In recent weeks, UP for Learning Program Directors and Youth Program Specialists have facilitated a series of dialogues on School Safety for Vermont’s middle and high school students. So far, the dialogues have taken place at Edmunds Middle School in Burlington, Lyndon Town School in Lyndonville and virtually on Zoom.

This project came out of conversations between the Vermont Agency of Education and UP for Learning, exploring how to hear from youth about their experiences with school safety. 

In 2023 the Vermont legislature implemented Act 29, which provided several new requirements, including locked exterior doors during the day, safety drills, implementation of an emergency operations plan, and the development of school behavioral threat assessment teams. While implementing these policies has been conducted by a variety of adult stakeholders, UP for Learning and the AOE designed the dialogues so that they could hear from students about how this work has impacted them in their day-to-day lives.

At the start of each facilitation, UP Youth Program Specialists state the following: “We recognize that safety means different things to different people, so we want to hear all your concerns, thoughts, and perspectives. We hope to learn more about how, when and why students engage or don’t engage with their schools or other adults, what creates trust and ownership of school safety, and how we can all collectively support safe and healthy schools.”

The UP facilitation team worked together to create the agenda for the dialogues, which includes Chalk Talk protocols  and circle discussions. Students are asked questions such as, “What does safety mean to you?” “What does it look like and feel like in schools?” and “How does it impact your learning?” 

Program Director Pat LaClair, who has been working alongside UP youth to design and facilitate the dialogues, remarked, “These are not conversations that youth are typically engaged in. Our main question is, how do we support youth in a productive way that gives adults insight that they didn’t have before?”

Youth Program Specialist Ana Lindert-Boyes commented that the facilitation team “wants to create a space where youth feel safe having these discussions. When we debriefed the dialogue, we recognized that they haven’t engaged in these kinds of conversations before. As a youth myself, I’ve never really had a chance to talk about these issues. In two hours, we introduced the topic and then asked them to form opinions about it, and it was sometimes challenging. In the future, we’d like to offer youth more time to really dive in and have more consistent, regular conversations about school safety.”

When asked about any notable trends or themes that they heard from the dialogues, Pat and Ana remarked on how youth at both Edmunds and Lyndon mentioned the need for having trusted adults that they feel comfortable reporting things to, and who they know will step in and do something about their concerns.

The next steps for the planning team will be to collaborate with the AOE on an analysis of the data that comes out of the dialogues, as well as from a follow-up survey that they will share with students in the coming weeks. They will also present their findings at the Governor’s School Safety Conference on September 30th, sharing takeaways from the events and survey, as well as showing a short video about the dialogues created by documentarian and filmmaker Ned Castle.  

The next Youth School Safety Dialogue will take place in Rutland on August 7th at the Boys and Girls Club Teen Center from 10am-12pm. If you are a youth in grades 8-12 interested in taking part in this event, you can find the registration form here!