Many behavior problems are partly the result of academic failures and frustrations. Safe schools have high behavioral standards and provide students with positive support to achieve these standards. Well-trained teachers with administrative support can create positive environments that promote appropriate behavior and development. Safe schools are strategic schools. They assess needs, develop and implement research-based strategies, and coordinate services to address the needs of all students.
Safe schools view the school as part of the larger community.
They bring in the parents, mental health and other social service agencies, businesses, youth and juvenile justice workers, and the other community services and players to build safe schools and communities. Alternatively, schools can be ineffective, crisis-driven settings, which fragment services and fail to provide students with the differentiated academic and behavioral support that they need to achieve high academic and behavioral standards. While each of these interventions was studied in particular settings, research documents that they can, with modification, be replicated in other environments. This is our future. I don't want the leaders of tomorrow at Westerly to have been kicked out of school at age sixteen.