A Systemic Approach to Changing School Climate: A Necessary Component of a Comprehensive Violence Prevention Program

Douglas C. Breulin and Rocco Cimmarusti

Introduction

Throughout American society there is a growing movement to challenge violence as unacceptable, and to develop strategies to address and eliminate it.  Family therapists have made major contributions to this movement, particularly in the areas of domestic violence and child abuse. Family therapists have also tackled the epidemic of youth violence, and have produced salient research and developed model programs.

One manifestation of youth violence is school-based violence.  In its most lethal form, such as occurred at Columbine and Santee, school-based violence results in terrible carnage.  Less lethal forms of school-based violence such as fighting, intimidation and bullying have also come under intense scrutiny.  Rather than normalize such forms of violence as an everyday part of the school experience, school administrators have begun to understand them as harmful to the victims and potential precipitants to deadly retaliation.  An outraged nation has called for extensive measures to make schools safer.

Today more than ever schools are committed to drastically reducing if not eliminating all forms of school-based violence.  To succeed, schools are developing and putting into place comprehensive violence prevention efforts.  Here too, family therapists have contributed to the reduction of school-based violence.  Most family therapists have received outpatient referrals from schools to treat violent adolescents, and some therapists cultivate relationships with schools that enable them to intervene in the school on their client's behalf.  Multi-systemic approaches to therapy have included schools as part of the ecology in the treatment of violent youth.  These approaches target violent youth and reduce their risk for violence by building individual, family, school, and community interventions around them.

Another approach to school-based violence views the school as the context in which violence can occur, and uses systemic interventions to change that context.  Violence in schools is more likely to occur when there is a culture of violence in the school, the school employs harsh and unfair disciplinary policies, there is a tolerance for bullying, preferred groups are encouraged to exist and rewarded, and teachers are overburdened and uncaring.  The goal is twofold: to make the school more peaceful, thereby eliminating the contextual triggers for violence, and to increase students' commitment to school that has been shown to be a protective factor against violence.

The goal is usually achieved by focusing interventions on the school's climate with the objective of making it more personal.  By consulting to schools, family therapists can offer a systemic lens and act as catalysts to facilitate climate change.  To succeed, however, family therapists must form an alliance with the school, recognize and address its complex political terrain, and adapt the program(s) to the resource constraints of the school.  We attempted to do just that in a four-year effort to more personalize a public suburban high school. And while the family therapist will encounter unique challenges with each school, the following eight guidelines informed our work described below: 1) gain administrative support; 2) find key individuals; 3) engage multiple perspectives; 4) form a steering committee; 5) develop a specific action plan; 6) create a vision; 7) get outside funding; and 8) evaluate the initiative.

Our Personalization Initiative

In 1997, the Lyons Township Board of Education established the goal of creating a positive school environment for all students.  This goal, which emerged from the self-study conducted by a group of administrators, teachers, students and parents, created a mandate to personalize the high school.  Throughout the 1996-1997 school year, a task force, consisting of the student support services coordinator, the assistant principal and the senior author, met regularly to define an initiative that would increase personalization.  In the spring, Carol Miller Lieber, a renowned high school consultant from Educators for Social Responsibility, joined the team.  The task force also sought external funding from a local foundation.  Three of the four years of the program were underwritten with a $150,000 three-year grant.

The task force decided that a top down mandated initiative requiring total faculty buy in would fail; consequently, a bottom up or grass roots effort was adopted.  To launch the initiative, the task force planned a week-long summer institute.  Invitations were extended to all constituents of Lyons Township High School (LTHS), including its administrators, teachers, parents, students, and community members.  This group was carefully chosen to contain voices that would not only celebrate the positives of LTHS, but also vocalize its shortcomings with regard to personalization.  Fifty participants attended the institute for three days, during which time the climate of LTHS was assessed and a list of priorities was generated to begin the process of personalization.

A smaller group, with representatives from all constituencies, met for two more days to distill the larger group's findings into a set of specific initiatives.  At the conclusion of the institute, this small group agreed to continue functioning throughout the school year as steering committee.  The steering committee designated six areas where personalization could be improved, and designed an initiative for each one.  The initiatives would be phased in over time as the resources of the steering committee and the school would permit.  The six focal points of concern were: 1) teacher-student relationships; 2) student-student relationships; 3) discipline; 4) relationships with the community; 5) students' attachment to school; and 6) faculty-administration relationships.

Teacher-student Relationships

The relationship between teacher and student was targeted initially through voluntary staff development training designed to help teachers personalize their classrooms.  A longer-range initiative focused on new faculty.  First, teachers were recruited who espoused the philosophy of personalization, and second, these new faculty were required to take the classroom practices training in the second year of employment.  To date about half of the faculty have received the training.

The staff development training used was adapted from the "Partners in Learning" model, developed by our partner, Carol Miller Lieber.  Known as peaceable classroom practices, the training offered was a three day summer institute, augmented with on-going staff development throughout the year .

The training provided a philosophy of student centered learning, specific classroom management strategies, and ways to incorporate conflict resolution and emotional intelligence ideas into the curriculum of any subject.  Teachers assembled a source book of lessons which they shared with each other, and their commitment to work together helped to sustain the effort.

Student-student Relationships

With 3,500 students distributed between two campuses, 750 of which are recycled every year, the task of impacting student-student relationships was daunting. The initiative selected was a student leadership training program offered through three day summer institutes. Students with non-traditional leadership potential were nominated by faculty for the training.  Upon completion of the training, these students formed a leadership group that met monthly and planned and executed activities throughout the school year.  Examples of activities were "meet and greet" days, eating lunch with someone you don't know, conflict resolution skits presented to classes, assemblies with speakers addressing peace etcetera.  In the second through fourth years, experienced leaders helped to run the training and functioned as leaders of school activities.  Like any newly established activity, it has taken years to create visibility and value for this group such that it has high status in the school.

Other programs were also in place to address the needs of students, including a peer mediation program and in 2000, the school adopted the "first class" principles designed to enhance respect in the school.

Discipline

Prior to personalization, the LTHS disciplinary system was based on a punishment model that could be characterized as moderately harsh.  Zero tolerance was used only in cases of weapons, but out-of-school suspension was frequently used for physical and non-physical violence and drug and alcohol infractions.  Like most schools, non-white students received a disproportionate number of these suspensions.

The initiative chosen to personalize the discipline system was called "The Alternative to Suspension for Violent Behavior Program. (ASVB)." This program offered violent students a reduced suspension in return for completing a conflict skills training program with a parent.  The ASVB was developed by the authors and offered by graduate students in the MFT program at The Family Institute.

Relationships with the Community

Because the high school was perceived by some in the community as a closed system and even antagonistic to outside input, the goal of a community initiative was to open lines of communication.  The initiative selected was called the "Community Advisory Council" (CAC).  Composed of 50 members with teachers, students, parents and community members represented, the CAC meets monthly to debate a relevant issue affecting the high school.  Many of these issues involve the effort to make L THS more personal.  The CAC forms opinions which are then formally shared with the Board of Education.

Students' Attachment to School

Like many comprehensive high schools, LTHS was structured in such away that students could come to school every day and never connect consistently with an adult who took a personal interest in their welfare. Increasingly, high schools are recognizing that many students feel lost in such a depersonalized environment and that an adult could increase students' attachment to school.  For schools that can't be small, the advisory period is used to create such student-adult connections.  LTHS had been exploring this option for several years so the steering committee decided to support the task force that was investigating the introduction of an advisory program at LTHS.  Over the next four years, proposals were developed and the advisory program was finally adopted for the 2001 school year.

Faculty-administration Relationships.

The concept of organizational climate has been extensively researched. It has been proposed that the organizational climate will be mirrored in the school climate.  The long-standing tension between the faculty and administration created tensions in the school.  To address these tensions, an initiative was created to improve the organizational climate of the school.  A group of faculty and administrators met monthly with the senior author for a year to understand the context of the antagonism and attempt to create a more cooperative organizational climate.  One measure of the improvement in the organizational climate was the relative ease with which the faculty contract was renegotiated in 2000.

Our evaluation of the initiative revealed rather striking outcomes. Discipline data for the two years prior to the personalization initiative and for the four years of it indicated a marked shift in discipline within the school.  There was, for example, an 11 percent drop in total disciplinary incidents from the peak in 1995-96 to the lowest level in 2000-01.  There was a 76 percent drop in out-of-school suspensions from the peak in 1995-96 to the low in 2000-01, and a 63 percent drop in suspensions for physical violence from the peak in 1994-95 to the low in 1999-2000.  The average number of out-of-school suspensions for the three years prior to the personalization initiative was 446 compared to 214 during the personalization years.  The average number of out-of-school suspensions for physical violence for the three years prior to personalization was 54 compared to 32 for the personalization initiative years.

Douglas C. Breunlin, MSSA, LCSW, LMFT, Director, Peaceable Schools Programs, The Family Institute at Northwestern University, and Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University.  Rocco A. Cimmarusti, Ph.D., LCSW, Coordinator of Evaluation, The Family Institute at Northwestern University, and Lecturer, School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Douglas C. Breunlin, The Family Institute, 618 Library Place, Evanston, Illinois 60201, or by e-mail at
d-breunlin@northwestern.edu.

Please note, citations and their references have been omitted from this manuscript in the interests of saving space. References may be found in Breunlin, D. C., Mann, B. J., Kelly, D., Cimmarusti, R. A., Dunne, L., Miller Lieber, C. (Unpublished). Personalizing a Large Comprehensive High School.