FEATURED COLUMNIST
School Safety & Community Partners By Scott J. Turnbull, Superintendent, Soquel Union Elementary School District
T
he 2023-24 school year is underway in Soquel Union Elementary School District. Thinking about all the academic and social growth our students will make this year is exciting. We want this growth to occur in a safe and welcoming school environment. As such, I wanted to share how we approach school safety with you. School safety can be a broad category. For this article, I’ll address three components of school safety. First, I’ll address how we prepare for emergencies. Secondly, I’ll touch on how we create safe and welcoming campus environments. Finally, I’ll focus specifically on our work to reduce bullying in our schools. All of these efforts cannot be done by schools alone. We are fortunate to have supportive community partners who are also invested in the safety of our students and staff. To help illustrate our emergency response preparation, I will reference an event that occurred on the first day of school this year. It was a bomb threat being
called into New Brighton Middle School. Their staff had to spring into action and execute an evacuation and reunification plan. This put all the training and drills our schools engage in annually to the test. With teachers and staff barely getting to know their students, the evacuation was completed smoothly. School staff then moved
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students to an agreed-to, off-campus reunification site. A command center was set up at a separate off-site location. Thankfully, the threat turned out to be unsubstantiated. We are so grateful for the cooperation of our students and their parents. This was the last thing anyone was expecting on the first day of school. The parents were calm and cooperative as they were reunited with their children. There are many instances across the country where the reunification process is chaotic, and it wasn’t for us because our staff provided leadership, our students were cooperative, and our parents remained calm. It does take a whole community to make things work. Our partners in law enforcement and the fire department were a big part of that community effort. Their response was incredible. They provided expert guidance and support from the moment we called in the threat. While I would never wish for such an event, it was reassuring to go through the experience in the expert hands of the Capitola Police Department and Central Fire District. We cannot express our appreciation enough for those community partners. The staff at our reunification and command center were also incredibly supportive. We have reflected on the event and learned from it to be even more prepared for the future. Another great partner in school safety is the Santa Cruz County Office of Education. They developed a countywide threat assessment protocol on which we train our administrative staff each year. The protocol helps simplify the process of differentiating between transient and substantive threats. The County Office of Education has also been instrumental in bringing together school districts, law enforcement, and first responders to develop a more unified
approach to responding to emergencies with the Santa Cruz County Standard Command Response for Schools. The plan will help ensure that we all use common terminology in responding to emergencies. Our district’s administrators have already been trained, and the staff at each school will be brought on board over the next few months. Of course, school safety is not just about emergency response. It’s also about creating safe and welcoming learning environments daily. There are many specific steps we take to help foster these environments. For example, finally having at least one school counselor at every school site has greatly benefited our students! Our teachers’ and staff’s ability to implement Social Emotional Learning and restorative practices naturally throughout the school day is another essential aspect of our approach. If you would like to learn more about our overall approach to school safety, I welcome you to peruse our district’s Comprehensive School Safety Plan on our district’s website. You will see that part of the above safety plan is a document called an AntiBullying Plan. Each of our schools produces one of these plans on an annual basis to specifically call out strategies to limit bullying on our campuses. The Anti-Bullying Plans for our schools can also be found on our website. You will find systems like peer conflict managers, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, and a Campus Supervisor position, just to name a few. Last year, we updated our anonymous bullying reporting system by implementing and offering an app from STOPit Solutions. STOPit is a user-friendly phone app that easily allows students and parents to report bullying anonymously and for school administrators to follow up more specifically. For example, a text-type dialogue between the reporting party and the school administrator can occur while maintaining anonymity. We can all agree that School Safety is a broad and multifaceted topic. We have safety on the agenda of every meeting we hold with administrators in our district. While we are proud of what we have in place, we will always seek continuous improvement. We are very grateful to work in a community where the saying “it takes a village” is not just lip service. n ••• Scott J. Turnbull is superintendent of Soquel Union Elementary School District.