Schools do not operate in isolation from the community, bias crimes or incidents committed inside or outside of school can quickly affect the school climate and relationships among students and adults. Incidents within schools can lead to retaliation or confrontations outside of school and are cause for ongoing attention and concern. Schools do cooperate with, and create on an ongoing basis through our chief operations and academic teaching/learning and family/community engagement teams community-wide coalitions of law enforcement, social service, civic, religious, governmental and education agencies to coordinate prevention efforts and responses to hate crimes as we take any incident with the utmost seriousness and do conduct follow-up investigation aligned to policy. These collaborations keep our teams current on trends as well as ensure responsive action.
Proactively, our instructional framework in PCSD includes classroom culture and the learning environment as areas of focus and addresses how to support students and staff in creating our aspirational school and district culture. Our commitment is one of care, concern and in building collective efficacy together.
We work together to enforce the district’s anti-harassment policies consistently and vigorously. Through short- and long-term actions we ensure that we are building toward a supportive culture and climate. If an incident should occur, it must be reported, shared, documented, investigated and consequenced as well as restored through a solid and multi-tiered intervention and supports plan for our students to grow academically, socially, emotionally and behaviorally. Our student services team includes a multi-tiered system of support coordinator to ensure our system is articulated throughout the schools. As a system, we strive toward a proactive rather than reactive approach.
We must work together to ensure current and future success. No school official or school board individually can possibly accomplish the elimination of harassment and hate crime without a strong, continuing partnership with staff, parents, students and the community. We must all support each other by pooling our knowledge and experience and sharing new ideas and solutions as we become more adept in pursuing our goal of a system by which all experience an environment that is safe, supported, engaged, challenged and healthy. This goes beyond behavior and incorporates the whole child. By working and learning together, we can strive to eliminate harassment and violence from our schools and our society one lesson, one day and one training at a time. It is through steady steps and actions that we will flourish.
Our collective call to action is to move beyond our established policy and into broad-based, national partnerships that include and support deep teacher and staff training, to ensure that curriculum — delivery, context and deep understanding while addressing historical events do occur in a way that sensitive topics and expected outcomes are explicitly described and explained so that there can be no doubt of the significant and egregious nature of inappropriate words and symbols can result in both disciplinary and legal consequence as well as from a restorative lens. We cannot have students who do not understand consequences for actions harboring hate and this is where restorative practices are necessary.
As we move forward, together, it is with empathy, care, concern and in alignment with our aspirational vision and mission for every student and adult within our system. Until hate speech, symbols or bigotry are eradicated, our intention, our work and our actions will not cease but will instead be highlighted through collaborative work of our educators, our staff, our administrators and our most precious commodity, our students.
“All life is interrelated. All people are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Martin Luther King, Jr., Speech at Birmingham Jail, 1963.