What is a “safe” school? What does a school look like that provides a safe social environment where children are free to be themselves, free to learn and study and grow into their best selves? Is it a place where everyone is kind to everyone else? Where no one is hurt or called names, or excluded? Of course not. Even the best intentioned among us make mistakes, have bad days, forget their commitment to their beliefs. Safety comes when the collective norm for a school holds everyone accountable for their actions and helps children learn from their mistakes and how to make it right. In a safe school, children know they can get help and where they can get it. Adults have the skills to intervene in peer aggression with both compassion and effectiveness. Aggression is in isolated acts, and does not escalate into bullying. Children are protected not just by adults, but also their peers. A safe school uses older students to be role models and agents of change and engage as many parents as possible in the school norms.
Regardless of the program you choose for your school, the Ophelia Project recognizes the following best practices in systemically addressing peer aggression and bullying.
An effective intervention program includes:
- Positive Normative Beliefs: instead of a list of offenses and consequences, positive expectations for behaviors are emphasized and used to guide behavior. The Ophelia Project identified six normative beliefs as the core for all of our programming. You may choose to use these beliefs as your school's code of conduct. Make it a visible, living mantra for all members of the school community publicizing beliefs on bulletin boards, websites, and in newsletters. Whatever beliefs you choose, carefully reinforce the need for personal accountability as a core value for success. In safe school, everyone is accountable for their actions, and when they make a mistake, they make it right.
- School and community buy in: building consensus with stakeholders in the school before starting systemic change. Too often change is engineered from the top down without adequate support from the teachers and parents. The process for gaining buy in is part of the CASS: Creating a Safe School Program Manager's Guide.
- Comprehensiveness: programming includes parents, teachers, school community, and students. If peer aggression programs are delivered by just a few school personnel without the collective energy of the entire school community it will not be seen as necessary beyond the classrooms of personnel who facilitate the program material to students. Infuse the normative beliefs into art projects, school plays, sporting events, or cafeteria activities. Children must be exposed to the normative beliefs in multiple ways over time.
- Training: training is offered for all adults within the school community including school faculty, staff, coaches, bus drivers, parent leaders, recess volunteers - anyone who works with the children in the schools. Training is also offered to student leaders and mentors. It is difficult to schedule the time for training, but without it a program is doomed to fail. All teachers need a common set of skills, beliefs, and strategies to ensure program success honed through refresher trainings. All parents need to be made aware of the school's efforts in creating systemic change with key parents trained as leaders. The students can be a bridge for parents and teachers, embodying the spirit of change.
- Classroom Meetings: a safe, structured setting to discuss problems and peer aggression for at least 30 minutes per week. This time would be permanently in the school schedule because the process of helping children deal with aggression is always a work in progress.
- Youth Leadership: opportunities for students to become agents of change and role models for their peers as an integral part of the systemic change process. We developed a program called Youth Ambassadors to develop leadership. Every school has potential student leaders who see what is going on and want to do something to help.
- Shared language: a consistent, well-structured vocabulary is used by all program participants. This language is introduced in trainings and classroom meetings but used consistently in every environment of the school. To learn The Ophelia Project's Language of Peer Aggression click here.
- Varied teaching methods: presentations, role-plays, Ambassador visits, journaling, action planning, storytelling, literary connections, and engaging classroom activities to name a few. The more ways you can present information to students, using real world application, the more likely it is to "stick" with them. The CASS Classroom Meetings and CASS Concepts for High School program manuals embody this varied type of delivery.
- Outcome evaluation: students and school staff are assessed at the beginning and end of the school year to assess progress both short- and long-term goals and objectives. Evaluations can be used summatively to analyze a year's progress or formatively to plan for ongoing implementation. Strategies need to be examined, new ones should evolve, until dealing with peer aggression has become a systemic process in how the school works.
- Consistency and commitment: How long does systemic change take? If only half of the best practices are employed, it will take much longer than if each is integrated into the program. The goal is to make the normative beliefs "what this school stands for" and every new person entering the school becomes part of the larger whole knowing what is expected of them. New teachers are mentored in the skills and strategies of the school culture as part of their orientation. New parents attend a parent night on school culture initiatives. Continue to train, support, and coach youth through classroom meetings and leadership opportunities.