School safety… during a pandemic. Part II.
A six-part dialogue between an architect + an educator. With a soundtrack. One year later.
In the 2019–2020 academic year, Barry Svigals was a fellow with our K12 Lab at the Stanford d.school. The purpose of the fellowship was to utilize design approaches to reimagine school safety. Barry brought decades of experience designing K-12 school buildings to this endeavor, including the design of the new Sandy Hook Elementary School. When COVID-19 forced us to shelter-in-place, Barry and I were in the last week of co-teaching a course called Safe By Design which brought together Stanford students and students from ASCEND Middle School in Oakland. We were in the midst of digging into research on student wellbeing, developing collaborations with several national organizations dedicated to school safety, and designing prototypes to help change conversations about what safety can and should mean for K-12 communities…
To get a full background on the letters below, which Barry and I wrote to each other a year ago this week, check out the first post in this series.
DAY TWO
April 8th, 2020
Dear Barry,
Absolutely. We know that we don’t know. We know that there will never be a finished state of knowing, just as there is no final ‘woke’ state, just a process of awakening that we can choose over and over and over to engage in. But I hold our awareness of our own ignorance in contrast — or at least in tension — with our desire to be of service now, when so much is needed. If there is something we can share to be of use, I want to share it. So let’s try, over the next few days, to come up with anything and everything we’ve learned — or at least begun to think about — that could be useful to our colleagues, neighbors, global community, in navigating this pandemic? How can we (not you and me, but all of us) apply the lesson you describe in your first letter about seeing unintended consequences of addressing issues in isolation? This makes me think of the arguments right now about how if we continue flattening the curve for too long (and don’t accompany that with some major policy changes), we may succeed in saving lives from coronavirus-19, but we may cause mass death and suffering through starvation and economic deprivation. Just as you and your colleagues in Connecticut found a way to make the Sandy Hook Elementary School a beautiful learning environment and one of the most physically safe schools in the country at the same time, perhaps there is a third path for our country that doesn’t force a choice between deaths by disease and deaths by starvation and lack of access to other essential needs?
And what lessons can we pull from your point about the language used around ‘active shooters’ and ‘fire drills?’ So much of the language being used right now is terrifying. We certainly don’t want to sugar-coat or obfuscate what’s going on (or, I don’t think we do?), so what care could or should be given to language that is not being given? Are there different turns of phrase we would suggest? Appropriate and healthy ways to compartmentalize? I saw a note from a colleague yesterday about a friend who works at a major media outlet who told him that they can’t consider a single story that doesn’t relate to the pandemic. On the one hand, this seems dangerous and like it is forcing a firehose of terrifying and heartbreaking information into each of our mouths. On the other hand, I don’t seem to have much bandwidth for news that isn’t about what’s going on all around me right now…
So, what can we say– What metaphors can we share– What quotes have we come across– that might be of service in this moment?
April 8th, 2020
Dear sam,
Wow. That’s a lot to digest and respond to…
But coincidently, speaking of quotes, this morning this one was sent to me:
‘There is nothing more powerful than a community that discovers what matters to it.’ — Margaret Wheatley
What I see happening all over is that people are feeling a lack. We are all feeling what separation and isolation means and how we suffer the absence of others. We suffer the absence of community. And in the suffering of that absence we experience the need to reach out however we can. First of all, we know that community, itself, matters. Holding that close, how then will our communities discover what matters for them? How to create the circumstances where community might be more broadly felt and, more importantly, lived? Allowing a way to feel what matters and to negotiate difficult, impossible decisions we must face. So, we need a language that brings us back to what matters, what we’ve always known to matter. We need to “re-member” our communities, bring the members back together.
Yes, knowing we don’t know doesn’t mean inaction. We are called. Yet can we see a way and follow it with a sensitivity to unintended consequences? The middle path is clearly the most challenging, one between flattening and deprivation. How to negotiate that journey with so many disparate voices and the specter of fear that clouds the way?
First of all, we need to have faith that the greatest help is always here: the creative forces in every community. Within that is the wish to contribute and we have begun to see how individuals have responded. These are the stories we need to amplify. Particularly, the voices of those who seem to begin with so little, those in marginalized communities who have systematically been forgotten, actively ignored or punished for their poverty. We see how this pandemic has only further accelerated the divide between the privileged and the disadvantaged. These stories need to be told and within them illuminate the signs of hope and compassion. They exist; they need to have equal weight in what we hear and read.
We all are motivated by deep impulses and deep appetites to serve, even though we may not be able to locate that which we are willing to serve. So, this is just a part of my nature, and I think everybody else’s nature, to offer oneself at the critical moment when the emergency becomes articulate. It’s only when the emergency becomes articulate that we can locate that willingness to serve.”—Leonard Cohen
The “emergency” is now certainly “articulate” and, as it turns out, as we discovered in our work, one of the most tried and true ways to reduce our fears is to think of others, to be of service to something greater than ourselves. Besides mitigating our fears, these stories of hope and community will resonate with the wish to serve that many feel, but don’t know where to begin. For example, there is a wealth of human resources in the students who are facing a time shortly where even online learning will pause. This powerful constituency of students throughout all communities might be marshaled to engage in the search for what’s needed and be called to carry out solutions.
And no act of service is too small; every one matters. The aggregation of these individual contributions have a catalytic and exponential effect. Others are moved to act as well.
It is less the grand gestures on the global stage that moves history; it is rather the modest acts in the common place that heralds real social evolution.
What can motivate these modest acts?
What holds true now, a year later, is that the false dichotomies are still with us. In combatting the pandemic, we shouldn’t forget why we have schools to begin with. We need to be challenged to create “safety” solutions that address multiple issues simultaneously, including equity and wellbeing, physical safety and joy of learning. What is also more important than ever is that we remember our collective responsibility for the quality of our learning environments. Everyone matters, everyone can contribute. And, more than ever, students need to be at the heart of creating and sustaining vibrant school communities—not just as those we serve and observe, but as co-creators.
We’re curious what you think:
Who is not in the conversations you are having about school safety who should be? How might you engage them?
For more questions about school safety — and a place to pose your own — visit ReimagineSchoolSafety.org
Join us again on 4/11 for the next installment of letters and tunes.
