School Leaders and Fuzzy Emotional Safety Talk

• In Event: Learning From Chicago's Decentralized, School-Based Decision Making Regarding the Role of Police in Schools

Abstract

On a national level, discourses around abolishing and/or reforming the police have been merged with issues of care—culminating in campaign framings such as #CareNotCops. Through Whole School Safety, CPS seeks to jointly address two such concerns: (1) police in schools and racially disproportionate discipline, and (2) youth psychological and emotional health. The initiative offers high schools the opportunity to replace their police with resources that support student emotional wellness and improve school climate. Just as the decision whether to keep SROs was locally controlled, so too was the question of what safety looks like. Whole School Safety asked schools to articulate not just their safety challenges, but the roots of such challenges and imaginative solutions. Explicit in the reform language was the idea that attending to students’ unmet needs would reduce the types of behavior and incidents associated with punitive disciplinary encounters.

Examining stakeholder conversations in Local School Council meetings where schools engaged in the thorny task of identifying problems, their roots and possible solutions, this research focuses on the “talk” of emotional safety. Across schools with drastically different physical settings, student bodies and safety challenges, buzzwords such as “social-emotional learning,” “mental health,” and “restorative (justice)” took center stage. Though these words mean quite different things in practice, school actors use them in interchangeable, fuzzy ways. Using words like these, principals promised transformational changes such as “becoming fully restorative.” These promises were accepted by stakeholders and championed despite often lacking clear specifics on what changes would be implemented. This fuzziness allows school actors to project the image of achieving the lofty goal of transforming a school culture while managing one of the most difficult school years in decades.

Author

• Uma Blanchard, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author