by
Xenia Doualle
| Aug 30, 2021
The School Safety and Security Staff Program
Remember HB 1216 (2019) which created requirements around an optional School Resource Officer (SRO) program? Well, 1216 has been replaced! ESHB 1214 (2021) expands and modifies that earlier legislation and impacts the work of not just SROs, but all K–12 public school safety and security classified staff or contractors.
The new legislation specifically notes that schools should be a place in which all youth feel safe. With racial equity as a central component of safety and security planning, the bill emphasizes that all School Safety and Security Staff should not contribute to an unsafe environment for Black youth and youth of color.
There are several components of ESHB 1214 which impact school districts and schools:
ESHB 1214 establishes a new staff category of School Safety and Security Staff which includes both school district and non-district personnel. District staff include all classified personnel assigned to work on school or campus safety or security. Non-school district safety and security personnel include contracted services provided by School Resource Officers (SROs) and any private security service staff. The requirements of ESHB 1214 apply to districts and schools with any combination of internal district or contracted safety and security staff services.
ESHB 1214 established a mandatory safety and security staff training program. This statewide program is being jointly developed and implemented by the Educational Service Districts. The School Safety and Security Staff training program covers 13 required, identified topics areas. Safety and Security Staff have to verify completion of the required training within the first 6 months of their work in schools. New training requirements also include on-the-job training, and staff check-ins. These requirements do not have to be met within the first 6 month of work. In addition, waivers for some of the specific requirements may be possible thru the ESDs.
Before School Safety and Security Staff are assigned to work in school students are present, school districts and their contractors must either confirm that the safety and security staff have current training documentation or require the safety and security staff to complete the required training components. Initial training and documentation information is available here. More detailed information will be forthcoming.
ESHB 1214 requires districts with Safety and Security Staff personnel to adopt both board policy and procedures. The required policy and procedures must include information regarding Safety and Security Staff duties and responsibilities related to student behavior and discipline. The policy and procedures must also include a process for families to file complaints with the school, the local law enforcement agency, or the company which provides the safety and security staff, and a process for investigating and responding to such complaints. See WSSDA Model Policy 3411 and Procedures 3411P.
ESHB 1214 includes the requirement that school districts must have and annually review and adopt a memorandum of agreement with the law enforcement agency or security guard company with which it contracts for safety and security staff services. The agreement must include hiring and placement processes, confirmation of required training, and a review process which involves families, students and community members.
ESHB 1214 also includes an annual data collection requirement. Data will be collected on the total number of Safety and Security Staff in each school building, descriptions of incidents involving student discipline, use of force against a student, and student arrest by Safety and Security Staff. Districts must also collect data on complaints related to job duties or student interactions by Safety and Security Staff personnel. Additional data elements related to Safety and Security Staff may also be included. There are also requirements related to the submission of annually adopted MOAs. You will be hearing more about this data collection in the coming months.
For more information on The School Safety and Security Staff Program requirements, please visit the School Safety Center, School Safety and Security Staff Program.
by
Xenia Doualle
| Aug 23, 2021
Our job jar is currently down. We apologize for the inconvenience. Our IT support company is working with the job jar vendor to restore functionality as quickly as possible, but we don't have an ETA at the moment.
To get an update when it's back up and running, subscribe to the "Jobs" blog category. You'll get an email notification when we post it's back up. We are working on an entirely new and much more robust career center. Look for that to launch in the fall.
Thank you for your patience!
by
Xenia Doualle
| Aug 20, 2021
In our kickoff episode for the 2021–22 school year, we discuss:
- the recent mandate from the Governor about required vaccinations for K12 employees,
- Superintendent Reykdal comparing the fight against the delta variant to a chess match,
- reaching out to us in case of conflicts,
- a survey to develop a plan to fund outdoor school programs,
- an OSPI grant to help ASB funding impacted by HB 1660,
- a great new resource to share from Chad’s Legacy Project and the SMART Center on mental health instruction,
- the 2021 Healthy Youth Survey,
- our amazing ProLearning offerings,
- networks, networks, networks, and
- the “Triple A” for school leaders.
Prefer to read the news? Check out the script.
by
David Morrill
| Aug 19, 2021
We are experiencing a national crisis in youth mental health. A Washington State Healthy Youth survey in 2016 cited an average of 1/3 of the state’s 8th to 12th-grade student population expressing depressive feelings or high anxiety and one in five students with suicidal ideation. In 2018, the percentage reporting suicidal ideation rose by 14% over the previous survey. As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, numbers can be reasonably anticipated to be higher with the upcoming publishing
of the 2021 survey.
Teachers and students alike recognize the importance of reducing the stigma of mental illness and the benefits of good mental health. Proven benefits include increased student productivity and, more importantly, reduced suicidal ideation. The stigma
associated with mental illness has contributed to a well-documented eight to ten-year delay from onset of mental health issues and illnesses to delivered services, with many never even receiving care. While some students may now be receiving mental
health education, systemic inequities also exist in terms of availability, delivery, and depth of content. Two obstacles largely contribute to this inequity.
First, while there is growing support for mental health education within teacher circles, educating youth in mental health is often thought of as potentially creating a demand for services schools do not have the resources to provide. In reality, research
done in schools that currently teach mental health education shows both of those two concerns not to be the case. Students have been asking for mental health education integrated with physical health as a means of understanding the complexities of
their own mental development and health and survey data shows students broadly express a value in the experience. More importantly, data shows that mental health education helps to eliminate stigma around mental illness. With delivered mental health
education to youth, we see a new peer support network develop around youth in crisis, leading to faster tracks to care in the community, rather than solely within a school’s four walls.
The second significant obstacle to delivering mental
health education is the time and effort needed merely to find and select a curriculum, not to mention orchestrating program implementation
from scratch. Prior to MentalHealthInstruction.org, a teacher, district or even state educational organization had to perform their own exhaustive search for curricula or school presentations. With that search, there is often no guarantee the program
meets the needs of a particular school, nor is there easily disseminated data to evaluate evidence-based programs. The cumbersome discovery process, followed by an almost impossible quest for evidence and feature comparison for any program found,
essentially makes mental health education infeasible to implement.
But the advent of the Mental Health Instruction Library gives any teacher, school counselor or other staff member a comprehensive resource of professionally vetted curricula and school presentations to easily and quickly compare available programs at their fingertips. The site has three very important features.
- A detail of every listing, along with an inventory of defined Mental Health Literacy Components. Each detailed listing also includes an inventory of six Mental Health Learning Standards as currently described by the Washington State Office of the
Superintendent of Public Instruction as a comparison metric.
- Each entry is backed with all available existing evidence and data surrounding the listing, as well as links to all available studies for both quick reference and in-depth review.
- A Quick Reference Table is provided for fast, convenient comparison for all listings so that a choice can be made with ease and links followed to access and implement a chosen program.
In addition to these three important components, the University of Washington SMART Center has prepared an Implementation Guide Toolkit featured on the site that provides best practices for program implementation. This toolkit has a wealth of information
to aid teachers with any facet of their teaching program across any subject matter, but is intended as a tool to help implement Mental Health Literacy with ease. The toolkit also provides resource links for more in-depth exploration in this area.
MentalHealthInstruction.org is the brainchild of Chad’s Legacy Project and was created in partnership with educational experts at the University of Washington SMART Center where programs were searched and vetted. The library currently
focuses on Mental Health Literacy, which consists of four primary components:
- Understanding how to foster and maintain positive mental health
- Understanding mental health disorders and their treatments
- Decreasing stigma
- Understanding how to seek help effectively
MHL programs within this library focus on learning delivery directly to students in grades
8 through 12. Going forward, MentalHealthInstruction.org will undergo continuous efforts to ensure information accuracy following its Fall 2021 rollout. In time, it is the intent of Chad’s Legacy Project for this site to also house Social Emotional Learning programs, suicide prevention-dedicated programs and instruction programs for substance use disorders.
Yesterday, mental health education was an often unrealistic aspiration. Today, it is an easily obtainable reality.
by
David Morrill
| Aug 10, 2021
Longtime education supporter helps fund Outdoor School for All
Senator Sam HuntEach year, AWSP’s Advocacy Advisory Council has the opportunity to select a state-level public servant who has demonstrated support of principals and the principalship in the education of all students. For 2021, the Council selected Senator Sam
Hunt as AWSP’s 2021 Torch of Leadership Award winner. Senator Hunt is a Democrat representing the 22nd legislative district, which includes Olympia, Lacey, Tumwater, and the surrounding areas.
Senator Hunt is a fantastic champion of students and educators. His 2021 budget proviso resulted in $10 million for Outdoor School for All. The Washington School Principal’s Education Foundation is managing these funds. Starting this fall, districts
can use them to help pay for fifth or sixth graders to attend outdoor residential camps across Washington.
“Senator Hunt is a great champion for education because of his personal experiences as an educator,” said AWSP Government Relations and Advocacy Director Roz Thompson. “He cares very much about students and educators. His work to
make outdoor residential school available to each and every fifth- or sixth-grader in Washington is just one of the reasons he’s our Torch of Leadership recipient this year.”
As a member of the Senate Early Learning and K-12 Education Committee, Senator Hunt also sponsored and supported many other education bills, as well as bills related to retirement benefits, voting rights, and elections.
A graduate of Washington State University, Senator Hunt was a schoolteacher in Montesano and Pasco (where he also served as a city council member and mayor pro tempore). He worked for the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee and the Office of Superintendent
of Public Instruction, served as staff director for the Washington Senate Majority Leader, was education advisor to Governor Booth Gardner, and served as legislative director at the Department of Information Services. He is a former member of the
North Thurston Public Schools board of directors.
Download the press release as a PDF.
by
David Morrill
| Aug 02, 2021
Welcome back, school administrators!
I hope you had some well-deserved, restful time off.
Looking ahead, ‘21-‘22 is going to be a busy year. As we begin to kick it off, COVID still plays a major part in our school safety preparation efforts. Masks. Distancing. Hand washing. And that’s just the starters. Over the course
of this year’s blogs, I plan to address several other school safety topics as well: school mapping, HB 1214, HIB, drills, equity, threat assessment, behavioral health, data requirements, and more. If you have a topic you would like to see
included, please let me know.
So, let’s start with something you can do right now, something quick and easy: register for this year’s 2021 Washington Great ShakeOut. October
21 at 10:21 am. That’s the scheduled time, but if you and your school Drop, Cover, and Hold on at a different time, that’s totally fine. Just be sure that your school is registered and counted!
Let’s finish up with some things you may be able to use over the coming year. Check out the links below. There may be resources that you can share with your staff and families in the coming weeks and months:
Again, welcome back! Here we go!
by
David Morrill
| Jul 22, 2021
The State Board of Education wants to hear from you about graduation and how students show they are prepared with the skills needed to thrive in life after high school. Learn more about this work and get an opportunity to provide feedback during
a listening session.
Registration links:
These listening sessions are part of the Washington State Mastery-based Learning Work Group's charge. If you have questions, please contact Alissa Muller, Director of the Mastery-based
Learning Collaborative at the SBE.
Related resources:
by
David Morrill
| Jul 21, 2021
As part of our celebrity Summer Conference news interview series, Dr. Scott Seaman and Communications & Technology Director David Morrill joined Kraken broadcaster Everett Fitzhugh to talk about his path to the NHL as the first black play-by-play hockey announcer. He has a unique story about culture and belonging and shares how the Kraken is breaking down barriers and creating a diverse, inclusive staff in a sport where that's the exception and not the norm. Everett has great stories, insight, lessons, and plenty of humor. You'll want to watch all the way to the end for this one.
by
David Morrill
| Jul 20, 2021
Not too long ago, our Executive Director Dr. Scott Seaman wrote his "I Am More Than a Test Score" blog. Along those same lines, AWSL Director James Layman has a couple of quotes in this piece from Knowable Magazine.
When poor, Black or brown students score lower, it’s not exactly the tests’ fault, says Eric Grodsky, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who analyzed the links between standardized testing and socioeconomic status in
the Annual Review of Sociology. That’s because scores reflect disparities in students’ lives before testing. Wealthy students, for example, might have benefited from parents who had more time to read to them as toddlers, all the way through
to being able to afford to take both tests, multiple times, to obtain the best score.
Other kids might not even be aware they’re supposed to take a test or that it’s something they can prepare for, says James Layman, director of the Association of Washington Student Leaders, headquartered in Randle, Washington.
Students from poorer schools tell him they often don’t hear about test prep or other opportunities, or they lack the time to take advantage of them because they’re busy with jobs or caring for younger siblings. To try to level the field,
in 2016 the College Board teamed up with the nonprofit Khan Academy to offer free online SAT prep materials, but even that requires an Internet connection at home and the time and space to take advantage of the program.
Read the full article.
by
Caroline Brumfield
| Jul 13, 2021
There’s nothing like more than a year of pandemic learning to make us examine past practices and consider better and healthier ways! One change your school might consider is making a purposeful effort to take learning outside. In the report “Back to School: Back Outside” (Kevin J. Coyle, National Wildlife Federation, 2010), research shows how a “green hour” built into classroom routines has a positive impact on students’ focus, attitude toward work, behavior, connections with others, and even standardized test scores. Take a look around your campus. Are there natural settings on the grounds? Is there space for a garden? Are there parks within walking distance? What happens to student learning and retention when teachers say, “I have this great math lesson on finding slope…now how can I take it outside?” Even small steps have a great impact on the quality of students’ lives, including their academic success. Consider how can you help students become their best selves by letting nature be their classroom.
Find more ideas and resources for supporting students in the outdoors at Outdoor Schools Washington, an affiliate of AWSP and the Washington School Principals’ Education Foundation.