St. Paul schools focus on safe, welcoming start

Like many Minnesota districts, St. Paul Public School leaders sent an email last week letting parents know they had plans in place to keep students safe.

“School security is not only one of our district’s top priorities, but one of my personal priorities as well,” superintendent Stacie Stanley wrote.

Stanley detailed St. Paul’s emergency operations plan, its tools for reporting safety concerns and its long-established relationship with the St. Paul Police Department.

For the past several years, the state’s second largest district has been working on an innovative approach to prevent violence, one that is more complex than a quick, reassuring email could describe.

“We have to have a layered approach to this,” violence prevention expert James Densley said.

Densley and his colleague Jillian Peterson, who co-founded the Minnesota-based Violence Prevention Project, have been partnering with the St. Paul public schools to develop a comprehensive plan to stop violence before it starts. The work is supported by a three-year federal grant.

Densley says they are skeptical of simplistic, easy-answer solutions to school safety that abound on social media in the wake of school shootings.

“In so many aspects of our policy conversations, we get these either-or dilemmas presented to us,” Densley said. “Why can’t we have all of them? If at the end of the day safeguarding children is the goal, then we should be throwing as many resources as we can at it and building this in a very systematic way.”

Five years ago, after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, the St. Paul school board voted to get rid of its team of school resource officers. Instead, specially trained teams of school safety liaisons roam hallways.

“They’re equipped and trained to handle high level emergencies, [but] really, 98 percent of their job is just being aware of what’s happening in their building, speaking with kids, learning about kids,” said Laurie Olson, the district’s director of security and emergency management.

The week before school, Olson went through more instruction with the safety liaisons.

“They know about [students’] families. They know about what’s going on in their lives,” Olson added that students trust these adults “to let them know if there's something that's going on in the building that they're concerned about.”

This is the sort of communication experts at the Violence Prevention Project say is necessary to keep schools safe.

“For all of the school mass shootings that we studied, somebody knew it was going to happen,” said Jillian Peterson, co-founder of the Violence Prevention Project. “That was typically a student who had told another student. Sometimes there were cases where 50 or 60 kids knew that it was maybe going to happen, and nobody told an adult.”

Densely and Peterson’s research shows that, more often than not, violence in a school comes from a very small number of students, who have a pattern of behavior issues and whose plans to hurt others are known to students, school staff or parents in advance.

St. Paul’s safety liaisons, tip line, and enhanced communication protocols are designed to stop violence from happening. The communication chain includes regular meetings with members of the St. Paul Police Department.

The system Densley, Peterson and St. Paul leaders have designed also involves “CARE teams” at both a district and school level. These multi-disciplinary teams of school staff meet weekly to discuss individual students and what they need, like time with a social worker or psychologist,  a check in with a parent,  or academic help.

For Olson, the distinction between viewing students as threats versus responding to them with care is hugely important.

“A student might have suffered a traumatic family emergency,” Olson said. “This is just an opportunity for people who care about kids to sit around a table with students, with family members, collaborating with community resources. If students need those, it's a way to fully wrap around a kiddo and their families too.”

Densley said he’s seen teachers explain to their colleagues that a student with behavior issues in the morning wasn’t getting enough to eat. The CARE team then made sure someone met the student with breakfast every morning as soon as they got off the bus.

“We're not in the business of criminalizing kids, punishing them in a punitive way. What we really want to try and do is get upstream of these problems before they manifest and evolve into something more terrible and get people diverted off of that pathway to violence,” Densley said.

School leaders have also intercepted more serious threats and situations. Densley and Peterson say they are still collecting data on how well the system is working.

“There's still some challenges. You still have resource limitations,” Densley pointed out. “You still have situations where you have, you know, the students with the most amount of challenges at home and in the community. Asking the school to fix that is in some ways an impossible task.”

A ‘sense of belonging’

At Highland Park Middle School in St. Paul on the first day of school, the work of school safety liaisons, CARE teams, and local law enforcement is behind the scenes.

When students arrive Tuesday morning, school leaders hope they begin to feel at home right away.

The welcome started last week, when eighth grade students in matching blue shirts greeted incoming sixth graders at orientation activities.

“[Students] were running the ship the whole day … just rallying the sixth graders, like, ‘Welcome to Highland! You made it to middle school! We’re here!’” said principal Hibaq Mohamed.

Orientation day is the kickoff to a year full of activities such as school tours, mentorship groups, community movie nights and bonfires. It’s part of a program called W.E.B., an acronym for “We All Belong.”

“It just creates, you know, the sense of connection for students,” Mohamed explained. “Having students feel like, ‘I’m coming to a place where there's other folks that I can actually connect with that look like me.’”