Cultivating Safe and Supportive Schools for Mental Wellness
May 01, 2025
How to minimize persistent worries of students so staff can maximize the instructional focus
School administrators have a unique responsibility to define what safety means within their schools and to engage stakeholders in conversations about achieving safety goals. This involves more than implementing safety and security measures. It requires building a culture where students and staff feel emotionally supported and physically safe.
When the minds of staff and students are preoccupied by safety concerns, they are unable to engage fully in their roles as teachers and learners. Teachers arrive at school intending to do their best to support their students, but safety issues 鈥� whether peer conflicts, bullying or disruptive behavior 鈥� often become a mental distraction.
颁贰狈罢贰骋滨齿鈥檚&苍产蝉辫; found 80 percent of educators regularly think about their own physical safety while at work. This persistent worry shifts their focus away from instruction, taking a toll on their mental health and their ability to stay present and give their all to their students.
For students, the fear of potential harm creates a similar barrier to learning. Just as schools responded to child hunger with meal programs because hungry kids can鈥檛 learn, the same logic applies to safety: Scared kids can鈥檛 learn either. If students are preoccupied with fears of violence or bullying, their mental energy is diverted from the classroom, preventing them from fully engaging with lessons and activities.
This mental strain not only affects their emotional health but also their academic performance. According to the CENTEGIX report, 84 percent of educators said they believe school safety directly affects student achievement, underscoring the critical link between a secure environment and students鈥� ability to thrive.
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Roderick Sams recommends these informational resources on creating safer learning and teaching environments.
Findings from a nationwide survey of 530 K-12 educators and administrators on school safety.
Helps educators create a comprehensive plan for assessing, responding to and recovering from an emergency.
Provides professional development, tools and resources around school safety and student mental wellness.
Offers resources to promote social-emotional learning in K-12 schooling.
Offers resources and expertise to implement evidence-based programs.
Cracking the Bullying Code
By Eric Landers and Juliann Sergi McBrayer
Bullying is one of the most prevalent forms of victimization in schools, affecting almost 20 percent of students. According to the latest Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2023, more students reported being bullied in schools than being the target of fighting, hate-related words or gang-related activities.
Bullying can severely affect students鈥� mental health, as evidenced by depression, social anxiety, loneliness and thoughts of suicide. Students who are bullied often avoid school, face social hardships and struggle academically.
Addressing bullying requires more than reactionary measures or occasional awareness programs. One approach, the Problem Analysis Triangle for Bullying, or PAT-B, offers a direct, systematic response to this complex social phenomenon.
The PAT-B framework identifies three core elements in bullying: the aggressor (bully), the target (victim) and the opportunity. Without all three factors, bullying cannot occur.
Supervised Spaces
Step one is assessing the environment to identify opportunities for bullying to occur, such as unsupervised spaces. This assessment includes analyzing data sources, such as discipline data, which show patterns of problem behavior that arise in specific spaces. Conversations with staff add context to these patterns.
To safeguard areas, administrators must (a) train all staff in each area to recognize bullying; (b) provide area-specific data to staff to communicate why action is necessary; and (c) empower everyone in an area to respond to issues that arise.
Appointing staff to oversee these spaces can make areas safer for students. Place managers can be teachers, counselors, administrators, custodians, librarians, cafeteria workers or bus drivers. Strengthening supports by involving a place manager, advocate and mentor can lessen the impact of bullying.
Clear Expectations
Adults who foster strong anti-bullying attitudes create environments where bullying is unacceptable and students feel safe helping each other and reporting incidents of bullying. Key actions include establishing clear schoolwide expectations for how individuals in the school treat one another and encouraging teachers to hold classroom conversations about bullying, acting as advocates and shaping the classroom environment.
The cornerstone of supporting targets is not solving the problem for them but teaching them how to self-advocate. We must equip students with:
Knowledge: Understanding the difference between rudeness, meanness, conflict and bullying.
Attitude: Realizing that while they do not have to like everyone, they must treat everyone respectfully.
Skills: Knowing how to resolve conflict as well as how to report bullying.
Re-educating Aggressors
Aggressors often use their leadership skills to organize support and harm others. Changing aggressive behaviors is key to protecting student mental health. Administrators must decrease the effectiveness of bullying behaviors and teach aggressors positive leadership skills.
Educators can do that by:
Identifying the source of the power. Bullies maintain their power through the attention and influence they gain from peers. For younger students, this dynamic is most apparent on the playground. For adolescents, bullying is more subtle yet more pervasive. Identifying the source of the power helps determine the appropriate intervention.
Limiting the aggressor鈥檚 power. To make bullying ineffective, the aggressor must lose access to power. For younger students, this might be limited interactions on the playground. For older students with more freedom, this might entail delayed transitions between classes.
The PAT-B framework can be a powerful tool for reducing bullying and protecting all students鈥� mental health.
Analyzing opportunities for bullying, empowering targets and redirecting aggressors are useful steps to creating a safer, more inclusive school environment.
Eric Landers is an associate professor in the Department of Elementary and Special Education at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Ga. Juliann Sergi McBrayer is an associate professor in the Department of Leadership, Technology and Human Development, Educational Leadership at Georgia Southern University.
How to Evaluate Social and Emotional Learning Assessments
By Nancy Duchesneau
Addressing the social, emotional and academic development needs of students is more important than ever.
Not only must school districts integrate social and emotional supports into academic learning but they also need to know whether their approaches are working. Unlike academic assessments, which are held to high technical quality standards and extensive scrutiny from experts, social and emotional learning assessments are newer to the field. It can be difficult for school district leaders to choose rigorously validated measurement tools.
EdTrust recently released 鈥淪ocial, Emotional, and Academic (SEAD) Assessments: A Framework for State and District Leaders,鈥� a comprehensive tool that offers a framework of questions educators can use to evaluate the quality of SEAD assessments.
Key considerations when evaluating a SEAD assessment include:
Assessments rooted in equity. Ensure items use a strength-based lens. The assessment item question should ask: 鈥淗ow often are you able to control your emotions when you need to?鈥� rather than 鈥淗ow often do you lose control of your emotions?鈥� This allows students to reflect on their own strengths. Strength-based framing ensures that subsequent work to address any revealed issues will build up students鈥� strengths.
Additionally, assessments rooted in equity capture multiple perspectives, including those of students, teachers, staff and families, which allows leaders to get a full picture of efforts to support students鈥� social and emotional learning. The perspectives of families can help school leaders understand whether a school is successfully building relationships.
When assessments lack multiple perspectives, they leave the onus of change and improvement on only one group of people rather than on a systemic approach to improvement.
Assessments have an appropriate use case. Developers should provide clear information about how an assessment is to be used so leaders can determine whether an assessment meets their needs. Developers should clearly identify the purpose of the assessment, who should use the assessment and the level at which an assessment is designed to be used, such as whether the data are appropriate to evaluate conditions for the whole school or individual classrooms.
Assessments are valid and reliable. Assessments should be piloted with diverse participants and statistically tested to show they are reliable across student groups, including students of color, students from low-income backgrounds, multilingual learners, students with disabilities and those who identify as LGBTQ+.
Look for assessments that not only say they were piloted in diverse schools but also include students鈥� demographic information and statistical analyses showing reliability across groups of students.
Assessments empower decision makers to improve outcomes. Resources that include a user-friendly data interpretation guide, platform or tool can help educators understand and act on results. Importantly, the tool should allow for disaggregation by student group so inequities faced by one group of students within a school or classroom are not hidden by an average score.
Assessments should aim to improve practice and support students, so leaders also should look for whether developers have guidance and resources for making policy and practice decisions in response to assessment outcomes. This guidance can be particularly useful for districts lacking access to specialists or other social and emotional learning expertise.
Use a system of assessments based on a theory of action with the goal of continuous improvement. No single assessment can fully illustrate what is happening in schools, and district leaders need to see how students鈥� social and emotional needs are supported in schools to change policy and practice.
Nancy Duchesneau is senior P-12 research manager at EdTrust in Washington, D.C.
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