Safety is a basic human need. When a student does not feel safe, supporting them in reaching their full potential cannot be achieved.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs displays this phenomenon through an illustration of a pyramid. Safety sits at the broad base of the pyramid with food, water, and shelter–the foundation upon which all other needs and growth opportunities rest. As gun violence continues to occur in and around schools, and the phenomenon becomes a focal point of mass media, communities are faced with an increasingly difficult challenge: figuring out how to keep students physically safe without inadvertently traumatizing them in the process. From 2020-2022, the d.school’s K12 Lab launched a Reimagining School Safety Fellowship aimed at prototyping and testing ideas in response to the following design challenge: How might we improve students’ emotional, physical, and mental safety in the wake of school gun violence?
Barry Svigals—founder of Svigals + Partners, the architectural firm that designed the new Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.—joined us as a full time fellow to lead this work with sam seidel and our K12 Lab.
Together, the group explored how design might help spark a reimagination of school safety. They met with students; conducted desk research; connected with thought partners in child psychology, architecture, behavioral science, and education; and engaged our educator community in design sessions. This work has taken many shapes: a graduate student group research project, a pop-out, a fellowship, a full course in collaboration with Ascend Middle School, a podcast, a Washington Post op-ed, the design and distribution of 20,000 packs of post-it notes featuring questions school communities should be asking about school safety, and a guidebook.
Questions to Your Answers about School Safety: A digital and physical tool to facilitate expansive conversations.
The notion of school safety is often only concerned with physical harm, but true safety is much more complex. For example, the measures we take to “harden” our schools’ perimeters to protect from external attackers might also scare and isolate students and families; students who have experienced or witnessed abuse by police officers might feel less safe with a law enforcement presence in the building; and the steps we take to protect against the threat of virus infections can have adverse social-emotional impacts for students and teachers.
Given that safety is a complex issue, we developed a series of questions to help facilitate conversation with the aim of exploring two essential issues: How might we remember our fundamental aim to nourish learning for all students? How can our safety plans contribute to the wellbeing of all our students?
The “Questions To Your Answers about School Safety Post-It Notes” is a set of school safety questions that can be used as a collaboration tool for students, parents, teachers, administrators, and everyone invested in creating safe schools. The questions are designed to help us think about safety in holistic and creative ways.
Here are a few ways you can engage with the questions:
Put them up. Share your favorite questions by posting them around your school or workspace. You can print them as full page sheets from the question pages in your web browser or make your own set of them using the download files at the top right of this page.
Start the discussion at your school. Gather a broad cross section of your school. Invite each person to pick a question. Divide time evenly and discuss each question as a group. Include specific groups — such as students — and randomly pick questions from the site on your desktop or mobile device for the whole group to discuss together.
Invite decision-makers. Reach out to your school administrators, especially your district’s decision-makers. Ask them to consider these questions anytime they are setting a new policy, designing a new facility, or purchasing a new safety-related product.
There is no “right” way to use these questions. Just explore and sincerely answer the questions – this could be alone or with a group of colleagues, students, and/or community members. You can go in order and take them as they come or choose one you want to dig into first. Shuffle the questions to see them in a new way. Feel free to skip over some and come back to them later. The only rule is to explore, consider and imagine!
And if you’d like some guidance or examples on how you might use these questions, check out our Activity Guide.
Changing the Conversation about School Safety: A book that offers an expansive definition of school safety and provides real world examples.
In an attempt to offer answers to some of the “Questions to Your Answers About School Safety” project, we wrote the Changing the Conversation About School Safety guidebook. Written for parents, teachers, students, administrators, and everyone invested in safe schools, the guidebook is centered around three big values that transcend strategy–Community, Equity, and Wellbeing–and three strategies to bring those big ideas to life–A Place for Safety, Technology and Systems, and People and Protocols.
We hope this guidebook and our broader portfolio of work on reimagining school safety helps make schools safer and more delightful learning environments for communities everywhere. We hope you find meaning and utility in the guidebook’s pages.
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School safety is ultimately about the quality of our learning environments. The extreme acts of violence that plaster our headlines and shatter our heart lines are the result of decades of systemic issues. Our response must emerge from a deeper understanding of what is needed.
Want More?
Visit the Reimagine School Safety website
Free accesses to the ebook CHANGING THE CONVERSATION ABOUT SCHOOL SAFETY
Order a hard copy of the Changing the Conversation About School Safety guidebook
Reimagining School Safety in this Moment. Read our July 8th op-ed in the Washington Post on “Being safe and feeling safe aren’t the same thing — and the difference will matter to kids when schools open.”
School Safety . . . During a Pandemic. A six-part dialogue between an architect + an educator. With a soundtrack. One year later.
Credits
Maria Verrier, Randall Hoyt, sam seidel, and Barry Svigals