http://www.schoolsafetysoftware.com/default.htm and at http://www.swis.org/index.php