Fall 2021 School Safety Trends Webinar

Safety incidents increased 150% year over year

Webinar: School Safety Trends

 

Watch this on-demand webinar to gain insight into our Fall 2021 School Safety Trends report and hear valuable input from school safety experts Dr. Roderick ‘Rocky” Sams, Guy Grace, Chair of Partner Alliance for Safer Schools (PASS) and Mo Canady, Executive Director of the National Association for School Resource Officers (NASRO).

    Understanding this data and the impact these incidents have on the learning environment and teacher retention is critical for districts of all sizes. Teachers need to feel empowered to keep the learning environment safe.

     Request the 2021 Fall Safety Trends Report 

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    Webinar Transcript

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    Hello everyone. Good afternoon. And welcome to our webinar. My name is Mary Ford. I lead marketing and customer success for CENTEGIX, and we’re so appreciative that so many folks have chosen to join us this afternoon. Before we dive into our agenda and content, I wanted to take care of just a couple of those typical webinar housekeeping tips. So the first is everyone is on mute just so we can manage the background noise. And if you would like to either submit a question or comment to me or to one of our panelists, please use the chat feature that you should see in, in your control panel. And thank you so much, Clara for helping us to manage those questions during the webinar this afternoon.

     

    There are two parts to our webinar today. The first is that I’d like to share with you some of the details about our fall school safety trends report that we released a few weeks ago.

     

    And then we will transition into a conversation with some of our thought leader experts that have joined us today. And I’m hoping that they will be here on video here shortly, I think you guys are going to be coming on hierarchy. So as they come on to the video here, I’ll go ahead and, and introduce them. So I’ll start with Dr. Sams. Rocky has over 20 years as an educator from teacher all the way up to high school principal and after serving various leadership, since in nonprofit, in business, I am fortunate to get to work with Rocky now at CENTEGIX, where he serves as a chief development officer. Rocky, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. And then we also have Mo Canady, Mo has served for 10 years, maybe I should say 11 years Mo, for NASRO, which is the National Association of School Resource Officers prior to that Mo served for 25 years in law.

     

    And then also with us, we have Guy Grace. Guy served as the head of safety and security for Littleton public school district for 30 years. And was named Campus Safety Magazine’s 2020 Safety Director of the Year. He now serves as the chair of the advisor committee for PASS, which is Partner Alliance for Safer Schools. Guy, thanks so much for being here.

     

    Before I dive into the data I thought I should set the context for where the date came from – where did this safety incident data come from, that we used for our analysis?  And it is actually our CrisisAlert platform usage data. CrisisAlert is our safety incident safety alerting solution at its foundation is a CrisisAlert badge. This is a wearable badge that we equip all teachers and staff with. So it has a hundred percent adoption in our school districts.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    It is a device that is very easy to use, does not require a mobile phone application operates independently of any Wi-Fi or cellular networks, provides precise location accuracy, and each time that a staff member uses their CrisisAlert badge, the alert is delivered to responders who understand who needs help and where on campus they are as an alert or a safety incident gets processed. The responders, the administrators at a school are able to code that situation. And it’s that coding that gives us insight that has to our data analysis we’re going to go through today. I’ll also share that CrisisAlert was selected by the Florida Department of Education for their implementation of Alyssa’s law. And then the analysis that we’ll look at today is based on over 25,000 alerts that our platform delivered for our K-12 school district customers in the fall 2021 semester.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    So we do have other customers in healthcare, hospitality, retail, and government, but this analysis is based on usage by our school districts. And another highlight is that 98% of the usage that our customers experience with CrisisAlert is for those everyday emergencies. I think so often the headlines point to those more extreme things that happen in schools, unfortunate and extreme things. And our data shows that really staff need help every day on campus for things from medical situations to your behavior emergencies. So just a little bit of background as to where this data came from.

     

    Okay, I’ll move on to our first our first trend. So when we looked at the data comparing all 2020 to Fall 2021, we saw that overall there was an increase of about 150% in average number of alerts per school. And here you can see that we actually see a little bit more usage in elementary schools than in some of the other types of schools.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    And when we talk to administrators, the feedback that we get about that is that in an elementary school, there tend to be fewer options for teachers and they need to stay with their class when something happens, which is a little bit different in the other environments. So overall the safety incidents went from about 5.3 per school to 13, 13.3 – a 150% increase. Looking underneath of this big, big increase. What can we see underneath of that? And we looked specifically at medical incidents, and you can see here that on average they went from about 1.8 to 4.1 comparison across those two time periods. And one of the other points of information for us is our end user survey. So program that we run to get feedback from staff after they have used their badge to get help in an incident.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    And it really comes through that it’s in the medical situations, there’s sort of two things I wanted to pull out, and this is more anecdotal, but teachers are using their CrisisAlert badge for medical situations, not just for students, but also for themselves as teachers or perhaps also for another teacher. So this medical incident category really applies across the board for anybody who may be on a school campus. And then the other thing that comes through in those end user surveys, that is that it is the medical incidents are especially where staff appreciate the ease of use and the availability of their badge. So in those crisis situations where they’re needing to attend to a medical situation with a student that challenge of those fine motor skills, a little bit of that fight or flight action kicking in, it’s really difficult to use any other type of option that may be available to them.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    So they really appreciate having the simplicity of the badge. So medical in incidents increased in addition, the actual, just the, the wrong number of people using the platform form doubled. So previously on average, we were seeing about three staff members using the badge to request for help that now doubled up to up to six on average per type of school per school. And on this screen, you can see that in high schools, we actually saw the greatest increase. And I think that the correlation there is of course high schools are bigger. So there are more staff that can call for help. So I think that’s why high school is larger here.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    Okay. And then next not only were more people calling for help, but they were calling for help more often. So we saw 22 higher rate of usage. When people were using the badge again, you can see the elementary schools here have a higher rate of usage, but overall we saw on average from 1.8 average alerts per user up to 2.2. And then the last that I’ll call out is what we saw in student behavior incidents. So in the Fall of 2020, and this chart you’re seeing here is the distribution the percentage of alerts across the different categories that were available for a district to categorize their reason, their alert reasons in, you can see, let’s say 60%, the majority of incidents were related to medical situations and about 30% were related to behavior situations. And at time we had one category for behavior physical altercation or fight by the time we got to the fall of 2021, a few things had changed.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    One is that our districts had asked that we add a new category for just general behavior so that they had better granularity to understand the types of emergency incidents they were responding to. So behavior was added as a category in addition to the physical altercation. And then there was also a request for an addition of a category called elopement, also sometimes of runners. And that eloping category now represents 5% of all of our alerts. So the year of year comparison, we went from about 30% of alerts being related to behavioral situation up to about 75%. So pretty dramatic increase in the distribution of types of alerts that we were seeing.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    And then one other thing, before we go to our panelists, I wanted to point out that the analysis that I have just shared is analysis that, that we did across all districts that have been used in crisis alert. And that data is available to every one of our customers for their own district, both at a districtwide and school level in their crisis alert dashboard. So we feel like that data is a very important part of the solution. And this is a sample of one of our districts for last year. So all that data is there. This is a graphical display that we share and the data is of course available also in an Excel type download where they’re getting all the details of alerts by who called it, the reason code, the type, the location, the duration, those types of things.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    So that’s the overview of the trends that we saw in our CrisisAlert usage from the Fall of 2021. And now I would like to pull in our, our panelists, our guests Dr. Sams, Mo and Guy, again, thank you so much for, for being here. So, Mo I think I would like to start with you. You had a quote in the Washington Post, it was actually back in October of 2021, and your quote said, “school violence has risen to levels. We haven’t seen quite frankly, I don’t think it took a genius to see this coming.”  So you’ve been hearing for some time that rate of incidents has been increasing in school. I would just love to hear from you, like, what were you hearing from, from your community at that time and any reactions you may have to the data that we’ve shared here?

    Mo Canady, Executive Director, NASRO:

    Yeah. I want to make sure and clarify to everyone that was not an arrogant statement in any way, if it came out and when I read it and hear it back, it sounds a little arrogant and it’s not meant that way at all. It’s just, it’s just a fact. And I think that it was kind of interesting when this all really began in March of 2020, by April of 2020, and I’m talking about early April, we’re beginning to have conversations with a lot of friends of ours, folks who are in education, school, psychologists you know, school counselor about, “Hey, how is this impacting students right now?” When you think about you know, adolescence, they’re dealing with adolescent brain development and, and let’s face it, you know us three panelists will certainly agree that this has had an impact on adults, us are ourselves.

    And so to try and imagine what that looks like and feels like for an adolescent, we really started having those conversations. And, at that time, I’m not in the medical field. So, I certainly didn’t anticipate that this thing was going to begin, continue to stretch out as long as it has, but it seemed to me as the days went by, it grew up maybe a little more grim in terms of the outlook for what this was going to mean for students. Once they eventually return to school, not to mention what’s going on for them right now in that given moment. Some of the things that we looked at are kind of common sense things. If you think about it. In the school, in the setting where we’re all there in person for years now, whether it’s the SRO or the school counselor, or the school nurse, or a teacher, or a combination of all of us, we, we discover a lot of physical abuse and even sexual abuse during the school hours, not that occurs at school, but that occurs out into the community.

    Mo Canady, Executive Director, NASRO:

    And it really began to concern me, as well as others, we were talking to what’s happened into those cases right now, not only are we not discovering them, but how much worse is it now that the student doesn’t even have that seven or eight hour a day break to be at school? If you think about just that element, and again, not to mention the fact that adolescents on their own so far out of their norm, they’re no longer in day to day physical contact with their friends or adults that are in their lives that are a positive influence on them in a, in a certain situation, maybe. So, you know, again, you kind of began to see the snowball rolling downhill.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    And now that we’re back in school, it’s definitely playing out in the classroom and in, in the data that we’re seeing, right.

    Mo Canady, Executive Director, NASRO:

    Unfortunately,

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    Unfortunately.  Rocky, I’d like to, I’d like to go to you next, so I don’t know how you all feel, but I feel like I wake up every day to some email in my inbox that is telling me about remote reminding. I think we all probably already know this, right? How difficult has been for teachers over these past couple of years and the rate at which teachers are being hired away by company, or thinking about leaving the classroom? And yesterday’s was that from Texas American Federation of Teachers, they said their recent survey said that 66% of educators in Texas have considered leaving the job in the past year. And that beyond the classic pay incentives or reduced workload, the next thing I on their list around what would help inspire them to stay in the classroom with something related to workplace safety improvements. I’d love to hear from you as an educator, somebody who’s been in that position, how important safety is and how it can be used as a tool for retention and recruitment.

    Roderick “Rocky” Sams, CENTEGIX:

    Thanks, Mary. I think there are a couple things I, I think about when I hear that statement and I hear the information that’s been shared in regards to that is that, you know, at, for teachers or any educator, you know, your number one priority is providing quality instruction to students, right? You want to give the best effort you can. You want to, you know, quality lesson and, and the outcome being that they learn the material that is needed for them to be lifelong learners and be successful in whatever endeavor that they choose. But before that can happen, usually, and doesn’t matter what location doesn’t matter, what type of school doesn’t matter. Whether it’s in a urban area or urban area, a rural area, affluent, et cetera they’re challenges everywhere and challenges to the safety and security of, of the classroom of the school.

    Roderick “Rocky” Sams, CENTEGIX:

    And, and as was mentioned earlier about Mo many of it involved the community, and so teachers are impacted by this and, and all educators. I shouldn’t say just teachers because obviously administrators and anyone who works with children or students is impacted by all these challenges that we’re, that we’re talking about today. And so when you think about what can be done to provide a more safe and secure environment you know, obviously there’s a lot of investments that districts are making that are, are designed to provide at that level support whether school resource officers or, or any other technology-based equipment that is designed to do that. There’s nothing that’s going to replace what a teacher feels day to day as they interact with students and others in regard to their own safety and security, and being able to provide something that they can have in their possession that gives them that relief, or at least some comfort.

    Roderick “Rocky” Sams, CENTEGIX:

    It is very, very key. Every day a teacher spends dealing with some type of crisis is a minute away from instruction and that snowballs, right? That time that focuses away from the instructional process and from the learning process for the student that snowballs to where I don’t know how much loss instructional time gets done in a regular basis in regards to dealing with those kinds of crises. And that adds to the stress that adds to the sense of sheer despair. Sometimes when you can’t do the job that you have committed yourself to doing. And so being able to do that is, is going to be a, a benefit, not only for the individual teacher, the districts who are able to retain their teachers at a higher rate, because they feel like they have something in their possession that can at least get them the support they need when they need it. But by and large, the greatest beneficiary will be the students who are going to potentially really have more time for quality instruction, more time for their focus to not be on how safe their classrooms or their schools are. And then they can dedicate their time, effort, and energy to the learning process versus trying to figure out whether or not, you know, I need to monitor what’s happening around me more, you know, succinctly because of the safety and security issues that may exist.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    Thank you for that. Guy, so tons, tons of experience, right? Providing safety and security solutions to a large district, and I know you have a brand, you are known for being the guy that weaves together new technologies to help increase safety and security. And so schools have done that. So many investments have been made, right, with all of this information that’s coming out. What is the next thing that schools should be doing to think about improving safety and security for their staff and students?

    Guy Grace, Chair of PASS:

    Well, I think that what’s important to note is what Mo and Roderick had said about the schools. The most important solution is reestablishing a, I would say, a routine for our students as they come back. There was a Gallop poll done a couple months ago, and it was a national poll. And it stated that the parents survey, the parents were saying about 30% of the parents were even saying that their kids were experiencing mental health situations because of the COVID. And then another 15% of them said that their families were at their limits. And as a retired school official being married to a school psychologist and seeing what they do in that realm, it’s so important because I think about mental health is this school is the center base of extra after school activities being involved, friendships it’s really, it’s their whole social, their whole social wellbeing is centered around the school.

    Guy Grace, Chair of PASS:

    So when we apply that when we apply measures in regards to technology, people, roles, and processes, they need to be holistically thought out, because when we think about school, it’s really a centerpiece of the whole community. That’s where people gather. That’s where we put our kids in school every day. And when we leave our kids to school, we don’t worry about them, but we don’t want to worry about them because it also increases the effects, the productivity of our society. So what we’re looking at is we need to holistically apply technology human procedures, roles, and processes. We need to do all that in a good way that does not impact and make things more unsafe. when you think about it, when kids came back to school they’re seeing mass, they’re seeing a whole, their whole what they saw for couple of years, in many cases or 12 years, in many cases, it was all disrupted. Everything, their whole life is disrupted. And now when they come to school, that whole, what they learned before has been disrupted too. What we need to look at, what is going to enhance the teachers to teach, what is going to enhance the teacher, the students, to feel safe while they’re learning, and what are we going to do to make our community to feel safe about our schools being open right now and not worrying about their children getting sick or their loved ones working in the school, getting sick. So that’s, that’s quite the challenge.

     

    And when we look at that, the technology needs to be applied holistically. We’ve been mitigating in school safety, many threats for many years, and some things go overboard and make a situation worse and what I see is things that, when we do school safety implementations, you try to be as low key as possible. That’s the best way, high tech, but low-key as possible.

     

    I personally, from my experience, that’s the best way to go when you start making things blasted down in your face, that the kids and the staff are going to be scared because, you know, it’s, it’s constantly reminding them that they have to be and there’s something that we’re trying to mitigate in the schools, and it creates an atmosphere of fear. So that’s the struggle. And I believe the correlation of the data that you showed in that chart was number one you gave them a tool to call for help. But it also shows that wow, when they came back, they had their life for disruptive for almost two years. And when they came back there that normalcy of school was not there.

    Guy Grace, Chair of PASS:

    And it’s about, it’s about getting them reacclimated into the schools and getting them in there to feel safe. And that’s what we need to be striving for with anything that we put in place in these schools now. And so when I look at like technology pieces, like I go to schools and, I’ve been to schools where I’ve been Thermo checked. You know, I have to put my face in a scanner at some schools. Yeah. To me, that’s not bad. But then, but think about this too, when the kids go to the school, there are now barriers up like glass barriers to the office secretary, so the kids see this and they’re like, it’s something that it’s kind of not to be comprehended. But I also believe too, that when we do these things, we need to educate our stakeholders of why we’re are doing that.

    Guy Grace, Chair of PASS:

    We look at age-appropriate, “Hey, this is why that glass barrier is up” or why we got to do this social distancing, why we got to wear the mask and things like that is we need to be educating our stakeholders about that. So when you do that, you need to educate your stakeholders as much as possible to so that they feel safe. And it becomes something that it’s not in the forefront of their mind, but in the back of their mind, you know, we look at safety and security. I’ve always said that is the backbone of academic excellence. If you are not safe, you don’t feel safe in your school. You’re not going to perform teaching. You’re not going to perform in learning and your society’s not going to perform and be productive out there in the community. So it’s, it’s so important for schools to holistically think this up.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    Rocky. I know that you have a perspective on that. Did you want to chime in?

    Roderick “Rocky” Sams, CENTEGIX:

    Yeah. So I think one of the things, one of the challenges that that Guy highlighted is the notion that we are, we’re thinking about these things as independent entities, and they’re not, they’re, they’re, they’re aligned you, you ha you cannot consider one without the other. You cannot consider teaching and learning without safety and security. And so, as we start thinking about how we acclimate students to the learning environment, as we think about how we bring teachers and, and, and other educators and other school officials back into their environments where learning and teaching takes place, we have to also consider the challenges that are now being brought into our schools because of a lot of factors that we’ve already talked about. And so where, what, what young people are now having to then transition to is a different reality, then what happened, then what they experienced, you know, two years ago, right prior to the pandemic. And so we’ve got to rethink education, not just from a delivery of instruction standpoint, but also how we’re providing that environment that is safe and secure standpoint as well.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    Thank you, Rocky. Guy, there was something that you said that actually aligns to the Rocky conversation that we’ve had, which is the value of the discreetness of the crisis alert solution. So Guy, you said like, don’t put it out there in people’s face, right? So other ways that teachers have traditionally used to get help and, and I ask them this, when they tell us about their emergency situations, they say things like I would send us to, I would send another teacher, I would yell down the hall. I would try and get, try and get to my cell phone or try and get to the button on the wall. All of that is very disruptive to the learning environment. And the ability to just click a button on your badge is such so discreet. And there, there are times where they’ll share these instances where being able to do that, enable them to help deescalate a particular situation, as opposed to other methods they could have used may have actually escalated the situation. Rocky, did you want to add into that?

    Roderick “Rocky” Sams, CENTEGIX:

    Yeah, I think one of the things that’s also important is that as you’re thinking about dealing with any type of situation crisis problem that originates in the classroom, the more discreet way you can do it, the better because heightened, emotions and everything else is already at a high, right? When these situations happen and the visible thing that may be in front of them, that knows that there’s getting ready to be some challenge to whatever they’re doing, takes that to a higher level. So imagine you’re having a conversation with a student, or maybe even, even an issue with a student. And the first thing you do is you send a student to the office to get administrative help, or you pull out your cell phone and attempt to try to send help that way. You’ve now given them a visible target to focus on that you are now in their mind escalating the problem versus something that could be done discreetly that by default will deescalate the problem. So that visible representation of sometimes doing things in a way that you don’t think is challenging is actually providing a even greater challenge.

    Guy Grace, Chair of PASS:

    And it’s all about practicing. When you enable these types of technologies and you put them into your schools, the teacher needs to understand his or her role in that situation, what the response is going to be in that situation when they call for help, they need to do that. And it needs to be embedded. So the technology side and the human role, the human roles and processes, and the training are so important and critical in these situations. However, when we look at this too, like Mo, could say, we look at it as a school safety professional, we were before the pandemic, we were seeing these budget cuts or elimination of some of our programs, which my opinion is a terrible idea. And I believe that’s probably being re-assessed in many communities, I’m hearing it is.

    Guy Grace, Chair of PASS:

    But when I look at that with the resources that we have in school safety, the ability to dial down in an emergency is of the utmost importance to get your safety team to help that staff member out and then deescalate that situation. And I think that that’s probably, especially with our resources being all over the place, and then when you got a dramatic increase, like you’re showing, you need to have a really good response. This enables that response to be even more efficient. It’s all about seconds matter, seconds matter. I used to deal in and as a school security director, probably three or four situations a day where kids were ripping up classrooms and things, and that was before the systems. And all I could say is, it took a little bit of time to get there because you had to go, okay, you got to call, there’s something at the school. First thing to do is check into the office where the class you’re heading to, and you get down there and you deescalate it, it works out quite well, but that’s when we had the resources to do that. Now we need something to help us to get and drill down quicker and deescalate these situations a much quicker, in a much more expedient manner.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    I know we’ve been talking about how CrisisAlert is a tool that really helps teachers. But, Guy, I think the point you’re making is that it also is very helpful to the school resource officers, right? They’re getting an alert on their phone. That’s telling them exactly where to go to provide that support and which staff member needs help. And Mo, as I’m watching, I’ve had a question come in directly to me here, someone is saying, so that we’re talking a lot about teachers, but what about school resource officers? What’s the best of guidance or thoughts as to how they can be best supported these days?

    Mo Canady, Executive Director, NASRO:

    Well, I think first of all, I want to touch on issue of de-escalation. I am often asked, “Hey, do you all teach de-escalation?” And my answer is in every block that we teach, it is a thread that runs through it, whether it’s adolescent brain development whether it’s learning to deal better with students with special needs, whatever it is, de-escalations a common thread. And, and it, I love chatting about that because sometimes we’ll think about what are the top three things that we can do to deescalate a situation where really, to me, it’s more of a philosophy. And so when you can have a situation where you’re able to respond to something in a discreet manner, you’ve got a much better opportunity to have that off and deescalated or keep it from escalating further.

    Mo Canady, Executive Director, NASRO:

    You know those can really be helpful. I think that when you talk about support for school resource officers and the importance of understanding what the role of a school resource I officer should be in a school. And, I can get on a soapbox about this in hurry, but we’re very specific in laying out the right way to do this job. Being a school resource officer is the most unique assignment in law enforcement. There’s nothing else like it, and it should be approached from a relationship-based standpoint. It really is. I like to call it relationship-based policing. We’ve got to be building positive relationships in that environment. And also what we’re talking about here around de-escalation, whether it’s the use of technology to help us in that or not.

    Mo Canady, Executive Director, NASRO:

    And it is great when we can use technology to help us with that that it really does have to be again, that common thread you know, school, culture and climate is, is a huge issue right now that, that we’re dealing with across the nation. And we’ve got to step back and take a breath for a minute and reassess the way that we’re doing this in areas. Because again, we’re facing circumstances that we’ve never faced before. And, I’ll mention one of the things that Guy was bringing up – the issue of all of a sudden students are returning to school and a lot of things are different, including wearing a face cover. And I know that there is a medical aspect of the face cover, and I want to be careful here, not I’m not anti-mask.

    Mo Canady, Executive Director, NASRO:

    I think it’s important that we have the right tools in place from a safety standpoint. But, the face cover also complicates an aspect of what we do. You think about a, again, we’ve, we’ve unfortunately had to, to put students outta their norm, and now we’re trying to bring them back into that norm, but we can’t see each other’s facial expressions that has a significant impact on me, I think it does on, on most people. So when we talk about school, culture and climate, we’ve gotta, we’ve gotta assess for that. Now we’ve gotta take that into account of how we better interact in these relationships. I hope that’s making sense.

    Guy Grace, Chair of PASS:

    Totally makes sense. Yes.  I think about the facial features when, you know, as a responder and how, when you lose that aspect, being able to read a person’s emotions, that’s quite the challenge for the responders or for that teacher, the staff members. And, when we look at that, it’s not being an anti-masker, but we’ve lost one of our abilities to read students when there’s a problem now.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    Great point.

    Roderick “Rocky” Sams, CENTEGIX:

    Or for students to read you, right? Part of that, they need to feel like they’re connected to you as that positive adult. Just like, Mo, you mentioned about the relationship building and all the things you guys do whether it’s de-escalation or any other training that is specific to working with young people, they need to feel that presence from you, just like they do with their teachers or any other adults in that school that they find to be a benefit to them, you know, in all aspects. So it works both ways.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    Gentlemen, I thought that we maybe could move to wrapping up, if there was a closing comment that each of you would like to share, I’d love to hear that. And Rocky, can I ask you to go first?

    Roderick “Rocky” Sams, CENTEGIX:

    Sure. Thank thanks, Mary. And I’m very appreciative of being involved in this conversation, with Mo and Guy along with Mary’s facilitation. This is a critical moment for education throughout the US and, really throughout the world. But we have an opportunity to really reassess how we want schools to operate and how we want them to benefit students holistically. And we cannot think about that just from the instructional and providing quality instruction and those things with technology and all the other pieces that we’re having to leverage in school today. But we also think about how we design a more safe and secure school. How do we design a more safe and secure environment so that learning can be maximized? And so we appreciate any conversations that can facilitate that. I look forward to working with anyone who wants to take that conversation further and hopefully there’ll be a time where students can actually come to school and really, really feel good about being in school. Again, that’s probably the thing that I think about more than anything else.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    Thank you, Rocky. Guy, any last thoughts to share?

    Guy Grace, Chair of PASS:

    Well, just to go back to what Rodrick said about it, it’s about holistically going back into your school when you implement technologies is to be cognitive of what you’re doing, people’s roles and processes, be really cognitive about what you’re doing in that school, and not about implementing things that are going to create and make the environment even feel more unsafe. It’s all about, again, that emphasis is enhancing that ability for the teachers to teach the students, to learn and for our community, not to worry on any given day. So I would just say to people just like we did risk assessments and analysis, we looked at, you know, like the metrics you provided Mary is looking at your data that’s out there. Data is something that’s very important for schools to basically come to and implement measures, look at your data, look at that and look at what the highest risk factor is in your school, mitigate it accordingly, but be very, very cautious about how you do it.

    Guy Grace, Chair of PASS:

    Just because there’s a lot of people that say, once there’s in schools or you’ve seen one school you’ve seen in all schools, that is not true because some of the measures that you do in one community are not going to be very well received in another. So when you implement these things, be very cautious and be very cognitive of what you can and can’t do because you do not want to create an unsafe environment. But I also would say to schools, as you do these technologies and, and implementations, don’t forget about your students. That’s what we’re there for. We’re there for those students and, and we’re there to make them be, feel safe and do as much as many things as possible. And going forward, that’s what we’re, your unsung heroes. You’re the ones that are going to help bring normalcy back to our communities is when our kids feel safe, our parents are going to feel safe and our, and our communities are going to be in a far better position to deal with the situation at hand.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    Thank you, Guy. Mo any last thoughts?

    Mo Canady, Executive Director, NASRO:

    Yes, Mary, first of all, it’s, it’s really been an honor to be on with Rocky and Guy. I think that in terms of the data that you shared through your slides, the thing that catches my attention more than anything is the issue of the increase in student behavioral issues and, you know and Guy, and Rocky probably share my feelings about this. Prior to the pandemic, there are so many of us and a number of organizations and associations and individually who have really worked hard on strategies to reduce out-of-school suspensions and expulsions. And, and on our side from an SRO standpoint, we’ve worked really hard with our membership on creative ways to reduce in-school arrests, especially around more minor offenses, like disorderly conduct. But when we see these rises in student behavior, it’s really going to challenge us like never before to be able to continue on that path, of reducing those issues.

    Mo Canady, Executive Director, NASRO:

    And so we, we’ve got to dig in even deeper now around that issue and, and really get creative about how we maintain some of those good practices that we’re input place and were working well. You know, from 1996, through 2019, we saw a reduction in juvenile arrests of 74% across the nation. I don’t want to see that go back up. You know, there in the last few years, we’ve seen a reduction in out-of-school suspensions and expulsions, and I don’t want to see that go up. I think we all know that if we don’t help students get their education and help them graduate, the future is not bright for them. And unfortunately from the law enforcement side, we will likely see them down the road. And so it’s really important that we continue to be focused on helping students get their education in whatever this new world prescribes for us to do.  I hope we’ll all keep forward-thinking on that.

    Mary Ford, CENTEGIX:

    Mo, thank you for that. That is actually the best point to end on, right because that is the goal of everything that we’re trying to do. So thank you for that.

    Okay, that concludes our content for this webinar. For our registrants, you will get an email with a copy to the recording link. We’ll come out shortly and again, Rocky, Mo, and Guy, thank you so much for being here this afternoon. Thank you.

     

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