Safety is built on trusting relationships, open communication, and mutual support, and calls for the participation of everyone in the school community. Youth (and adults!) told us they felt safe when they felt heard, seen, valued, and supported by those around them. People spoke about school safety as “a sense of belonging,” “connection,” and “space for vulnerability,” and knowing that you can show up as your “whole self,” without being judged. As Bianca put it, “The thing that makes you feel safe is the relationships.”
Read More...This might feel like a big departure from ideas about physical safety as the absence of violence, but young people, educators, and parents were clear that physical safety and emotional safety are deeply interconnected—and that both are required for students to be able to learn and grow. Participants directly linked the building of strong relationships and communication skills to violence prevention. Young people especially emphasized the connection between safety and the presence of supportive, relatable school staff who were always ready to listen and help.
At the same time, participants were clear that there is no single definition for safety within a community, and that personal feelings about safety are shaped by our unique identities, experiences, and relationships to power and privilege. With this in mind, youth and adults spoke about the need to engage in ongoing community conversations to develop shared understandings about safety, engaging all school stakeholders and centering student perspectives. As Nori explained, “We don’t always agree, and we don’t all come from the same backgrounds or same circumstances, but when there’s a level of connection there or respect, then that helps safety.”
We also heard about structural forces that make people feel unsafe in school, including the presence of racism, the power that staff have over students, and past “educational trauma” for students, staff, and parents. A number of staff and students also spoke painfully about how metal detectors and school safety agents contributed to young people feeling criminalized and stereotyped in school, on the basis of class and race. It is important to note, however, that some youth said that school safety agents and metal detectors did make them feel safe. Other students grappled with mixed feelings—naming that metal detectors and school safety agents criminalize youth, but not having a sense of how to keep schools safe without them. The school staff we spoke to had more consensus about the negative impact that school safety agents and metal detectors have on their students. This diversity in perspectives reaffirms that the conversation of “what makes us feel safe,” is both essential and ongoing.
Listen to Community Voices
Hear from students, parents, and educators about how they are reimagining school safety, together.
“The connection between emotional and physical safety… A lot of physical altercations… stem from people not feeling emotionally safe. If you create a space where people feel emotionally safe, like the other types of safety are kind of already built in there…. I feel safe when I feel like people see me for my whole self… No one’s going to come at me if I make a mistake or do something wrong, that they’ll nurture me and help guide me through that. But I won’t be chastised or excommunicated if I’m not doing everything right.”
“I also feel safe when I can express myself when I know that if I make a mistake or something is not right, I will be given a chance to like fix it… explain to me why it’s wrong… I’m also thinking about some of the times I’ve asked students this question and been really surprised at some of the answers I find. And just thinking about how, what safety looks like for me, might be different than what it looks like for other people…making sure that I’m not making assumptions… Just because it’s working for me, that doesn’t mean it’s working for others.”
“Going through the metal detectors in the morning… I felt very uncomfortable… They like to stereotype Black and Brown students being violent, or always having to carry some sort of weapon… It’s very wrong. At the end of the day, if you want your students to feel safe, then make them feel safe by not… just engraving fear into the thinking… There have been times from other campuses where there has been violence and somebody has brought weapons to school, and that has been alarming for me. So I understand why they have metal detectors. I just don’t necessarily agree with the concept of why they need it. Because students shouldn’t have to live in fear…. the school system should take other measures rather than just having metal detectors… They need to hear the students’ opinions… We shouldn’t have an administrator’s opinion or principal’s opinion… See how we feel about it instead of speaking for us.”
“Is it impossible for RJ to work in an inherently racist system? Is it just impossible? Do we have to tear it all down? …So many students find schools so traumatizing. And they’re never going to feel safe at school…. I can only speak from the students in my program [who have incarceration histories]. Now, they will never feel safe. They hated school, they hated it. They never felt safe because they felt like they were going to be called a monster, an animal, they were going to be the one kicked out… And so school, it wasn’t safe to them in any kind of emotional or physical way.”
“I wish we didn’t have the security guards. But I don’t know how much power my school alone has to change that… But I would say, at the very least, it would have been cool to hold like a restorative justice circle. It’s like students who want to participate and any of the security guards to just talk about how, I guess how everyone feels about them and how the students can feel safer, what the security guards are doing wrong or right, and how things can be improved. I think that would have been useful.”
“It’s a conundrum, right? I sometimes think that RJ can never truly work as long as we’re in a punitive system. Because as long as a principal or an admin or a dean or a teacher can suspend the student, it’s like as long as the opportunity is there, it’s always going to be there…. Ultimately, I think the job of RJ is to abolish the police, and including the police that live inside our heads… like the code of conduct is a carceral system.”
“My child was always the only person of color in elementary school… She felt unsafe because she was called [anti-Black racist and misogynist slurs]. She had teachers that basically treated her differently than other staff. She never physically felt unsafe in terms of violence… But emotionally she didn’t feel safe because [of]…. racism in microaggressions that happened to her. It messed up her confidence and it messed up her feeling of safety. When she goes out now, she’ll notice in a room, ‘Am I the only person that looks different than other kids?’ And that’s a safety issue to her because it makes her feel like she has to conform, she has to alter herself to adapt to the situation. There’s never been an issue with a physical sense of safety. But the emotional sense, yes, she’s definitely felt unsafe.”
Work through Contradictions
Vent Diagrams help us reflect on the challenges, complexities, and contradictions of doing this work, and figure out how we can keep moving forward. Here is one of the big tensions we heard from participants about reimagining safety, together.
Everyone should feel safe in school
Safety means different things to different people
Talk with Your Community
What does this look like for you and the people in your life? Use the prompts below to start reimagining safety in your school and communities, laying the groundwork for community understanding and making change. (Check out the Community Conversations Toolkit for downloadable guides for facilitating discussions about this project.)
Explore. Who do you see currently defining safety in your community? What might their definition of safety be?
Share Experiences. What are the spaces in your life where you define your own rules and responsibilities? What does it feel like to be there?
Envision. In listening to what makes other people feel safe, how would you define what safety is? What does it feel like or look like?
Explore. Where are the places, or who are the people that you feel the safest with? What about them helps you to feel safe?
Share Experiences. Can you think of a moment where somebody responded to a situation in a way that was different than how you would have responded? What did it make you feel or think about?
Envision. What can a community look like where everybody has a role to keep one another safe? How would that change your day-to-day life?
Make It Happen
The young people, educators, and parents we spoke with shared incredible examples of how they are already reimagining safety in their schools, as well as visions of the world we must keep fighting for…. This is what restorative justice looks like, when it’s On Our Terms.
Build School Practice.
Here are specific ideas about how school communities can reimagine safety, together.
- Engage in a collective process with school staff, students, and their families every year to build community values and agreements for members of the school community. Special attention should be paid to student experiences and ideas, and there should be ongoing community reflection about how agreements and school rules are being upheld, including challenges and places for growth.
- Ensure that key community spaces, including school leadership meetings and student advisories, include regular discussions with parents, students, and educators about safety in the school community, including definitions of safety, current needs, personal experiences, and ideas for promoting safety in the school community.
- Incorporate safety and accountability into all job or role descriptions in the school community (not defined through means of policing), demonstrating how safety is created and maintained by the entire community.
- Develop and publicize a list of mental health resources and social supports in your school and neighborhood, with the participation of students, families, and local community partners.
Building Safety Through Community Values:
Nori R. (she/her), staff: Having students create community norms, community agreements. Having them decide what feels safe for them as opposed to you thinking you know what’s going to be safe.
Morgan L. (she/her), staff: Emotionally, whatever is being modeled by the staff, students internalize. So teachers and other staff members don’t feel emotionally safe in the school, if it feels very punitive or if it feels high stakes… I think that trickles down to the students. So I think you have to create a culture amongst staff of emotional safety. And I think… building school-wide norms as staff members is really important to create a sense of safety in the school.
Demand Policy Change.
Here are some key policies needed to better support our schools in transforming school culture and growing restorative justice.
- Provide funding and guidance to schools for processes to design community-specific approaches to school safety, rather than controlling it through city-wide mandates.
- Create community safety worker positions within schools that are not employed by the NYPD and which do not have a policing role, responsible for violence prevention and responses in school communities; such a program might be modeled after community violence interrupters or credible messenger initiatives.