Moving in the right direction: Tennessee's Initiatives in School Climate

I just wanted to take a few minutes to highlight some initiatives that I believe are moving Tennessee in the right direction when it comes to improving school climate.

Through the TN S3 grant, and the Safe Supportive Schools Initiative Mike Hermann, the Chief Operations Officer for the Tennessee Department of Education, and Kim Daubenspeck, the Director of the TN Safe Supportive Schools Initiative, and their colleagues have expanded the state’s capacity to lead school climate improvement by:

• Constructing and valid and reliable, web-based school climate survey and data management system that is being used by high schools, middle schools, and next year will launch a new elementary school survey to capture student, teacher, and parent perceptions of school climate and schools safety.

• Piloting the school climate data collection, analysis, and action planning in 27 school systems and over 150 schools statewide, and all TN schools will have access to the survey and data management tools in the future at no cost.

• Providing professional development to school leaders across the state to help them provide effective leadership toward improving school safety, school climate, school discipline, and engagement of students as school climate leaders.

• Developing a comprehensive School Climate website that provides a wealth of professional develop resources, tools, research, and model programs and practices developed by local Tennessee schools. The site has an expanding array of high quality videos that showcase exciting school climate programs created as part of the S3 initiative.

• Providing over 25 exciting Student Leadership Summits where school climate teams from pilot schools can come to share ideas, meet other student leaders, and develop high quality action projects and plans to sustain their work well into the future.

• Offering schools training in Restorative Justice programs and strategies in the coming year to help schools initiate supportive school discipline programs.

Thank you Mike Herman, Kim Daubenspeck, and the many dedicated educators from Tennessee and beyond , for all your hard work, for all you are doing on these important issues!

Respectfully,

Bill Preble, Ed.D.

Executive Director - the CSCL