Kevin Whitaker
The New York State United Teacher‘s union task force has released a report calling for proactive school safety measures as disruptive and violent episodes in the classroom become commonplace.
The task force said in the report that the key areas most crucial to building safer school environments include addressing social-emotional needs of students, ensuring appropriate staffing levels, fostering community partnerships, and confronting the crisis of mass violence in schools.
Jamestown School Superintendent Dr. Kevin Whitaker said JPS does have a commitment when it comes to social emotional support of students, “We, as a district, have committed to additional counselors, additional psychologists, additional, what I’m calling, behavioral first responders which are paraprofessionals who are specially trained in de-escalation.”
Whitaker said when it comes to school safety, in addition to increasing the number of School Resource Officer by one, about 60 teachers are part of the Crisis Emergency Teams in each building, “Those folks engaged in a multi-hour, multi-part training process called CSTAG, which is Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidance. It’s out of University of Virginia from a professor named Dewey Cornell. And it’s internationally recognized as a threat assessment model that is effective.”
Whitaker said the NYSUT report also mentioned the importance of involving teachers in the development of safety plans and in threat assessment, which is what the district is doing already.
He added that other than the report recommendation that schools hire more staff to help reduce class size, which is a regular budgetary issue for schools, that he’s on board with the safety concerns specific to the schools raised by the report.
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