Dive Brief:
- Miami-Dade County Public Schools is launching a districtwide violence prevention program in all its middle and high schools in partnership with Sandy Hook Promise, an organization founded by families affected by the Newtown, CT, shooting four years ago.
- In announcing the partnership, Sandy Hook Promise said the prevention program will train students to create inclusive communities, identify at-risk behavior and intervene, and it will also train educators and administrators how to assess and act on threats of violence.
- The school district will kick off the partnership this week with an initiative based on Sandy Hook Promise’s “Start with Hello” program, which teaches students about inclusion and connectedness.
Dive Insight:
The Every Student Succeeds Act allows states to create new accountability systems that factor in more than just student test scores. This opens the door to considerations of school climate. California is one state that wants school climate to factor into the overall analysis of school quality, though exactly how much these additional metrics can impact a school’s overall grade will depend on the Obama administration’s rulemaking.
Supportive and inclusive school environments have the ability to keep students from falling through the cracks socially. In school-wide violence prevention programs that focus on identifying and reporting at-risk behavior, however, administrators have to be careful of creating a witch-hunt environment. Should students from certain ethnic or religious groups be overrepresented in reports, a course correction would be in order.