October 4, 2018: Safe

Blog #5

Oct. 4, 2018 – Safe

Sheridan School District 2’s motto starts with the word safe.

“Safe, smart, and happy.”

The words are in that order for a reason.

You can’t have the second two—smart and happy—without the first.

Safe is critical.

Students at school need to feel safe in order to learn.

It’s a big issue—coast to coast. School safety and discipline is not a concern that Sheridan faces alone.

At Fort Logan Northgate School, a relatively new approach is building a new culture of respect.

Funded with a grant from the Colorado Department of Education, the STOP Response program is training students to declare when they are feeling disrespected or bullied in any way.

The key component is empowering the student who is being picked on to say, quite simply, STOP.

Like this: “Stop.” 

If the behavior continues, the student feeling disrespected is trained to WALK away. And if there is still an issue, the student is trained to TALK to an adult.

Stop. Walk. Talk.

Fort Logan Northgate School assistant principal Beth Joswick says when you take away the peer reaction of the person who is the perpetrating the disrespect, you take their power away.

And students being disrespected can’t skip step one because they now know that teachers and staff will inevitably first ask if the student uttered the key word, “stop.”

Sound simple?

It’s supposed to be. 

It’s supposed to be easy to remember and easy to train.  

If you are around Fort Logan Northgate, you’ll notice the dramatic improvement in the atmosphere, in the hallways, cafeteria, and classrooms too. 

In grades three through five, in fact, the number of issues reported has dropped 10 percent. In grades six through eight, the number of reports of being disrespected dropped 25 percent.

That’s progress. That gives teachers more time to teach and it gives principal Nelson Van Vranken and assistant principal Joswick more time to support teachers. And as those elementary age students move up through the school, the upper grades at FLN will see even more improvement than the STOP Response has brought to date.   

The grant also brought a fulltime social worker to the school and it affords the school the opportunity organize a committee that looks at behavior data and evaluate where more work is needed.  In addition, social worker Maggie Okoniewski works with students (grades 6-8 only) on career and college readiness and she has brought students together to form a Stand Up For Courage team that helps guide the program itself.

Okoniewski works closely with discipline resource officer Eddie Chacon to address the unwelcome behaviors in the school and uncover underlying problems that might be prompting the behavior. Perhaps it’s a situation at a home or something going on in the community that is making it hard to focus. (We have all had days like that, right?) 

One of the traditions now in place at Fort Logan Northgate School is something started by the Stand Up For Courage team—the kindness box.  These allow students and staff the chance to recognize acts of kindness and then for those students who went the extra mile to be rewarded for being thoughtful or empathetic or whatever the case might be.

Unfortunately, adults out there in the “real world” of politics or entertainment and business are sometimes poor role models. We know there is far more good than bad, but the negatives often get more attention than the positives. What we can do is do our best in school to teach the right concepts and set the right environment for learning.

What we can do is be safe, smart, and happy!  One thing leads to the next.

Congrats to Fort Logan Northgate School for their work on this—and the fine results to date!