A report from the National Summit for School Safety that National Life and the LifeChanger of the Year program sponsored in March has been published.
The report not only lays out the issue of how violence in our schools has become an epidemic. It also begins to lay out how teachers can and should be the leaders to resolve it.
“The needs of the whole child must become a national priority if we want to make real progress in preventing school shootings and other acts of violence and achieve safe and healthy schools,” the report states. “As a society, we cannot continue to ignore these needs while in pursuit of academic excellence. The NCSS is committed to ending school violence by working to ensure that our children have access to the tools, the services, and the support they need to live healthy productive lives.”
National Life helped the teachers establish the National Coalition for Safe Schools and continues to offer in-kind services to get it off the ground.
CEO Mehran Assadi wrote in the report why National Life considers the cause to be so important.
“We signed on to help push this coalition forward because of who is seeking to answer the questions: Teachers themselves,” Mehran wrote. “They are the people who understand many of the core issues. 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.”
As a company, we spend a lot of time in schools and understand how powerless many teachers have felt in the face of the violence that has plagued them and their students.
That’s why we committed to sponsoring this new coalition. The report the teachers produced is an important touch point for us as we talk to clients and school administrators, reinforcing just how committed we are to the cause of supporting educators.
The report is available online and a PowerPoint slide deck that can be used for presenting the report to groups will soon be posted.
For questions about how to help distribute the work and recruit more supporters to the National Coalition for Safe Schools, please reach out to Mallorie Manosh, director of the LifeChanger program.