Building holistic school safety workshop curriculum

Support the development of curriculum with educational best practices

Provide presenters with appropriate educational methods and strategies for creating interactive presentations.

Connect presenters with content experts and educational experts

• If presenters are not experts in the subject matter of the presentation, it can be helpful to identify content experts who can provide slides for presentations on the topic (especially with local statistics), offer expertise on presenting about this age group, and brainstorm on presentation content. Educational experts can collaborate with presenters to make sure the presentation uses educational best practices.
• Providing local statistics from the content experts is very helpful to the presenters. Presenters can benefit from a brief content expert presentation on their topic.

Build an educational community of presenters supported by content experts and educational experts

•  Organize an in-person or virtual meeting to allow the presenters, content experts and educational experts from all of the presentations to meet one another and build an educational community. Provide workshop logistics at this meeting.
• Ask the educational experts to share tips and best practices for the presenters to incorporate in their presentations (for example, bring stories relatable to schools and districts and their students’ lived experience, focus on safety research, use interactive activities).

Meet with individual topic area presenters and content experts to brainstorm and plan presentation content

• The educational lead and workshop coordinator from your organization can attend these meetings to help guide the conversation and take notes. The presenters and content experts can share their experience in this topic area, and what their initial thoughts and ideas are for the presentation.
• Recommend the inclusion of local data and evidence-based strategies where possible.During each meeting, document and organize the presentation ideas shared by the presenters and content experts, and keep track of the presenter and content expert to-dos.

Gather school and/or district input prior to the presentation

• Collaborate with the presenters and content experts to brainstorm questions for potential participants that can help introduce schools and/or districts to the holistic school safety framework and get them to think about what they already know, what they would like to learn, and what questions they have for the presenters. The presenters can also ask questions about the participants more generally and about their experience with the topic.
• Create an introductory PowerPoint presentation for the community partner to introduce the school and/or district leadership to the learning partnership, to the presenters, to the topics, and to the intended workshop design. Engage school and/or district personnel directly after this presentation in a discussion on holistic school safety and gather input on topics and workshop design that address their needs. This input will support the workshop presenters as they develop their presentations.
• Review the discussion results from the interested schools/districts, summarize the answers, and provide responses to the presenters and/or content experts to use in developing the presentation content. The responses help the presenters understand the participants and develop relevant tailored content.
• Understanding the community, the participants, and their perspectives beforehand can help create a safe space for the participants to open up and engage, working collaboratively to address the many facets of holistic school safety.

School Safety Inventory Worksheets

The School Safety Inventory Worksheets (SSIW) were developed for the CLASS workshop as a hands-on, collaborative tool. We have provided multiple versions of the SSIW for download in the materials and resources section of this page.

For each of our 5 framework domains, we created a worksheet. For each domain, we listed several possible elements (an activity, program, or process). These elements were based on existing safety plans, research, and other resources.

For example, the worksheet for family engagement had 13 elements in the first column, including:

• Education about healthy behaviors and how to promote and support them
• Social media education, including awareness and risk management, addiction, rules enforcement (at home and at school)
• Family event nights
• English Language Learner family engagement
• Multilingual proactive communication outreach

For each of those 13 elements, the subsequent columns included 4 key questions to be discussed during the workshop:

• Does the state standard address this element?
• Does your safety plan meet state standards for this element (if they exist)?
• Are there missing elements you want to add to your safety plan?
• Where do you go to get more information about this element?

These questions were aligned with the agenda and guided the days discussions and district planning for holistic safety plan development.

A workshop presentation also covered the process of identifying and prioritizing items, or elements, that participants would plan to develop further. A Benefit Translation (Prioritization) Grid was introduced as a tool to assist in that post-workshop task.

Post-workshop activity

In crafting the CLASS holistic school safety workshop, we recognized that having a breadth of district representation in the room was important, but schools/districts would also need to continue their planning and development activities with additional personnel. The Worksheets included additional columns for participants to continue the planning process in their home district, with other collaborators.

The questions asked participants to:

• Identify up to 5 elements within each of the 5 domains that they want to consider for further action
• Identify the resources (Funding/ Staffing/ Partners) that would be needed for priorities 1 through 5 under each domain
• Using the Benefit Translation (Prioritization) Grid presented at the workshop, prioritize the top 3 elements overall.
• Identify the individual/role who is responsible for managing the further development of the identified priorities.

Workshop materials and resources

It is critical that your organization provide personnel with adequate time and resources to establish, support, and sustain the workshop. This includes the materials needed for the workshop, its presentations, and intended future outreach.

There are some standard materials needed for each presentation, and other materials that will depend on the presentation content.

Standard materials:

• Pre-presentation survey
• PowerPoint presentations
• Evaluation forms

Example materials for individual presentations:

• Activity sheets
• Resource pages (e.g. data summaries, research literature, websites)

Data

Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) Washington State report cards

• Identify the level of reporting data that is most meaningful to your workshop. Data is available at the State, District and School level.
• Determine the data points that are applicable to the focus of your workshop (for example, demographics, attendance rates, graduation rate, discipline rates)

Access OSPI report cards

Healthy Youth Survey (HYS) results

• Identify the level of reporting data that is most meaningful to your workshop. Publicly available data is reported at the State, County and Educational Service District levels. School District level data is available only with permission from the district superintendent.
• Determine the HYS questions which most readily align with your workshop topic(s). The CLASS Project team selected 35 questions from the 2023 HYS which aligned with the 5 selected domains. We link here the 2023 Healthy Youth Survey Question Mapping used for our workshop. You may wish to consider other questions.

Access HYS results

Mapping HYS data to CLASS framework/domains

This table translates a publicly available dataset to the holistic safety domains from our framework.

HYS question map to CLASS domains (MS Word file)

School Safety Inventory Worksheets (SSIW)

• SSIW (Letter-sized MS Word file)
• SSIW (MS Excel file)
• Poster-size SSIW