Safe Schools & Communities Resources and Research

"All students—regardless of race, national origin, religion, disability, or sex—deserve access to a high-quality education, from preschool through college. Throughout the last seven-and-a-half years, the Obama administration and the Department of Education have worked to safeguard the rights and protections of our students by enforcing our nation’s civil rights laws and implementing regulations that prohibit discrimination and providing additional support to educators to prevent such discrimination.

Building on these critical efforts, today, the Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) launched a webpage that consolidates resources from across the Federal government about religious discrimination. The new page links to OCR’s relevant policy guidance and case resolutions involving religious discrimination claims, as well as resources in various languages and from other Federal agencies.

We also revised our online complaint form to clarify when OCR can investigate complaints from individuals who believe they have experienced racial, ethnic, or national origin discrimination involving their religion. Both efforts aim to ensure that students of all religious backgrounds receive the full protection of federal civil rights laws.

OCR’s jurisdiction under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 extends to discrimination based on a person’s actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics, including membership in a religion that may be perceived to exhibit ethnic characteristics (e.g., Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and Sikh students). Our updated online form reaffirms that students and parents of all faiths can file complaints with OCR that include aspects of religious discrimination in education, even though Title VI does not expressly prohibit religious discrimination.

Such complaints are not new to OCR. Last year, we received more than 450 complaints of racial or national origin harassment, including some involving religion. We have used enforcement as a key tool to protect students of many religious backgrounds from unlawful discrimination. For example, we have resolved cases involving Jewish students subjected to anti-Semitic epithets or Muslim students targeted for wearing a hijab and called terrorists. In instances where schools failed to address a hostile environment, we have secured commitments from those schools to improve their harassment policies and procedures, train staff and students, and conduct school climate surveys.

In addition to resolving cases, OCR has conducted outreach and worked to share resources with the field in order to support schools in their efforts to prevent religious discrimination. Since March, OCR has participated in a series of roundtables with other federal agencies on issues of religious discrimination, including bullying of students from diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds. Our participation in the Justice Department’s Combating Religious Discrimination Today roundtables also has given us the opportunity to hear from communities and advocates around the country on the issue of religious discrimination in our nation’s schools. In June, OCR issued a fact sheet about combating discrimination against Asian-American, Native-Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Muslim, Arab, Sikh, and South Asian students, and I recently blogged about OCR’s work to prevent discrimination involving religion at schools and universities.

We recognize, as the Department recently stated in the Federal Register, that there are “an increasing number of incidents of anti-Semitic bullying and harassment in public schools . . . [and] reports documenting that students who are or are perceived as Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Arab, Middle Eastern, South Asian, or Southeast Asian are frequent targets of bullying and harassment.” In response, the Department revised the regulations for the Equity Assistance Centers (EACs). The EACs, starting in October, will be authorized to provide technical assistance, on request, to public school districts, students and parents, and community organizations to prevent and combat religious discrimination.

Recognizing that data are critical in understanding the problem and measuring progress, later this year every public school district in the country will be required, for the first time, to report to OCR through the Civil Rights Data Collection on the number of incidents of religious-based bullying or harassment in their schools in the 2015-2016 school year. We hope that this information will be useful to schools, policymakers, researchers, and others to facilitate a broader understanding of the scope of this issue.

We look forward to continuing this important work by using all the tools at our disposal to address unlawful discrimination so that all students can learn in safe, inclusive, and welcoming school environments.

Catherine E. Lhamon is Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education.

http://blog.ed.gov/2016/07/protecting-students-religious-backgrounds-unlawful-discrimination/ 

By Melinda Anderson

"Tunette Powell travels across the country counseling families and mentoring youth. An award-winning motivational speaker and author, her professional work in the education field ranges from training nonprofit leaders to consulting for colleges and universities. But none of Powell’s career-related skills could prepare her for the frustration and helplessness of seeing her two sons suspended from preschool, which she pegged to overly harsh and racially biased discipline. In a July 2014 Washington Post opinion piece that gained national attention, Powell relates how her boys—ages 3 and 4—were suspended from their Omaha preschool program eight times total in one year. Once published, the essay resonated with readers nationwide. “So many parents reached out [to me] … a lot of black mothers” who shared her experience with excessive suspensions, said Powell. “We live in a time when we just say, ‘Suspend them, get rid of them.’”

A glance at news headlines confirms that Powell and her sons are not an anomaly. From a 3-year-old suspended for too many toileting mishaps to a 4-year-old booted out of school for kicking off his shoes and crying, toddlers are racking up punishments that leave many parents and child experts bewildered. Overall the rise in school suspensions and disproportionate impact on youth of color has triggered a flurry of interest from activists and high-ranking government officials, and for good reason: A February 2015 report from UCLA's Civil Rights Project examined out-of-school suspension data for every school district in the country and found that nearly 3.5 million children—about six out of every 100 public school students—were suspended at least once during the 2011-12 school year, with close to half of those (1.55 million) suspended multiple times.

But for some more astounding than these discipline statistics were the thousands of the nation’s youngest learners—nearly 8,000 preschoolers—suspended from school in the same year, often for relatively minor disruptions and misbehaviors. For researchers and educators immersed in this work, why preschoolers are put out of school and the entrenched racial disparity seems most closely tied to reasons such as teacher bias and children living in poverty whose hitting, biting, and pinching is frequently labeled misconduct rather than developmental delays."...

For full post, click on title above or here: 

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/12/why-are-so-many-preschoolers-getting-suspended/418932/ 

By Amber Ferguson
"The opposite of drug addiction is not sobriety, it’s connection, according to best-selling author Johann Hari.
 

The animated video above, adapted from Hari's Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, claims that the drug war has failed because it has focused on eliminating drugs and punishing users -- two tools that have proven woefully ineffective at stemming either supply or demand. Instead, Hari says, we can address the desire for drugs by understanding that our surroundings play a huge part in driving us to abuse mind-altering substances.
 

According to psychologist Bruce Alexander, changing a person's environment and social setting can dramatically affect his or her chance of addiction. In the late 1970s, he developed the “Rat Park” experiment, which debunked previous beliefs that certain drugs will make any user addicted. While previous experiments had shown rats that were given a choice between regular water and water laced with heroin would choose the latter -- and keep going back until they died -- Alexander's experiment showed that wasn't always the case.

Rats in Alexander's experiment were given food, play equipment, other rats to interact with and both regular and drug-laced water. The rats lived without becoming addicted to the drugs, and none of them overdosed.
 

Hari argues that these findings can be extended to humans. The best way to address addiction, he says, is not with jail time or isolating addicted people from others in society. Instead, we should give them support, a healthy environment to thrive in and activities that involve substantial social interaction -- all of which will help them on the road to recovery and eliminate the desire to return to dangerous drug use.

The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services reports that 44 people in the United States die from prescription opioid overdose each day. The number of heroin-related fatalities increased by 39 percent between 2012 and 2013, when 8,260 people died of an overdose."...

For full post and to view related video, click on title above or here: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cure-to-drug-addiction-video_56377561e4b0c66bae5cf58f 

..."A recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals some important clues on how to change a school’s mores. The gist of the findings? To change school norms, the most well-connected students have to lead the way.

Scholars Elizabeth Paluck, Hana Shepherd and Peter Aronow, who conducted the yearlong project in 56 New Jersey middle schools during the 2012-13 academic year, sought to discover the impact of student-led anti-conflict programs on kids’ behavior. When it was over, they found that groups led by influential students were most successful in changing the way fellow students treated one another. Indeed, in those schools where an average number of  well-connected kids took part in the campaign, reports of student conflict dropped by 30 percent.

The more the solution comes from the kids themselves, rather than eager adult overseers, the more likely other students will hear and respond to the message.

These results offer a promising new approach for schools in the midst of a cultural crisis, whether from bullying, cheating or some other undesirable student behavior. To aid educators, the scholars have made their detailed curriculum available online.
 

The study team designed the investigation with care. To ensure the accuracy of their results, researchers put half of the 56 schools into a control group — which received no specialized anti-conflict programming — and offered the remaining randomly selected 28 schools a carefully designed intervention that sought to reduce friction among the students.

To test the idea that the most socially connected kids have the greatest influence among their peers, the researchers first had to figure out who those kids were. Here, they took a novel approach: All students were given a survey that included every student’s name at that particular middle school. Each child then was tasked with identifying the 10 individuals they’d spent the most time with during the last few weeks, either in person or online. The survey also asked about student perceptions of conflict in school.
 

This “social network mapping” strategy, which aims to identify the most influential people in a group, differed from typical research methods in two important ways. First, it was driven by students rather than adults; grownups had no role in selecting the influential kids. “When adults pick out students to intervene with, they often pick the popular kids or the traditional leaders,” Paluck said, leaving out some less visible but more influential students, including those who aren’t models of good behavior. Second, by asking kids who they spent time with, rather than who they called friends, the survey revealed which children had the most actual influence."...

For full post, click on title or image above: 

http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/01/20/how-empowering-influential-kids-can-change-school-culture-for-the-better/ 

Every Child Has a Right to a Healthy and Safe School

"Health Hazards from WiFi 

The World Health Organization warned in May of 2011 that microwave radiation from wireless devices such as WiFi and cell phones may cause cancer. It is considered a possible carcinogen on the same list as DDT, lead and engine exhaust. Governments and school boards can no longer say WiFi is safe. 
 

It is important to note that both cell phones and WiFi came to the market without safety testing as a gift to telecom companies to help them expand quickly.

A novel group of symptoms has emerged in children attending schools in Simcoe County since the Board installed microwave WiFi transmitters.

Watch a Global News investigation that proves that WiFi is not "SAFE".
Watch what Children and Parents say at one Simcoe County School. 

About WiFi: 

WiFi is a microwave transmitter that is used to connect to the internet without a cable. Wireless systems come with a long list of potential health risks. Most schools in Ontario already have safe cable connections that are faster and more secure.  However, school boards are pushing to install microwave systems that end up largely unused and continuously expose students to strong microwave signals. It is cheaper and safer to simply add more cables where needed. Hard-wired systems are now available from computer stores that easily turn every electrical socket in a building into a internet port. This is another easy and safe solution for schools or homes.  
       
Your Right To Know: WiFi is harmful to children.  Microwave exposure is linked to infertility, erratic heart rates, learning impairment, behavioural changes, leukemia and cancer, especially in children.

    The Committee has documented reports from children such as , "I can't hold my pencil sometimes," "I feel faint," "I keep having headaches," or "I feel sick to my stomach at school."  A distrubing number of children have suffered sudden erratic heart rates or full cardiac arrest during their school day. Cancer takes several years to develop before it is detectable."

For full post, click on title above or here: 
http://safeschool.ca/ 

A group of Boston students have released what's believed to be the first app in the nation for students to hold staff accountable to honoring their rights.

[Picture Caption from linked page: Boston Student Advisory Council president Glorya Wornum, left, and BSAC member Ayomide Olumuyiwa show off the Boston Student Rights app in the hallway of Madison Park Technical Vocational High School. (Peter Balonon-Rosen/WBUR)]

For full post, click on title above or here: http://learninglab.wbur.org/2015/06/16/why-boston-students-created-a-know-your-rights-app/

By Alicia St. Andrews

"Nearly 300 impassioned and committed people crowded into the Green Room at the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center last week to launch Trauma Transformed. Known as T2, the regional effort – representing the San Francisco Department of Public Health and seven Bay Area counties – is funded by a four-year, $4-million grant from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

Youth, families, health directors and public health leaders from the seven counties participated in the celebration. San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee committed to partnering with communities to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma and poverty.

Dr. Nadine Burke Harris emphasized how understanding the research about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are the basis for understanding trauma.

Louise Rogers, San Mateo health chief, accounting the tragic stories of systems-involved youth and the county’s process of responding to their trauma, said, “It all starts with local stories.”

http://www.acesconnection.com/g/california-aces-action/blog/trauma-transformed-launches-regional-effort-in-san-francisco-bay-area 

By Teresa Watanabe
"When Viviana Martin Del Campo walked into her sixth-period geometry class at Venice High School in March, she saw a group of boys huddled over a cellphone, laughing. The target of their attention turned out to be a sexually explicit photo of two classmates. The photo, circulated on social media, embroiled the school in turmoil after the arrests of 15 boys, mostly on campus, on suspicion of sexually assaulting two girls.

But what shocked Viviana, 16, wasn't so much the photo. It was the arrests. Sexting has become so common, she said, that few teenagers would ever imagine that police would get involved. "I didn't take it as much because it kind of happens often," she said. "Students shouldn't be criminalized for it."

As teens' access to social media expands — 92% report going online daily and three-quarters have access to smartphones, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center report — sexting has also proliferated. A 2014 Texas study found that 28% of teens surveyed had sent naked pictures of themselves via social media and 60% had been asked for one. Both researchers and students say that sending other texts — including photos of others, semi-nude pictures, sexually explicit cartoons and messages — is even more pervasive.
 

"It's a perfect storm of adolescent hormones coupled with the immediacy of a smartphone," said Jeff Temple, an associate professor and psychologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch who coauthored the sexting study.
 

The growth in sexually explicit photos in text messages has set off wide-ranging responses from families, educators, legislators and law enforcement."...

http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-sexting-20150707-story.html#page=1 

"When educators talk about "the whole child," we recognize our students as humans with complex lives that include interests, joys, passions, experiences, fears, needs, and hopes. Sometimes their lives may also include traumatic experiences, either in their past or ongoing even as we interact with them day to day.

As a teacher, you have a few ways of finding out that a student has experienced trauma. Some IEPs will incorporate this information. Sometimes a counselor or social worker may fill you in, or a parent or family member. The trauma may be a known part of your community's fabric -- for example, a natural disaster that destroyed a student's home, or a war in the country where your student used to live.

A student may also personally disclose that he or she experienced current or past trauma. For more on responding in the moment, see this guideline from the Australian Institute of Family Studies (PDF), which is specific to abuse but applicable to many types of trauma that a student may disclose. Be sure that you know your state's mandated reporting laws and follow through on any in-school systems that may be in place.

After receiving this information -- in whichever way it comes to you -- now what?

Here are some considerations and steps when integrating it into your practice in a way that best supports your student.

1. Absorb the information.

Take the time you need to process your own response to learning about the trauma, in a place that is safe for you. We all respond in different ways to hearing about our students' experiences with trauma. My own reaction to information about my students' lives has covered a spectrum from sadness to anger, heartbreak to disbelief, and sometimes the information impacts me in ways I didn't anticipate. In order to best serve my students, I need to adequately process these emotions until I am grounded enough to be supportive to others. Whether it's private journaling, talking to a trusted friend or colleague, or accessing your own therapist or counselor, start by working through your emotions, whatever they may be.

2. Recognize emotional truth.

Remember that the factual truth is unimportant compared to the student's emotional truth. As a teacher, your role is not to investigate the details of a student's trauma, or even know all or any of them. Your role is not to challenge the student's or family's description of what happened or ask whether it really occurred. Humans respond in a huge variety of ways to stressors, and so your time is better spent understanding how your studentemotionally responds to the traumatic experience, and how that emotional response may impact the student in your school setting.

3. Be clear about your role.

A true community of support for a student requires a few different roles, depending on the situation: teachers, social workers, mental health professionals, and care providers/family, to name a few. Don't try to take on every role on that list -- it's not healthy for you or for the student! If you're not sure who else is involved in a student's constellation of care, make it your first priority to find out, and if you have the permission of the student and family, communicate with those people.

4. Seek to better understand "problem behaviors."

Once you develop an understanding of how the student is impacted by trauma, use this context to reframe what might be thought of as "problem behaviors." Example: Instead of seeing a student's rude outburst as a sign of willful disrespect, I might instead understand it as a marker of a missing emotional self-regulation skill. A student who can't sit still and paces around the classroom? With an understanding of trauma impacts, I might now recognize how that student has a heightened sense of vigilance around safety in her environment. Once I reframe these behaviors for myself, I can now respond to the core issue rather than the behavior itself.

5. Coordinate with others.

Students can develop a sense of safety when multiple adults in their lives respond in consistent ways. Using common language, offering the same set of strategies, or using similar cues can help a student internalize positive ways of addressing challenges. Even without coordinating specific strategies, a common mindset toward the child goes a long way -- see Unconditional Positive Regard or Kids Do Well If They Can as examples.

6. Learn from the experts.

While every student responds differently to trauma, there are tons of resources out there for better understanding impacts of trauma, ways to be supportive in and out of the classroom, and how to build positive social and emotional skills. One of the best experts, though? The student! Ask your student what he needs to feel supported, what strategies work or don't work when he's having a hard time, and how you can help him be successful in your class. Some students might surprise you with their insight, and some might never have been asked and will benefit from the opportunity to develop their answers.

7. Continue checking in with yourself.

Being in a supportive role to someone who is managing the impacts of trauma can be challenging, and may result in vicarious trauma or compassion fatigue. Check out NCTSN's Self Care for Educators resource(PDF) for more information and tips on these challenges. But the bottom line is taking care of yourself and getting your own support so that you may support others.

Our students benefit when we thoughtfully align our strategies and supports with our best understanding. Though it is difficult to find out that our students may be in pain, this knowledge is also the first step in helping them move forward.

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/helping-students-who-experienced-trauma-alex-shevrin 

"What happened at a rural high school was, according to a new guide to school discipline, the starting point for change. Faced with chronically tardy students and a steady stream of office referrals, including a disproportionate number of American Indian students, school administrators asked: Why? Why the lateness? Why the office referrals?
 

With schools across California and the nation working to reform discipline practices — either voluntarily or under legal pressure— the guide, “Addressing the Root Causes of Disparities in School Discipline: An Educator’s Action Planning Guide,” is intended as a tool to help schools “look for the whole story” behind who is disciplined and why...."
 

http://edsource.org/2015/getting-to-the-why-of-discipline-disparities/83861 

For full post, click on title above or here: http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/16/us/georgia-school-paddle-video/ 

To sign petition to Georgia State House to end the practice of corporal punishment in schools:

https://www.change.org/p/georgia-state-house-no-kindergarten-student-should-ever-face-corporal-punishment-disguised-as-discipline 

By Katy Butler with The BULLY Project

"Upstander n.  A person who chooses to take positive action in situations where individuals are being harmed or in the face of injustice in society.

When I was in middle school, I was bullied all the time for being gay.  Kids called me unspeakable names, and violently attacked me. One day, one group of guys even slammed my hand into my locker, breaking my finger, laughing as they did it.  So many people – students, teacher and even parents ­– just watched it all happen. They were all bystanders, and no one was teaching them otherwise.  The worse thing about this is that it wasn't just happening to me. Bullying affects over 13 million kids a year.

Back then, although the word bystander was widely known, we did not have a word to describe those being more than a bystander, those people actively standing up for each other, an act that would have made the world of difference for kids like me. But a lot has changed since I was at school. Today, we DO have a word, and that word is upstander.

Thousands of people today are mobilizing around the term upstander, and taking action to help others in their schools and communities all over the world. Research shows that over 50% of the time, when an upstander intervenes, a bullying situation is stopped in less than 10 seconds. So, imagine how many more upstanders, and how much less bullying there could be if the word was in the dictionary!

Thousands of schools around the world are teaching words that have not been recognized, and this just has to change, especially when I look at all the frivolous words that HAVE been added in the last year; words like Fratty, Jeggings, totes and double-double.

This is why I,  along with Sarah Deker, Monica Mahal, the Bully Project and a coalition of supporters and organizations, are petitioning for upstander to be added to the Merriam Webster and Oxford English Dictionary. 

Standing up for what's right is our responsibility. Please sign and share our petition to #addupstander." 

Katy Butler
Monica Mahal & Sarah Decker
The BULLY Project
Facing History & Ourselves
Bystander Revolution
Not In Our School
National School Climate Center
GLAAD
GLSEN
BBYO
They Say Project

To sign the petition, click here: : 

https://www.change.org/p/add-upstander-to-the-dictionary-addupstander#addupstander