DeVaughnn Williams
I believe school safety begins at home. The more we teach our children about their power and their power of choice, the more they will understand cause and effect. I think that the more vigilant we are with our children the less they will see that school is the place to express violence and anger and things that they feel are trapped inside of them. It all starts at home, we just have to pay attention to our kids, pay attention to how they are feeling, how they are doing and listen to them and encourage them to be the change they wish to see both at home and in school.
Mack Junior
I used to do child abuse and neglect investigations keeping children safe in my community for thirteen years. My biggest concern as an investigator is I would like cameras, I would like audio and video inside the classrooms on campus, period point blank. In my professional opinion that is the best way to keep children safe. I saw this multiple times during my investigations, I informed my superiors and I got disenchanted based on the fact that cameras are not mandated in facilities.
Ashley McGirt
As a licensed mental health professional I believe that one of the best things that we can do to make our schools safer is to bring in mental health professional, especially mental health professionals of color because that is something that’s lacking. Take their A scores, lets start right there, measure their A scores, Adverse Childhood Experiences, because we know that children with higher A scores are at higher risk of social health problems. So when we can identify these students with higher A scores who are predominately students of color we can hook them up with mental health professionals who can help heal and prolong their lives.
Keysha Bass
As a people I think we need to more involved in what’s happening at the schools. I go to the schools, my son’s school and I don’t see very many of us that are there so we’ve kind of taken a backseat and just assume the school should do some things and we are just not involved. That’s why as a people we have to get involved in what is happening with our Black boys, our children, it begins at home and then that school is an extension of what’s happening at your house, so we’ve got to get back to what we know.
Anthony Maurice Davis
One thing that I think could make our schools safer is getting the kids involved. Between 1989 and 1991 Rainier Beach High School the students had an anti drug and gang organization and so that was internal. This was when gangs hit our community really hard and us our young men, it was call ABA (All Brothers Allowed) we engaged our community, politics, the police, other schools we were very active, but we were students concerned for our community.
Khalif
I believe number one we need our own curriculum, number one. The Black child, quote, unquote, minority child needs to have a curriculum that speaks to our culture, our issues and our future as people. That is what we really need to change, because the old education paradigm it doesn’t work anymore.
Akua Kariamu
In order to keep our children safe in the schools is to begin to police our own communities. We need to take an attitude first, to get out of our houses, get to know our neighbors and start to talk about what is going on in our society. The things that we see in our world are not normal, people are unraveling and to the degree that we deny that there’s some very fundamental things that are missing and that are wrong, to the degree that we are not keeping our children safe. Because safety begins with having a secure mind and I believe a lot of our children are not safe because the mind is not safe. We need to begin to first look at our communities and see basic things. Involve the children in things that are going to make them responsible, getting them involved in the community activities and I feel they’ll bring that sense of self and ownership into that school environment and I think that will be a place to start.
