Too Long, Didn’t Read (TLDR)
Dear LCMSD Community, In the spring of 2023, parent survey results revealed a decrease in perceptions of school safety. To learn more about this, we held a coffee chat, which then initiated the School Safety Task Force. The Task Force met several times last May and has met three times thus far in the 2023-24 school year. Over the summer we engaged with Hanover Research to conduct a best practices study, which resulted in a gap analysis to identify strengths and areas of growth in our district practices. The Task Force has since prioritized gap areas and created a timeline to address specific areas of improvement. In addition to our summer study, we wanted to dig deeper into student (6-8 grades), staff, and parent safety perceptions; hence the survey we administered last week. This survey will also be evaluated against best practices and identify research-based next steps for LCMSD. Thank you to the 49% of parents who participated in our School Safety Survey. The link will be open for the next 48 hours. If you have three minutes and haven’t yet completed the survey, please do so. In addition to the summer study and recent survey, we have partnered with our insurance provider, Keenan, who will provide a team of retired law enforcement to walk every campus over two days this week to further investigate our physical safety practices. Concurrently over those two days, we will host another team specializing in psychological safety who will be reviewing our practices and observing our campuses. Following these site visits, the teams will create two reports, one on physical safety components and one on psychological safety. In total, we will have five sources of data to inform our current practices and next steps in physical and psychological safety: 1) spring 2023 survey, 2) Hanover Research summer study, 3) Hanover Research safety survey, 4) Keenan physical safety site visit report, and 5) Keenan psychological safety site visit report. Since our Task Force is focused on both physical safety and psychological safety, we wanted to reach out one more time to parents and staff before we dive deeper into these data. Therefore, we have scheduled a special School Safety Task Force meeting on December 13 from 3:30-4:30 at Hall in Room 401. During this meeting, we will update new Task Force members, define both types of safety, and further discuss ways we are informing our practice (i.e. counseling, universal mental health screeners, PBIS, zero tolerance for hate speech). If you are interested in participating in the Task Force, please fill out this form. Current members do not need to complete it. We appreciate your continued support in keeping our school safe. Dr. Brett Geithman Superintendent |
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