Reaching Beyond the Basics of School Safety

By Joshua W. Stafford

“It is one of the best things that I have been involved with in my 24 years of serving on a school board,” explains John Summers, president of the Vienna HSD 13-3 school board. Summers is a retired clinical social services director and a certified substance abuse counselor who holds an undergraduate degree from Eastern Illinois University and a master’s in educational psychology from Southern Illinois University. “To me it is a model that gets help to kids that they need ahead of time, as opposed to being reactive to what could be a terrible situation. The wrap-around of having all of the community stakeholders and school personnel working in tandem for the best interest of our kids is a win for everyone.”

School safety is a topic that continues to be vitally important, even more so in light of the current global pandemic. With schools across the state and nation taking various approaches to students returning back to learning, people who take a traditional look at school safety might not see the need for continuous focus. But the reality is that no matter how your district is returning to learning, school safety must be a priority.

All the schools in the Vienna dual-district system have been offering in-person instruction, five days per week, with a slightly early dismissal for teachers to work with students who have chosen remote learning. Currently, about 90% of Vienna students are in-person, and 10% are remote learning.

School superintendent Joshua W. Stafford explained that while the look of instructional delivery changed with the current stage of coronavirus pandemic response, the foundation of a school safety initiative that was built over the last several years has been maintained and enhanced to accommodate the adjustments.

“Several years ago we worked to bring together all of the resources within our rural community in order to take a comprehensive look and make enhancements to our approach to the safety and well-being of children and families in our community,” Stafford said.

Johnson County is located in deep Southern Illinois. The Vienna dual-district system has four grade schools, a high school, and a college extension center on its campuses.
 

A Comprehensive Look
The comprehensive look that Stafford felt needed to be considered didn’t just include locked doors, drills, bullet-resistant film, and school resource officers. It also brought in stakeholders and agencies including the regional mental health service provider, Arrowleaf (formerly Family Counseling Center), local counselors and therapists, the county probation office, and Resilience Southern Illinois, which has partnered with the Education Redesign Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Also involved are the Juvenile Justice Council, the county state’s attorney, the county victim’s advocate, lead teachers, principals, nursing staff, the Regional Office of Education, school building level RTI (response to intervention) specialists, truancy/attendance staff, churches, university extension groups, and various others.

“The conversation at our first meeting started with a vision to explore all aspects of school safety with student and family well-being at the center,” Stafford says. “Oddly enough one of the major outcomes of the first meeting was that we walked away with some of the major players in our community knowing each other.

“Most communities have common and limited resources and are doing everything possible to serve citizens well, and one of the negative commonalities is that many times these resources are disjointed. Everyone functions in their own silo, their own world, and in that focusing, there isn’t always a clear opportunity to make meaningful connections. On the other hand, one of the positive commonalities of those resources is, undoubtedly, everyone wants to ensure that schools are safe. Sometimes people just need to be asked to come together, around that vision, and to a great extent, that is what has happened in Vienna.”

That initial gathering has now grown into a functioning group that meets quarterly with a well-developed purpose and agenda. The group has begun initiatives, not only to improve school safety, but also to build a healthier community.

School board member and certified law enforcement officer David Stewart has over 20 years of experience in working to improve community safety.

“It takes an army to help keep our kids safe and on the right track,” said Stewart. “Bringing all of those people to one table and having real open dialogues is crucial in identifying at-risk kids, or those who just need a person to listen to them. The partnerships that Vienna has developed are key to being able to identify the youth in Johnson County that need help and getting them that help before they become another statistic.”

Reactive
Schools will always be faced with crisis or emergency situations in which the time to act is right now. In a previous article in The Southern Illinoisan, Stafford shared, “We didn’t want to have to make introductions in the middle of a crisis.” Relationships that were developed at those quarterly meetings were tested when John Giffin, principal of Vienna High School, began receiving threatening text messages from a California phone number.

“We ended up with FBI field agents from Marion in our principal’s offices for two days, plus local and state police,” Stafford remembers. “It was all hands on deck.”

An emergency search warrant served to Verizon led officials to a Caller ID-spoofing app developed in California, where they obtained an IP address that traced back to a local student, who was sending the threats from a cell phone. “That’s a horrible situation to go through, but I was so thankful for the school safety meetings,” Stafford said. “We didn’t have to second guess ourselves about who we call. Everyone already knew everyone.”

Proactive
Though Stafford began the meetings to prepare his school for times of crisis, they’ve also become part of a broader approach to student well-being. “We talk about everything from mental health, to truancy, to discipline,” said Johnson County State’s Attorney Tambra Cain. “It’s all about what can we do to provide extra support for students.”

“The goal is never ‘getting’ someone,” Stafford said, “but to redirect situations, so our kids and families aren’t ending up in jail or other lifelong detrimental situations. It’s about, ‘If you see something say something.’ But that takes an environment of trust among agencies and individuals, to take down your guard and share information.”

Thanks to the meetings, counselors and therapists at Arrowleaf quickly become aware of students that school leaders believe could use mental health counseling or truancy intervention. “We as a mental health agency can’t disclose information, but they can identify the kids they’d like to see in services, and we can step in and help out before something becomes a big problem,” said Sarah Newman, Arrowleaf’s behavioral health assistant director of youth services for the southern seven counties. “It’s incredibly helpful because the mental health service aspect is coming together with the educational component.”

The collaborative discussions have also inspired the school to pursue new opportunities, Stafford said, like grants awarded in partnership with Arrowleaf to give all high school students access to career counselors and to initiate an evidence-based drug prevention program in the grade schools and the high school.

The school safety group has also established a full-time school resource officer (SRO) program, additional school-based social workers, professional development for all school staff on being more trauma-informed and trauma-sensitive, among numerous other initiatives.

The Vienna system is one of the pilot partner schools in Resilient Southern Illinois (RSI), a region-wide coalition that trains teachers, administrators, and school staff to help students deal with childhood trauma. RSI has been able to coordinate enhanced, next-level programming for staff throughout the system.

“How do we as a school, from bus driver to secretaries, how do we be aware of that trauma that a student might bring to school?” Stafford said. “Our whole drive is to get to the point where we’re being proactive, not reactive, to stop it from ever getting to the point of a young adult feeling so desperate they need to make a threat.”

In the wake of the Parkland, Florida high school shooting that claimed 17 lives in February 2018, a state school safety working group recommended all school districts create interagency threat assessment teams, to work together on potential threats to school security. Vienna has formed a team to meet that recommendation, Stafford said. In essence, the relationships were already in place from the school safety meetings.

“The most important thing that our communities do collectively is that we have school,” Stafford said. “We want to make sure that the environment is what it needs to be. And that takes everyone to be involved.”

In the Age of COVID
While school looks different in the age of COVID, Stafford explained that the foundation of the school safety team has continued to serve students well. “Our current learning model of some students being in-person while others are on remote has come with a few hurdles, but our school safety team has adapted previous practice to ensure that all students are still being covered.”

The school system has utilized several of the resources derived from the school safety team to maintain relationships with remote learners, such home visits on a rotating basis by the RTI group, principals, and SROs, while at the same time maintaining the traditional practices of keeping in-person learners’ well-being and safety a priority.

Vienna High School principal Giffin is the lead for the daily option of in-person learning and also is involved with the home visits to remote learners. “Remote learning is a challenge for everyone involved and we want to reduce as much stress as possible during this time. I wake up in the morning thinking about students and their safety and how to ensure their success. With the school safety team that we have in place it was easy to roll out a plan that allows us to stay as connected as possible with our remote learners via home visits,” said Giffin.

“When school closed in March it was a terrible thing and we missed our students,” said SRO Eileen Rochford, who serves as the lead in Vienna’s SRO program and is a veteran law enforcement officer. “Over time you build a relationship with them as you interact, eat lunch with them, and help them work through various problems that they face. Being able to have many back in school is a win, And for those that are still on a remote, doing the home visits has been good. They need to know that we are thinking about them, we are still here for them, and we care.”
 

Joshua W. Stafford is superintendent of Vienna HSD 13-3. For more information about the school safety program at Vienna, contact Stafford at [email protected].