From the Field: Building Capacity and Collaboration for Safer Schools

Transcript

Brent Miller: All right. Hi everyone. Welcome to today’s panel discussion. My name is Brent Miller. I’m the training manager here at the National Center for School Safety. We’re housed at the University of Michigan. We serve as the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s STOP School Violence Program’s national training and technical assistance provider. The NCSS brings together researchers and practitioners from across the country to provide expert-led trainings, one-on-one support, and also evidence-based resources. Our goal is to help schools and their partners address broad range of school safety challenges by providing them with tools and strategies to prevent violence and create safe, supportive learning environments. Those of you watching can learn much, much more at nc2s.org. Today we have three STOP School Violence grantees with us who are going to share about their work and describe some successes that they’ve experienced. We also have an internal audience of NCSS staff who are joining us. Each of our panelists is going to share for about 15 minutes, and we will make time for questions at the end of the recording. So without further ado, we’re going to start with Julie and Seana from Napa County Office of Education. Please introduce yourself, your work, and describe what’s been successful.

Julie McClure: Kick us off. Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Julie McClure. I’m the Deputy Superintendent of Napa County Office of Education. And if we want to go to the next slide, has our lovely photos on it. That’s me and then my colleague Seana, the Director of Communications and Special Projects at the county office. And together we make up the team that supports safety work for the Napa County Office of Education. And we’re both delighted to be here today to share the work that we did through our STOP grant funding, which began in 2023. And we’re pleased, we were really pleased to receive this grant because it enabled us to accomplish the development of structures and partnerships in our community that we feel will really serve us well for many years to come beyond the life of the grant. And if we can move to the next slide, just a little bit about our community. Napa County, as you may know, is located in the San Francisco Bay Area. We have a population of just over 130,000. And many people think of Napa as a very wealthy community. We have lots of fancy restaurants and wineries, but the reality is we have a very high number of students living in poverty. It’s over 60%, and many of those are from the families of the agricultural workers and the folks that support that tourism industry.

And our school community is very diverse. We have 18,000 students, and most of those students are located in one large suburban district, that’s the city of Napa, and four small rural districts up valley, two of whom have less than 100 students. So when we’re thinking about countywide efforts, we need to think about implementation in ways that will work across a variety of school settings. And we can move to the next slide. Just a overview of the goals of our STOP grant. One, first goal was to establish a coalition of first responders and school representatives, our Napa County School Safety and Health Coalition, to begin to do this work again across systems and in a countywide way. And the second bullet there is to create safe school climates through the development of common emergency response protocols, which was the first piece of work we tackled with this coalition. And then to support behavior threat assessment teams and efforts at all of our county districts. And we can move to the next slide. So speaking about the coalition, the coalition consists, still exists, of course, of a multi-agency task force comprised of Napa County’s five public school districts, the County Office of Education, us, our county’s private schools, as well as a range of public safety agencies from the police of all of our local communities to sheriff’s office to fire agencies.

We have several here in a… Fire is a big issue here in our part of California, as well as county emergency response folks as well. And I have to give a shout out to my colleague Seana, who really worked a lot with all of these agencies during COVID to respond to that emergency and as a result built lasting partnerships with many of them and created that direct line of communication between the county office and the agencies. And we wanted to build on that and extend those relationships out to all of our local schools. And the first project that this group tackled was to develop those common emergency response protocols, which we didn’t have in our county. Districts were using different protocols and training differently, with some involvement of local law enforcement, but not all. So it was kind of a mix of things going on and we had that real need to come together as a county because if something happens in one of our communities, there’s response from across the county and we need to be speaking the same language. So if we move to the next slide, this is just a statement of our goal for this work. Of course, we hope that we never need to implement these protocols, but we want to have that common language so that when something happens, we can ensure the best outcomes possible.

And in the next slide, I’ll talk about this first objective here and then I’ll turn it over to Seana. We were really looking in this work to create a work group to develop a shared understanding between schools and first responders, a common vocabulary around emergency response. And the first thing that we did is we reviewed together a couple of different protocols that were out there that we could consider adopting as a county. We looked at standard response protocols, the “I Love U Guys” protocol, as well as Big Five, which is a Northern California specific protocol developed by a local county office here. And we spent a lot of time as a group discussing terminology, how schools were interpreting terms, how law enforcement was interpreting terms. We had a lot of discussion around the term secure campus and kind of couldn’t come to a collective agreement on what that meant between law enforcement and schools. And as a result, we decided to develop our own protocols and really looking to simplify our language so that it was clear what was meant in different circumstances. So those were great conversations that led to a lot of shared understanding and helped us in the next phases of the development, which Seana’s going to share with you. Seana.

Seana Wagner: So, as Julie said, we spent a lot of time around language. And everyone wanted to make sure that when a school picks up that phone and calls dispatch, the language that passes between the two of them is clear and understood. And so as part of that conversation, we realized that a lot of the other protocols we were looking at had sort of a mixture of what we would describe as the state of the school and an action. So, for example, it might have lockdown, which your school is in lockdown, but it might also have drop, cover, hold for an earthquake, which is more of an action you would take. And so we decided as a group that we really wanted to focus on clear protocols that describe the state of the school. And so also the importance of the language being simple and universal. So we really made sure that the terms that we ended up landing on, which you’ll see in a moment, were clearly understood by both groups on the school side and the first responder side. That it was easy to train and that in a state of panic or concern, it would be something easy to remember and to execute. Next slide, please. So after we did the work and settled on the protocols, where we ended up was we developed a poster, which you can see an example of here. And we distributed the poster digitally as well as on paper as an 11 by 17. We did it in English and Spanish. We made a handbook, which we distributed as a stapled booklet as well as digitally. The handbook was done for staff, so it was in English. We also created training slides that could be modified.

And all of this was distributed widely thanks to our STOP grant funds. We were able to print them and give each district as many as they wanted and needed. And then we also have it featured on our website so that everyone in the community, whether they’re just families or first responders, can access them easily from our website. And then as a part of all this, we decided that a Train-the-Trainer model was going to make the most sense for us. And so in, just to give you a sense of timeline, in April of 2024 we held a… Or I’m sorry, April of 2023, we held an in-person Train-the-Trainer event which I’ll talk a little bit more about. It was first responder led, the content pieces, and that we got a lot of positive feedback from that. It gave it a sense of sign-off with the first responders and I think made everyone feel comfortable that this was universal practices that we were proposing. And then we did that so that we could get the materials in their hands by June, and then everyone was able to roll it out in their own way in what fit with their own training schedules and all of that for the upcoming school year. Next slide. So these are the protocols. So you’ve already heard these terms, shelter in place, lockdown, evacuation. As you can see, we went with very simple phrases that would be easy to remember. So there’s actually three potential areas under shelter in place. For example, again, earthquakes, drop, cover, hold on. And then for each of these three, there’s a sentence that kind of gives a little bit of a broader explanation and tries to use that language.

But with the training, what you’re really going to try to do is emphasize those quick phrases to remember. So lockdown is built around run, hide, fight. But you can see in the sentence we use the words run, hide, fight to tie all of that in. Okay, next slide. And embedded throughout the training and the handbook is we really wanted school staff to feel empowered to make the best decisions they could in the moment. So we’re telling them about these protocols and we’re training them, but also use your gut. If you’re suspicious… There’s something going on with a student that you’re concerned about, something like that, or a safety hazard you’re worried about, speak up, tell someone. But also in the moment, if we’re using these protocols, you have the power to make a different decision. So again, using earthquake as an example, your room has been damaged, the school has called shelter in place, but you know the best thing you need to do is get those kids outside into an open courtyard. And so we want staff to feel that they have the ability to do that. Next slide. So I’m going to give you a sense of some of the universal pieces we used throughout the three protocols as we were training. The handbook and the slides, what you’re seeing here are some examples from the slides, are very in line with each other. So go ahead and go to the next slide, please. So one thing we did is for each of the three protocols, we have school administration actions and teacher actions. And you can jump ahead to the next slide, which will show teacher.

As we started to develop the content, we realized that really there was two very different sets of instructions for those two groups, and so we broke everything up in that way. And I’m also going to mention here again, with our STOP grant funds, we were able to hire a consultant with a lot of first responder experience, and that person really helped us with the development of the content based on the feedback from that coalition group’s meetings. And that was really helpful to bring in an expert to help pull all of this together. Next slide. And another thing that we did throughout the training for each of the three scenarios, or, sorry, each of the three protocols, was do scenarios, essentially a tabletop exercise. And we got a lot of positive feedback. We of course did some post-training surveys, and staff, the attendees, the future trainers, really appreciated that they were able to learn about the protocols but then almost immediately break up into their district groups, talk, think about, “Okay, now that we understand, how is this going to work in these different situations?” So we strongly recommend including that in the training. And the next slide. And then a final piece we had was throughout the training slides, we have these sort of custom reminders, just really encouraging our districts again, because they’re all so different, that this is meant to be a jumping-off point, but that they’re welcome to embed their own information, tools within the training, and we hope that they will. And the next slide. And I’m going to pass it back to Julie.

Julie: All right. Thank you, Seana. So just kind of touching on the things that we felt were most successful in this work, it was the creation of this coalition that still meets regularly to advance our overall safety work and the robust discussions that happen in that group. Again, building relationships, building understanding, it’s really been invaluable. And I think we were able to do that because of the relationships that we built during that COVID time and the leadership role that we had was able to carry over into this work, which was great. And I think those trusting relationships allowed us to get the right people in the room for those robust conversations. And it’s not always easy getting everyone from law enforcement and schools in the same place, and so we were glad to be able to facilitate that. And it was interesting. We were able to… It was kind of, if someone was supposed to be there from the police and they weren’t, the other law enforcement people in the room would call them up and harass them for not being there and say, “You got to get over here.” So I think that was, it was a real priority for everyone to be at these meetings, and so we had really great participation.

Creating the train-the-trainer model, I think that worked really well because it allowed the same core information to be disseminated across the districts, but for them to customize that based on their structure and size and what type of training plan would work. And we worked with each of those districts to implement that and make sure that they had a working strategy. But a district of 16,000 is very different from a district of 100, so I think that was effective. And again, just I think we feel very proud and very happy to see that it’s been implemented countywide. When I’m out doing site visits, I love to see the posters up in every classroom, and we feel like we’ve had a lot of success in getting that countywide implementation. Okay. And then just a big thank you for the grant funding. It really helped us to advance this work. And our contact information is here. If anybody would like to see the full version of the slides, they can contact myself or Seana. And there’s also a website that has the posters and some of the other collateral materials available that’s here for you.

Brent: Thank you so much for sharing and congrats on all of the success. And so much goes into all of that, so I really appreciate it. All right. Moving right along. Pasadena Independent School District, Gabriela.

Gabriela Chapa Herrera: Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Gabriela Chapa Herrera, and I am the threat assessment specialist at Pasadena ISD. And it’s a pleasure to be here with you guys today. I have a very simple presentation talking about our summary of our STOP Grant 2020. This is a grant that just opened so many doors in regards to school safety for our district here at Pasadena ISD. And like I said, I’m very privileged to be a part of this work. And thanks to this grant, this position that I currently hold was originally created. So I just want to share with you a little bit of our work that we did in the STOP 2020. So our major goal was to establish a structured and consistent framework to be able to not only identify, but also to be able to intervene on potential school safety concerns and threats. One of the major gaps that we noticed in doing this work is that everything was done analog, everything was done pencil, paper. So we realized very early on that we needed to be one band, one sound, and we needed to have technology to back us up. So we needed to have digital tools. Because what was happening before is everybody housed their own threat assessment documentation and school safety documentation, and we weren’t able to see a district snapshot. Where do we have the most needs, the most concerns? How can we close those gaps? And so we wanted to have data and we wanted to be able to report on those trends. The other gap that we noticed that we addressed with our STOP 2020 grant was kids taking a more active role in threat assessment and any kind of safety concern like prevention. So we really were able to accomplish this through a program called Safe School Ambassadors.

And this is something that I also spoke to fellow grantees at different conferences, and I’m excited to report that I want to say like two or three of the grantees also got on board with Safe School Ambassadors. And it was just a wonderful experience to see our kids be front row and center and take some prevention leadership. And so promoting safety, and they are even better than some of the adults, and I love that for them, having that opportunity to kind of display their leadership qualities in a different way outside of your typical high school and intermediate clubs. That has really grown. We’ve even had some of our Safe School Ambassadors be recruited to present at a worldwide summit called Eradicate Hate. They went this past fall. And so it’s just exciting how this has transformed the kids and how they take such pride and responsibility in prevention and intervention when it comes to school safety. So kudos to them. Also, we did focus on those collaborative partnerships. So we did it mostly, we started within district, but it also grew with our emergency management partners outside of the district. So like the city of Pasadena, the city of Houston. So one of the interesting pieces of our district is that we’re kind of in the middle of several jurisdictions. So we have Houston Police, we have South Houston Police, we have Harris County, and we have the city of Pasadena. So we’re kind of in this little like, I want to say like tri city area where we merged. So it was, that initiative was great to get us all together. So here are some sample accomplishments. So like I told you guys, my position was birthed out of STOP 2020.

They wanted to have someone dedicated to this work, and that’s what I have been doing since March of 2021. We wanted to uniform our staff training. We wanted our staff to be able to know what to do, to have standardized protocols. Because in the beginning, everybody was doing their own thing, and we wanted to make sure that we were following the Pasadena ISD protocols. So definitely we had a comprehensive staff training. And this, of course, this number has changed. But by the end of our STOP grant period in three years, we were able to complete nine threat assessment trainings, and we equipped 272 staff members. Now here’s the cool part from that. At this point in time, where we are at this moment, is 100% of our staff, like everybody that would participate in a campus threat assessment team. So I’m talking about administrators, I’m talking about counselors, I’m talking about school psychs. Everybody that would come to the table is 100% trained. And that’s, thanks to the STOP grant. Like I just bragged on our Safe School Ambassador program, we were able to implement it across the board for our secondary campuses. So that’s a total of 18 campuses. And like I said, it opened doors to leadership, it opened doors to bullying prevention, and of course, helping with our school climate and culture. And then we were able to also, I talked to you guys about the digital tools, we were able to launch our Anonymous Alerts app as well. And so that is a two-way communication, meaning when you have any kind of concern, any stakeholder in the district.

So whether it’s a community member, a parent, a student, a faculty, or a staff member, if they have any type of safety concern, they’re able to report it anonymously. But we’re able to have that two-way communication in case we need to ask more details. And that has been lovely and has prevented us from having a major incident of violence occurring in our district. Now, I will say things have happened, but thankfully to some of these preventative measures, it has not gotten to the point that any type of incident of violence has been completed or even gotten close to it. Because of things like Anonymous Alerts or Safe School Ambassadors. We were able to discover a plot or a plan ahead of time during the Thanksgiving break. And this is just things that are really impactful to our district because thankfully, because we have these measures in place, we’re able to prevent that. And we’re so thankful for that. We’re so grateful for that. So here are our major goals that were accomplished according to what we wrote in our grant. We have a very strong threat assessment protocol. One band, one sound. We have, and since STOP 2020 was completed, the state of Texas has continued with mandates. And so that’s even uniforming the process a little bit more because now we have Sentinel platform and things like that in the state of Texas. And I know that that’s going to be a huge learning opportunity for us here in the state. But we were able to have that standardized threat assessment protocol before Sentinel even became… Before it even emerged.

We also have a very consistent professional development plan. We offer basic and advanced threat assessment every single semester. And we have some special topics which include special education, any kind of neurodiversity to be able to be inclusive of all of our kids’ needs. Like I said, we have digital tools and monitoring through the Anonymous Alerts app. We have it on our website. Kids, adults are able to have it on an app on their phone. And then like I said, having the kids take responsibility and accountability in prevention and intervention has been a huge game changer for us. That’s something that we want to continue, especially in any kind of challenges that are coming our way in public education here in Texas. So I just want to share a couple of barriers and some problems that we encountered during our implementation because it hasn’t all been roses, right? We’ve had to be forged through fire. But we’ve learned a lot of really good lessons through this. And so our timeline’s not adding up. Everybody has their fiscal year, so that kind of threw us off and having to ask for forgiveness, having to ask for GAMs just to elongate that reach. Of course, we were still dealing with the post-pandemic, but having to pivot on a dime and go from in-person to digital type of training at the very beginning, like in 2021, or even having to pivot because of new legislature, new mandates that were out there. We also had some extreme weather here in Houston. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with the weather here, but you could start the day with sun and it can end up with the tornado.

So those are kind of some things that got in our way of some of our standardized training, whether it was Safe School Ambassadors or staff training. And then of course, there was a lot of, I said, growing pains in regards to technology and protocol changes. So, for example, onboarding everybody to Anonymous Alerts and for them to understand the purpose, for the kids to understand what is reportable, what isn’t reportable, different reasons like that. And we also built out a digital platform, like I said, before Sentinel even emerged. We made our own prior to that so that we could get those pieces of data, those trends. We could look to see where we could fill the gap on those needs. And that is pretty much the greatest impact that we’ve had. Here are a couple of those lessons learned that I talked to you guys about. Definitely, we feel proud of the work that we’ve done. It’s been preventative, it’s been proactive. And lessons that we’ve learned has definitely been really work the staff buy-in, the community buy-in, because sometimes you have to go slow to be able to go fast. But now that we’re here, it’s just so exciting how it’s like a domino effect. Like I told you, when did we ever imagine that our kiddos were going to go present at a worldwide forum? And so that’s just amazing. We are recipients of STOP 2023, which is currently still going on. And so what we decided, because Safe School Ambassadors worked so well with our secondary campuses, why not start the kids earlier and vertically align? And so we are going to continue all of these successes that we had thanks to STOP 2020. They are still implemented to this day. We are going to continue it. And even though, like I said, we have some challenges coming up in public education in Texas this upcoming school year, these are things that our administrators and our upper administrators in the district, our leadership is so committed to because they’ve seen the fruits of all of this labor. And so just excited to share that with you guys today.

Brent: Thank you so much. Yeah, it’s great to think back to 2020 and just all of the challenges that that pose. It was really great to see how y’all have gotten through it and are continuing the work. So thank you so much for sharing. Jess from SERRC, you are up next, so I’ll hand it over to you.

Jess Mangram: Thank you. I don’t have a presentation, but my name is Jess Mangram. I’m from SERRC in Alaska. We’re Alaska’s Educational Resource Center. We’re also Alaska’s only educational resource center, so we service the entire state. It’s about 127,000 students. This is our second STOP School Violence grant. Our first one was just called STOP IT because originally we just wanted to provide anonymous reporting for districts just so that students could report things that were happening. We all know what anonymous reporting is. That’s what we wanted to do the first time. We had some of the larger districts in the state decide that they didn’t want their data reported on a federal grant, so they pulled out, which allowed us to turn in the GAM and create a position for a school safety specialist. So the school safety specialist makes sure that schools know what they’re doing when they’re implementing the ARS and what’s helping comb through their school safety plans, just because sometimes they inherit those and don’t look at them. So a lot of what she was doing was not rewriting school safety plans, but just combing through to see what needed to be updated, what might is, maybe is outdated and needs to be renewed or checked. And the cool thing was, with that position originally, she was connecting districts. So we had a district who had a landslide, and they lost about three teachers in the landslide. So she helped immediately with whatever she could in that case. But then a few months later, another district lost a teacher to a polar bear attack, which I know is the most unique Alaska statement ever made.

But she connected those two districts to kind of help the students and the teachers and the schools with that wraparound, like, “Where do we go from here? How do we make sure people feel safe? How do we make sure the communities feel safe?” So that was something really, I feel bad calling that cool, but it was a cool thing to see come out of the first grant where the connection was made and she could help those two districts kind of fix some hurt in the districts. When we applied for our new grant, we wanted to kind of expand on that position. So our new grant continues with anonymous reporting, but it also added culturally responsive restorative practices training. We were all IIRP trained, and then we kind of took that IIRP training and turned it into more of an Alaska-focused, culturally responsive restorative practices training. There are five major regions in Alaska where the tribes are all a little different. So we kind of have five starting points for that training to respond to all of the different regions accordingly and with the right language and with the right names for things and in the correct languages. Because there are a lot of languages here in Alaska. Another thing we added was the Youth Mental Health First Aid training, so that’s provided at no cost to the districts. They can have their staff Youth Mental Health First Aid trained. And then next year we would like to add Teen Mental Health First Aid training where the students can also be reporters to the youth, the people who are trained in Youth Mental Health First Aid. Sorry, I just oversee that part.

So I have very… I understand it, but the words are wrong sometimes. And then she’s continuing the school safety planning. So she still goes through school safety plans and attaches resources and says, “Hey, you could update this. I attended this webinar. Here’s the recording. You should watch it at certain timestamps to kind of see what the most updated protocols or best practices are.” And then we also are now hosting a website called the Alaska Victims Assistance Partnership or the AVAP website, which includes resources for schools to help plan and prepare for emergency situations. Not only responding to mass violence events, but also for things like, “Okay, we’ve had a landslide. Now what can we do in our community to kind of help people with the resources and the cleanup and the getting back to normal afterwards?” So that’s been how our grant has changed between our first grant and our second grant. I have some warm fuzzies for us that happened with our newest grant. So one of our districts shared that through the anonymous reporting app, they received an after-hours report of a student who was having suicide ideations. But because they received that report and it was escalated properly, they were able to help that student. And in a school of 107 students, one is big. Like, one save is really, really big. There are only 107 students in that community. So to help the one was a huge deal. We presented about the anonymous reporting or the ARS at our school safety summit that our state holds, just kind of why it’s important, even if you aren’t doing it with us, why you should be doing it in some form for students.

And that was really well attended, not only by our partner districts, but also by districts who have refused or have said they don’t want to get into the frou-frou reporting of mental health stuff. So that was really nice to tell them the nitty-gritty of why it’s important to provide that for students. Five of our districts are currently piloting on-demand mental health through our anonymous reporting too, so they get access to a state-certified counselor. There’s a lot of background work that went into it, a lot of parent approvals, a lot of permission, a lot of tech setup that we were unaware of, but now we have muscled our way through. So students have access to a counselor right through their app. We’ve seen a really interesting shift from last year. Our reports were about 70% on phones, and so the other 30% was through their Chromebooks or whatever they’re issued. Alaska’s been really heavy on the no phones in classrooms, so we’ve seen that shift go to about 60% in their Chromebooks and then 40% still from their phones. But we were worried about how that was going to impact their ability to report, and we found that school districts have been really receptive to listening to us say, “Hey, well, if you’re not going to let them have their phones, you need to put this app on their Chromebooks so that they can still use it. It’s still an important thing.” We’ve administered or administered, provided training for Youth Mental Health First Aid in three of our communities, and it’s been very well received. And the cool thing about our trainings is they’re not limited to just the schools.

We also invite community members. So we did one in a community, and the tribal leader came, the housing coordinator came, both of the police officers in the community came. So everyone came to the training, which built that community. They saw they were all there. Now they all have a common language. So that was really exciting. And then our culturally responsive restorative practices. We all live in the same world. We all know how hot-button those words are right now, so we’ve gotten some really nice feedback from those. One of our teachers who came to that training said that when he initially attended our first session, he thought it was just a waste of his time or something that they had to do for the grant. He told us that to our faces. And then we went back for a follow-up training, and he said, “I actually tried it. I listened to you. I didn’t think it was going to work, and I tried it with a group of high school students. We were talking about something that was kind of a heavy topic, and we put them in a circle, and they talked in a circle about it, and everyone got to hear everyone’s feelings.” So he was like, “I am a believer,” which was really nice to hear from his first feedback to his second feedback. But again, having the common language that they can use in their schools and in their communities has been really helpful. We actually make adults get into a circle and do some restorative practices activities when they’re in the training, and they said that was really helpful, one, to see how we kind of controlled the circle, because adults are the hardest students.

No one can convince me otherwise. So making them get in the circle, making them do the activities, making them take the activities seriously and respect everyone else in the circle was really helpful for them, especially for the high school teachers. Because then they knew how to do it and how to kind of not yell at their kids and get them to listen, but kind of teach the, not compliance, that’s a strong word. But teach the routines and teach how important it is to respect the circle. And then we’ve done school safety planning. We’re working really hard on school safety planning with four districts currently. It’s open to all of our districts. We have 22 districts participating, but four of them have taken us up on it and are giving us their plans to go through. One of the things that we found really that makes it more challenging is of our 22 districts, only four of our districts are on the road system, and only one of them has more than 5,000 students. So it really is catered, unique. Every district has different needs, different things that they have access to. We work closely with the state troopers in Alaska because sometimes that’s the only law enforcement that goes to a community. And then we try to work really closely with police districts in, or police offices in whatever district we’re working in, just so they know what the anonymous reporting system is, what that means to them, and that it’s not a burden that they have to carry. It’s something that we’ll only escalate to them if it’s deemed necessary. So that’s been really helpful and increased our buy-in some for school districts. I think that’s all I have. That’s my brain.

Brent: Jess, thank you so much. Yeah, I’m hearing so many commonalities. I mean, y’all are thousands of miles apart, but this idea of engaging as many folks in the community as possible in these systems, whether it’s law enforcement, first responders, folks in the school, community members, to really buy in and treat this as everyone’s problem, not just the school’s problem or whoever’s problem. So just commendable work, y’all. This is really cool to hear about. I’m now going to turn it over to our audience of lovely NCSS teammates. What questions do you have for our panel? And panelists, you’re welcome to ask questions of each other as well.

Casey Kotrba: Can I go first? I was hoping to ask Napa County just… I know COVID helped with building your coalition, but how did you encourage engagement, and how did you get the buy-in before you had the large group?

Seana: Julie, do you want me to start or do you want to take it?

Julie: Yeah. Why don’t you? Yeah.

Seana: I really think the key is actually having something they need because that’s what happened during COVID. They really needed to find out what was going on. They needed to find out if they could reopen schools. There was all these questions and so everyone was very motivated to start participating in conversations and meetings and being plugged in. And so I really think the same was true when we started to transition from sort of these COVID meetings to more of forming the coalition. When we started reaching out, because first responders weren’t really necessarily a part of that COVID piece and it was more public health and the schools. And as we brought the first responders in, they were like, “Ugh, schools have been on our to-do list forever. We never quite seem to be able to get to it. So, yes, let’s do this.” And so I think as long as we keep having content and information that they need, then they show up. But that is, they’re not going to show up if they attend a meeting and it’s not really that helpful or doesn’t feel like a good use of their time.

Julie: Yeah, I would just add that I think we created the structures for this to happen. Like, everybody wanted it to happen, but couldn’t I think see how it could happen. And I think with our county role, we were able to bring all the players together with a structure and kind of a pathway in place. So I think that gave them confidence that it was going to happen. They weren’t going to waste their time.

Brent: Okay. Thank you. Other questions?

Heather Murphy: I have a question for Gabriela. I’m curious if you have any recommendations for other school districts looking to really empower youth voice, youth perspective, and start some of these, I think you call them the Safe School Ambassador program or club?

Gabriela: Definitely. So just to clarify, it is like lessons learned, best practices on how to kind of get this rolling in your district? I am going to say that I love Community Matters, the organization that created this. It’s been around for a long time. But one of the, I want to say, one of the growth areas is their marketing. Having pictures, videos, being able to show principals especially, because a lot of it is that buy-in and understanding. You can have it in text, but that doesn’t really convey the story or the goal as opposed to having the pictures and the video and the stories. Jess did amazing job when she talked about the warm fuzzies. Those anecdotal stories, they go a long way. And so what we’ve done is we’ve created a kickoff. So our upper administration has spoken to them and said, “Hey, we want these programs on your campuses,” right? So they’re voluntold initially. But then when we get together and we make it a fun event and we show them the background, that we share those anecdotal stories, that has really taken off to be able to tell them like the personal stories, how it promotes not only safety, but it promotes the positive school climate on their campus. They’re sold. And so I would say if you’re starting from scratch, talk to other districts. We are, and Allison knows this, we are very open to speaking to other districts, other states. We’ll share our pictures because, like I said, we’re working on a video. But marketing, I want to say, is everything to get them to visualize what the mission is.

Brent: Other questions? I’ve got a question Jess, for you, I don’t know if you can speak to, obviously you’ve described the district spread across just vast distances and some connected to the road system and others not. I’m curious if there’s been any kind of offline connection between the districts. So maybe not through the formal programming or the summit, but have you noticed any sort of communication between the districts or support that they’ve provided each other in the between times?

Jess: We do a lot of connecting districts who are… Sorry, I’m getting over a cold and I’m going to take a sip of water. We do a lot of connecting districts. Like if one district is similar size to another district and they’re struggling with something and we know this district kind of has a handle on it or at least has a starting point, then we check with the district who has the handle to see if we can connect the other district. So we do a lot of that background because we know a lot of what each district is doing independently and then they take it from there. Sorry.

Brent: No, you’re all good. Thank you. Great. Other questions? Laura?

Laura Schreiner: Many questions. Thank you all. It’s incredibly impressive to hear what you all have accomplished and continue doing with your teams. I heard another common theme that you were talking about, a lot of this creation, need and creation that you’ve done around whether it’s shared collaborative partnerships and spaces that may be countywide, maybe across spanning diverse communities, schools, regions, and needs. I’m really curious to hear any learnings or key aspects, considerations you might uplift for others trying to do this work across a lot of different regions and needs around safety. But in terms of, I heard this need for clear, comprehensive, standardized, universal guidance and tools, language that has shared understanding, but also this need for flexibility or ability to adapt or tailor to local contexts. And so I’d just love if anyone, any of you feels there were key learnings or aspects, recommendations you might have for others. How do you create that? How do you build towards that in a standardized way that’s also not too rigid that others can be customized I sent, or customized? And I know, Jess, you spoke about cultural responsiveness. All of these pieces are also just huge. They’re not easy to accomplish. So I know it’s a big question.

Jess: We did a lot initially with customizing. I am not from Alaska, I’ve moved to Alaska with the military. So we had to find community members who wanted to teach us about their culture and then would allow us to turn that around and teach other teachers and people in their community about the culture as well. So we did a lot of connecting and understanding and learning. It’s fascinating to learn, but it was a lot to sort through initially.

Gabriela: And I’m going to go ahead and say our experience was maybe a little bit more streamlined because we’re one district versus trying to forge that gap between districts. I feel like that is definitely a bigger challenge. But even within the district, you have your believers and your non-believers that are like, “Well, that doesn’t really pertain to academic achievement, for example,” and other priorities which are equally as important. Nobody’s taking that piece away. But I would have to piggyback on what Jess said. Connection is everything. Relationship is everything. And being at the table with the leaders and talking about it and explaining it and showing, again, my marketing pitch, these are the objectives that we’re trying to accomplish. And I will tell you, after the first year and they were able to see, for example, a uniform training schedule, they love that because they’re like, “Oh, my staff member didn’t get this semester, but it’s already scheduled for next semester.” Love that. I don’t have to recreate the wheel because there’s already a protocol in place and there’s a person that I can actually pick up the phone and call and consult with. So that connection and that trust and just being, like you said, you talked about flexibility, so it not being so rigid that people feel imposed on as part of that connection piece. That’s what we experienced within the district. And that’s why I feel like we’ve been able to do some of the things we’ve done because we’ve gotten a lot of support from leadership and just regular staff that believes in the work that we’re doing.

Jess: I have one more thing now that I’m not going to pass away too. We are very careful to protect our districts’ privacy. So when I say, “Oh, I have a district who’s doing that,” I don’t tell them, “Oh, it’s this district that’s doing that.” I just say, “I have another district who’s doing that. Let me see if I can connect you,” because Alaskans really like to keep their privacy. And I’m sure it’s that way for other districts, but Alaskans are aggressive about it. So it’s a lot of protecting anonymity before connecting resources too, which I think we have a lot of street cred for doing that at this point. So I think that’s helpful as well.

Julie: I would just add in terms of, kind of something, a tip is really be thoughtful about who you’re bringing, who you’re inviting to the table and who your messengers are. Because that really can have a big impact, right? Who’s going to be the person who’s going to be able to carry the message, in our case, back to each district? Or who’s the person from the police who’s most invested in this work and is going to be able to be a thoughtful contributor at the table? So doing a little groundwork. Because if we had just called and said, “We’d love to get a representative from the police,” but we had a relationship and a thought about who we wanted and we tried to… You can’t always choose because sometimes they do just assign. But if you can choose who you’re having, like we chose pretty thoughtfully for our work group, and it wasn’t the entire group. We narrowed it down and then worked with some folks who we thought could help us move through the process quick and also would be good messengers for the large group.

Brent: Thank you all so much for sharing and answering our questions. We appreciate you, and we hope those of you watching or listening are also learning a lot. Thank you all.