Key 1: School-Community Partnership
School violence is not a problem of schools alone. Successfully meeting the developmental needs of youth requires a comprehensive, community-wide effort best coordinated by a school-community partnership that includes law enforcement, faith groups, businesses, government, seniors, community-based and youth-serving organizations, along with students, teachers, administrators and parents.

Potential Actions:

• Convene the key stakeholders
• Articulate a common vision
• Explore how each constituent group can work toward that vision in a coordinated way
• Make and carry out specific action plans
• Report successes and problems
• Meet on a regular basis to provide ongoing training and support

The Challenge: Not another committee! Not another meeting!

Tip: Having expert facilitation of initial partnership meetings can insure that they're productive, and that participants' enthusiasm and commitment grow as they see their actions produce results.

For Help: With our years of experience starting and sustaining partnerships, we can provide the skills training, facilitation & strategic planning, and coaching and technical assistance that will allow your partnership to function smoothly and make a positive impact.

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Key 2: School Safety Team/Climate Committee
Since students are the primary victims and perpetrators of school violence, they hold a critical key to the success of whatever solutions are developed. Comprised of students, staff, teachers, administrators, school resource officers, and parents, the School Safety Team meets regularly to monitor school climate. The Team provides a forum in which all stakeholders can voice their concerns, and can work with key decision-makers to implement specific actions that promote safety and prevent violence in the school.

Potential Actions: Convene stakeholders to form School Safety Team; provide training and other support so the Team can function effectively.

The Challenge: Sustaining youth and adult involvement in the absence of a crisis.

Tip: Focus on school safety rather than violence prevention. Take actions that lead to quick successes, and have high visibility activities/results several times during the school year.

For Help: With our background in team development and youth-adult partnerships, we can provide the skills training, facilitation & strategic planning, and coaching and technical assistance that will allow the Team to start off on the right foot, function smoothly, and make school safer for everyone.

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Key 3: Behavioral Standards, Policies, and Procedures 
Every school community needs clear standards of behavior which are known and accepted by all members. They also need to have clear consequences for stepping outside the boundary of acceptability, and these need to be consistently applied.

Potential Actions:

• Assemble representatives of all sectors of the school community to forge consensus on the standards, consequences, and policies affecting student (and staff) behavior and discipline.
• Start a “teen court” for handling certain discipline issues

The Challenge: Getting past the perception held by many students that adults won’t really listen to them, take their input seriously, give them significant roles, or share power with them in meaningful way.

Tip: Engage key students – those respected by their peers – in this process through one-to-one conversations. Then hold several dialogue sessions to solicit students’ views

For Help: We can help you map out the process, and can facilitate key meetings.

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Key 4: Physical Environment
This key is not just about bringing “airport security” to schools. While every school needs to make sure that its students and staff are protected from the most likely potential threats – student weapons on campus, armed intruders or other unwelcome visitors – new fencing, locks, cameras and metal detectors are not the only ways to make the physical environment support school safety. The overall quality of the physical environment has a huge impact on how students feel at school. Is the lighting harsh or warm? What about the colors used? Are the halls and common spaces sterile or do they contain plants, student art, projects, and awards? Are the grounds clean or littered? What about graffiti?

Potential Actions:

• Use surveys, focus groups, or other age-appropriate means to gather input from students about their perceptions of actual and potential threats, weak or blind spots, and ways to increase the physical security of the campus, as well as its overall feeling of warmth.
• Remedies might include new or improved fencing, gates, locks, lighting, cameras, radios, and/or metal detectors, as well as new policies and procedures for visitors, lockdowns, etc. They might also include new paint (and student murals), lighting, and décor.
• Don’t resort to band-aids. Compile the input from students, staff, and professionals into a comprehensive report that lists threats and their probability of occurrence, along with proposed remedies and their costs. Do a cost-benefit analysis. Seek comment from all stakeholders.

The Challenge: Not expecting security to do it all. While these remedies address potentially dramatic and costly threats, such events are only a small portion of the daily milieu of acts that erode students’ sense of safety and impede learning. Creating and maintaining a “warm,” supportive, and friendly physical environment will greatly increase students’ sense of safety at school.

Tip: Don’t wait to complete this part of your plan before starting to address the issues raised in the other keys.

Tip: Involve students in designing, selecting and actually doing climate improvement projects; their participation increases their sense of ownership, which means they’ll take better care of the improvements.

For Help: Many state and county offices of education, as well as state and national educational associations, have networks of resource people who can help with both sides of the physical environment coin: security and threat assessment, and the more affective design factors.

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Key 5: Safe School Ambassadors
Every school can benefit from an organized team of students—the socially influential opinion leaders of its diverse groups and cliques—who are committed to notice hotspots and trained to cool them off. Students who have the observation skills to notice the exclusion, put-downs, teasing, relational aggression, bullying, harassment and other forms of mistreatment that usually go unnoticed by adults. Students with powerful non-violent communication and intervention skills who interact with their peers to prevent and stop this mistreatment when and where it happens – on the bus, in the yard, at lunch, in the locker rooms and bathrooms, in the halls and on the fields.

Potential Actions: Create a team of Safe School Ambassadors on your campus.

The Challenge: Gaining administration and faculty support for the program.

Tip: Demonstrate the program's benefits in terms meaningful to key decision-makers: fewer discipline problems, suspensions, and expulsions; increased academic achievement.

For Help: We provide the training and technical assistance to help start a Safe School Ambassadors program. This link will open our Safe School Ambassadors website in a new window. To return here, pull down the “Window” menu of your browser and choose “Community Matters: Eight Keys.”

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Key 6: Tolerance & Diversity Activities
Decreasing the tension between the cliques and interest groups on a campus requires that tolerance and respect be an integral part of the school culture. By infusing the entire school with ongoing activities that promote dialogue, understanding, tolerance and respect for differences, the school climate can be improved.

Potential Actions:

• Initiate guided class discussions led by specially trained students, guest speakers, forums, lock-ins, trainings and other experiences
• Recognize youth and adults who have made positive contributions to school climate
• Bring in community members of different backgrounds to tell their stories

The Challenge: integrate these activities across subject areas and make them popular school traditions.

Tip: Involve students and community members in the planning and implementation.

For Help: We can work with you to map out a year-long plan of meaningful activities. We can locate, provide, and facilitate such activities, and can train students and staff to facilitate them as well.

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Key 7: Opportunities for the Least Engaged Youth
Athletics, academics, and traditional activities do not meet the developmental needs of all students. And in todays's schools, far too many students feel disengaged, left out and isolated. Research shows that those who lack a sense of belonging are at greater risk for dropping out, or acting out. Therefore, we must create new and diverse opportunities for these least engaged youth to reconnect with their school and community.

Potential Actions: initiate dialogue; create opportunities for these students to be mentors, to be tutors and teach a skill to others, to learn a skill and start a business, to serve those in need, to build a skateboard park or ropes course, to plan events and other needed activities.

The Challenge: Avoiding the perception that "they're doing this TO me, FOR me, AT me."

Tip: Use a peer approach to connect with these students, and don't try to "bring them in" -- seek to understand them through honest dialogue, and work with them in partnership to set and achieve common goals.

(Read more about engaging the least engaged youth.)

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Key 8: Curricula and Instruction
Especially in the elementary grades, students benefit from active teaching of the skills and values that equip them to communicate effectively, establish solid friendships, and resolve their differences non-violently. This can be accomplished directly through lessons that teach these things directly, and it can also happen more indirectly through the class meetings and other strategies (like cooperative learning) that teachers use in their classrooms.

Consistency is also vitally important: consistent messages in all curricula … and in all classes. And, consistent teaching and use of the curricula; you can’t have a handful of teachers spending 15 minutes a week on friendship skills while the others spend 2 hours and weave it into their reading for the week.

Potential Actions:

• Have your School Safety Team or Climate Committee (Key #2) form a work group or subcommittee to address this issue.
• Survey staff members to find out what they are currently using and doing, and what resources they know about.
• Engage staff members in dialogue about where and how these resources and strategies could be incorporated into their own teaching practice.
• Visit other schools to learn from their approaches.
• Involve staff members in decisions about what resources to purchase and what practices to adopt.
• Provide training, including opportunities for practice and mentoring.

The Challenges: Securing the buy-in of all staff to use one approach or program in multiple grade levels (so the messages are simple and consistent school-wide), and keeping interest high.

Tip: Don’t isolate the teaching of social skills in one classroom or department. Meet with all staff to look for ways these skills can be incorporated into content OR PROCESS (e.g. class meetings or discussions) school-wide, and make agreements as a staff to do so!

For Help: Ask colleagues at other schools what they do. Also contact the Curriculum Resource Specialists at your district and county offices of education.

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Key 9: Teacher & Staff Training
Whether they are classroom teachers or bus drivers, attendance secretaries or administrators, counselors or librarians, every adult has a role to play in building and maintaining a positive, healthy, and safe school climate. Unfortunately, too many adults don’t see the student mistreatment around them, and don’t have enough options to intervene effectively when they do notice it. Saying “Hey, cut that out!” is only one tool in a potentially big tool kit.

Moreover, many adults fail to take advantage of readily available opportunities to build positive relationships with students beyond the content of schoolwork. These relationships not only improve the climate of the school and students’ sense of connection to it, they become the gateways students use to report information about fights, weapons, or other potential harm to people or property.

Potential actions: conduct discussions and/or in-service training to help staff members better understand the problem and costs of youth-on-youth mistreatment, and develop strategies to prevent and respond to it.

The Challenge: Not another in-service!

Tip: Take it slowly: show staff how it will benefit them, in terms of increased student performance and motivation, and fewer discipline issues. Involve them in planning and delivering the training.

For Help: We provide custom-designed training to administrators, classified, and certificated staff, to help them:

• better understand the nature and extent of the problem of youth-on-youth mistreatment, and its costs
• notice more of the mistreatment that happens
• develop tools for intervening when they do notice it
• better utilize the wide range of opportunities to build youth-adult relationships.

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Key 10: Parent Involvement
Since parents significantly influence students' opinions, values and interaction skills, parent understanding and support is essential for any successful school safety plan. But Booster Nights and Open Houses usually draw only the familiar faces of the highly engaged parents, so schools must find other ways to connect with parents, especially those not actively involved in their children's education.

Potential Actions: initiate parent dialogue nights in homes to discuss safety, tolerance and other issues, co-hosted by a parent, student and a school-community partnership.

The Challenge: the many demands on parents' time

Tip: Start small; make the invitation personal(ly) and make the experience safe, friendly, relevant and productive.

For Help: We can help you plan and design parent outreach activities, and conduct trainings for parents on relevant topics like bullying or building your child’s Developmental Assets™.

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These ten keys can unlock the door to a campus where all youth and adults feel welcomed, respected, understood, and safe. A campus where students and staff pursue educational excellence with passion and commitment, in a safe and supportive climate.