North Penn School District Safe Schools Committee was praised Monday night by the founder and director of Safe Schools for Alex, for standing out from other districts in the Commonwealth by leading the way for positive culture and climate in its schools through accurate and appropriate reporting of physical attacks, drug use, bullying, sexual assault, weapons possession, suspensions, and other incidents of violence, to the state Department of Education.
Safe Schools for Alex is a nonprofit started by Max Schachter in the wake of his son Alex’s death — along with 16 of his schoolmates and teachers — at the hands of accused killer Nikolas Cruz at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in February 2018. The incident is the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history to date, and more than three years after the shooting, Cruz is scheduled for trial sometime in September.
In February, Safe Schools for Alex started a School Safety Dashboard, with the goal of creating a positive learning environment for children. The dashboard has successfully implemented in Florida, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. It is a free, user-friendly tool that parents, school administrators, school board members, legislators, and law enforcement can use to analyze details of incidents of violence and drugs in schools, and thus, develop resources and conversations to help reduce violence and create healthy school settings.
Yet, the website is only as good as the information being reported by school districts to their respective state Departments of Education. Schachter promoted that both accuracy and accountability are the keys to the School Safety Dashboard.
“(Schachter) is on a mission to ensure that data that the state collects and what is shared by school districts is accurate, so we can transcend politics and opinions, and focus on the data at hand, which makes sure that a community is focused on student safety and community safety,” said North Penn School Board Director and Committee Chairman Jonathan Kassa.
Kassa said he met Schachter shortly after the district unveiled its own Safe Schools Dashboard and referred to Schachter’s effort as the better mousetrap. He said Schachter is promoting a positive legacy in the name of his son by making sure conversations are held at all levels of community, so that a public policy reflects what school safety might be.
“That all comes down to having good data, which is backed up by solid policies and practices,” Kassa said. “We look forward to collaborating to make North Penn a leader across Pennsylvania and wherever else we need to go in making sure there are effective community conversations for school safety.”
After the shootings, Schachter was appointed to a public safety commission at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and aided the FBI and U.S. Secret Service in developing a federal school safety clearinghouse that sits inside the Department of Homeland Security. It was all to identify failures in school safety and make recommendations to make schools safer, he said.
“You cannot have a safe school if you do not have a positive culture and climate,” Schachter said. “We have seen a tremendous amount of complacency. I appreciate North Penn’s attention to school safety. I can tell you guys are prioritizing safety and security.”
Schachter said it was revealed by South Florida Sun Sentinel Newspaper that Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was hiding crimes and not reporting offenses like sexual assault and bullying to the state. The newspaper discovered many other schools in the state were also downplaying violence, and even continued to report false information after being warned against it by the state, all to promote schools as safer than they were.
“Marjory Stoneman Douglas reported, for three consecutive years prior to the shooting, zero bullying, zero physical attacks, and zero threats and intimidations. When the commission investigated and interviewed the former principal, they found out he was uninvolved in the threat assessment process,” Schachter said. “This general sense of complacency, even if you report zeroes to the state, it doesn’t mean violence is not going on in your school.”
The School Safety Dashboard, he said, took 1.6-million cells of overwhelming Excel spreadsheet data from Florida, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania education departments, and turned it into an easy-to-access, easy-to-understand resource for the community. The Dashboard organizes incidents at the schools and allows parents and administrators to see the rates of code of conduct violations, fighting, bullying, sexual harassment, weapons possessions and nearly 40 other reported incidents.
“The goal of the site is to reduce violence, reduce suspensions, and create positive culture and climates in schools. We have the ability to target and to focus resources and help children at a level that we’ve never been able to do before,” Schachter said. “How does a principal know if numbers are high or low, or good or bad, unless they have context and schools to compare to in the neighborhood, county and state?”
The site, in North Penn’s case, can break down the number of incidents per 100 students, and uses enrollment numbers at each school as a major factor in the breakdown. Users on the site can compare North Penn to other districts in the state and Montgomery County, as well as compare incidents to each school in the district. Incidents can also be analyzed by sorting by ZIP code, Schachter said.
All incident rankings are based on the number of incidents per 100 students, called the Incident Rate, and each school is ranked based on their Incident Rate, from very low to very high within the school type. Incidents of crime, violence, and disruptive behaviors, according to the dashboard, are organized into four categories: violent incidents, drug/public order incidents, property incidents, and code of conduct incidents.
North Penn High School, for instance, reported 10.2 incidents per 100 students in 2019-2020. When compared to all high schools in the state, it falls into the high category, ranked 280 out of 429 high schools statewide, and 16 out of 22 high schools in the county. All in all, North Penn High School reported 308 incidents for an enrollment of 3,005 students.
Compared to all high schools in the state, North Penn High ranked very high for violent incidents (1.00 per 100 students; statewide rank of 365 out of 429), public order incidents (2.76 per 100 students; statewide rank of 298 out of 429), and property incidents (0.27 per 100 students; statewide rank of 365 out of 429), and high for code of conduct incidents (6.22 per 100 students; statewide rank of 295 out of 429).
“We are hoping that parents all over the state use this site to get more information, and we are hoping school administrators and school board members use this site as well,” Schachter said. “We are not saying the school is safe or unsafe. The dashboard reports incidents that schools are reporting to the state. If schools are underreporting and not being accurate, this would change where each school is. A lot of states are not taking the issue seriously, as far as accuracy of data. We have got to know what’s happening inside of our schools.”
Schachter said nobody should be looking at the dashboard information and drawing exact conclusions. Kassa said there is no ramifications for underreporting and lack of accountability to the state.
“One thing you have to understand is Pennsylvania is in the very early stages of wrapping their heads around the importance of this data. I’m not sure the Pennsylvania Department of Education is looking at this data. I know North Penn is, and that is why I’m extremely impressed at their commitment to look at this data,” Schachter said.
It is upsetting, he said, when a district like Philadelphia School District reports zero academic dishonesty among its 122,000 students. When schools are underreporting, how can you make schools safe if there is not accurate reporting of incidents? While there may be a logical explanation for such reporting, he said someone should investigate it and have conversations about it.
“Most school districts want to hide information. North Penn is doing the opposite. They should be congratulated for bringing it to the attention of the public and bringing the issue forward,” Schachter said. “They need accolades for that. No other school district has reached out to me to have a meeting about the School Safety Dashboard and their data like North Penn has.”
Committee member and School Board Director Cathy Wesley asked Schachter if there were any specific categories that the district should pay attention to on the dashboard. Schachter said fighting in schools is the best indicator for violence in a school.
Suspensions, he added, can be separated out to analyze suspensions due to drugs and violence, and suspensions due to solely code of conduct violations.
“Our goal is how to collaborate and use this as a process management tool at the building level and districtwide,” Kassa said. “There is an awareness that needs to occur. We can be a first foothold in that direction.”
Kassa said major fines to colleges and universities under the Cleary Act, a federal law that deals with higher education reporting, is the type of accountability that needs to happen at the state level.
“All the goose eggs are just as worrisome at the top of the list. There are far too many in Pennsylvania to assume reports are accurate,” Kassa said.
Kassa said the district is using data already to spark public conversations.
“North Penn is doing a great job,” Schachter said. “If nobody is looking at the data, it will never be corrected. What the dashboard brings to the table allows us to see what is happening in the district … so we can correct it to make schools safer.”
Kassa said Monday night was only the start of the discussion and exploration of data. The district, he said, has already started to reach out to neighboring school districts and their boards to brief them on the School Safety Dashboard opportunity.
“As a school board,” he said, “we’ll need a commitment from Safe Schools if this is something we want to explore further and collaborate with Safe Schools for Alex to continue through this.”
School Board Director and Committee Member Dr. Wanda Lewis-Campbell thanked Schachter for his efforts and giving parents and families something to feel good about in the community.
“Thank you for honoring the life of your son Alex like this,” she said. “You took time to wade through all the information on those spreadsheets to come up with a system that would help all the states.”
Schachter said the dashboard can offer credible objective documentation for grand funding, bond referendums and the like, as well as data to seek legislative support to address patterns of risk for schools. Furthermore, the School Safety Dashboard can identify patterns and trends of violence in the district and assist school boards to target resources effectively.
“We shouldn’t have to wait to have a mass shooting in the state for people to take safety and security seriously,” he said.
After the meeting, Schachter said he hoped North Penn would move forward with developing a strong school safety dashboard for the district.
“This is the first iteration and there is a lot more we can do. I appreciate their attention to it, and their prioritization to safety and security is extremely important,” he said. “I can tell North Penn School District really cares about making their schools safe and making their schools a model for the rest of Pennsylvania. That is clearly evident to me.”
Check out North Penn’s reported incident data for yourself at this link.
See also:
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North Penn SD Office Of School And Community Engagement Receives Several Awards For Publications
North Penn Teacher Wins Prestigious Award From Drexel University
North Penn Passes $291 Million 2021-22 Budget With 2.85 Percent Tax Increase
