Final plans are being completed for the National Summit on School Safety, which National Life and the LifeChanger of the Year program are sponsoring.
About 50 teachers and education leaders will gather in Birmingham, Alabama, the first weekend in March to tackle two key questions:
- Why are so many children angry?
- Why do children resort to extreme acts of violence to solve their issues?
The national debate on school shootings is clearly polarizing, but National Life is involved in this initiative because it is designed to avoid political questions and instead focus on how to get at some of the core reasons behind the violence.
Current LifeChanger of the Year grand prize winner Brian Copes is one of the organizers. And it is because he and other teachers are driving it that National Life became interested.
“They are the people who understand many of the core issues,” CEO Mehran Assadi said. They are the adults that we send our kids off to each and every day. We believe that working together, they can begin to get at the root causes for this epidemic with our kids and leave the politics at the school house door.”
National Life is also working with the National Coalition for Safe Schools, which is behind the summit.
The coalition will be working in the months to come to take the guidelines, curriculum and anything else that develops from the summit and make sure they’re distributed to educators across the country.
LifeChanger of the Year will work to become a forum to help with that communication.