Rick Phillips, founder, Community Matters

Joe Jamieson, OCT, Deputy Registrar

Getting students to “wake up to courage” is the purpose of Community Matters, a California-based program founded by Canadian born Rick Phillips. The program builds confidence and competence in students so they can build and own the positive school environments they learn in. Phillips spoke with the College’s Deputy Registrar Joe Jamieson about the program’s philosophical underpinnings and why it works.

 

Q Joe Jamieson: Rick, what in your experience as a school administrator led you to found your approach to creating safe school environments?

A Rick Phillips: I was an administrator at the time of the Columbine shootings in April of ’99. What I saw and experienced as a result of that in the States was the passage of the Safe and Drug Free Schools Act, an opportunity for schools to get financial support from the federal government to address school violence. Public schools throughout the United States quickly expended the majority of the dollars on security, perceiving that the best response to shootings was to create a perimeter using fences and cameras and personnel and developing zero tolerance policies to make a very strong statement that bullying and violence would not be tolerated. I understand why people would go to that route, but 13 years later, most of us, who are educators looking at the school environment, know it is not a safer environment because you have perimeter. That’s called outside-in thinking. As an administrator, I saw the need to work from the inside out and that the real solution, systemically, to reducing the likelihood of violence happening, emotional and physical, was to work on the dynamics among the people in the building in a more relational-environmental approach. That’s what stimulated the work that we began to develop as a result of that outside-in approach being in effect very costly and not having metrics that shows that you can secure safety from making your school look like an airport or a prison.

Q The fortress effect with fences, walls and security cameras, and so on, is obviously tangible and visible. What does the approach look like when you are moving to work on relationships and systems?

AThe art of this was how to move people beyond what was overt and obvious to a relational approach. The inside-out approach is primarily characterized by believing that the best security is to wake up the courage of students and staff to stand and speak up when they see intolerance or incivility in whatever form it’s happening. Mobilizing bystanders is a stronger approach than purchasing cameras and controlling behaviour because, at the end of the day, it is the social norms inside the building and the acceptance or the non-acceptance of the people that allows the virus of bullying or harassment or cyberbullying to expand or contract. We started from that premise on relationships.

Secondarily, we looked at students not as consumers or problems but as the solution and contributors because they hold so much power; while not always using it.  

The third thing about this fundamental shift from outside-in to inside-out, was moving away from punitive policies as the primary solution. I’m not opposed to punitive policies when they are appropriate, but we need a range of more restorative, corrective practices alongside suspensions and expulsions so we have a range of ways to help kids learn from their mistakes. The inside-out approach creates that more restorative justice practice.

So all of those things – working on relationships, putting students in the centre as change agents, adjusting policies away from zero-tolerance to more restorative practices creates change in social norms.

Q What would it look like in a student who has that courage awakened?

A What I mean by waking up courage is that the majority of the students in most schools are neither perpetrators or victims of bullying or intolerance, they are bystanders. Bystanderism is a form of consent, a form of permission. People who see somebody say or do something and don’t confront it allow it to continue to happen. Fundamentally, we know kids know right from wrong, but the missing ingredient in getting them to speak is that they lack the competence and the confidence to use their right from wrong moral compass to act. So if we dial back and ask how do we increase their confidence, we do that by increasing their competence, which means that we must begin to look at the curriculum of our secondary schools through the lens of also teaching social-emotional competency.

Most kids, Joe, say the reason they don’t speak is that they fear retaliation: ‘I’m afraid of doing it wrong. I’m afraid of messing it up, making it worse. I’m afraid of being picked on because I didn’t handle it well.’ We realize that kids are hungry to make a difference when they see injustice; it’s our responsibility to give them the opportunity to acquire the skills, tools and competence. When we do, then the combination of knowing right from wrong, and having competence and opportunity activates that courage we want to wake up.

Q So, Rick, how long has the program been running and where?

We’ve had young people intervene to defuse things that could have led to dangerous things happening because they had the courage to do or say something.

You can’t get all bystanders to stand up at the same time, Joe, you have to have a strategy that’s tactical. So we started a program called Safe School Ambassadors, a student-centered, bystander education model. It starts with the premise that if we can identify and enroll the alpha-social leaders from the different social affiliate groups, sometimes called clichés on a campus, that those individuals already have status and if we could give them a motivator and some tools, they would use their already established leadership to interrupt, defuse, de-escalate their friends from saying or doing mean things. They would begin to be the change agents – each one teaching one, each one reaching one – a mentoring, positive peer pressure model that starts with seeding the different social groups with competence. We put this program in more than 1,200 public schools now for more than a dozen years, so we’ve had a good opportunity to see what works, how it works, when it doesn’t work, why, and to understand how to mobilize the bystander-community through this strategic approach.

Q Obviously it would be an approach that would work anywhere there are groups of students. Has the program moved beyond any of the 50 states?

A There have been a handful of opportunities in Ontario, but it was not sustained, partly because funding dried up or the school leaders who had the initial inspiration to work with us to implement the model moved. I hope there will be some renewed interest because this model doesn’t have a zip or postal code. We need to do better at identifying and equipping our young people if we want to get better metrics and outcomes.

Q When we hear of programs coming from across the border, there may be some resistance, but I believe that a group of kids in a secondary school in Anaheim or Washington, DC, or Winnipeg or Toronto or Orillia is fundamentally the same as far as motivators, drivers and responses.

A I couldn’t agree more. A 10-year-old girl in any of the provinces can push a button just as easily as someone in Detroit, Michigan to spread a rumour, to use the Internet, to use technology, to gossip, upload a picture, or upload a video that they have taken involving somebody at school. This is now a universal problem. It is a form. The frequency may change based on geography and demographics, but the substantive mean-spirited behaviour exhibited by young people is getting younger, meaner, and more pervasive. It’s no longer just older powerful kids using their size or status. It can be anybody. It’s girls on girls in relational aggression. It’s verbal. It’s texted. It’s Facebooked. So it’s much more pervasive, insidious and covert. That’s why we must, as educators, be more vigilant to train more staff, to train more administrators, to educate and wake up the courage of adults and students. We have to adapt and get ahead of this thing or we’re going to be looking at one or another tragedy all too soon.

Q How instrumental are parents in this?

A We introduce the Safe School Ambassadors program at the 4th grade believing that’s culturally when a lot of the dynamic begins. As kids become, 9, 10, 11 and 12, the social hierarchy or pecking order gets more emphasized. Having said that, parental influence during the elementary years is, I believe, more significant than it is during middle and high. Parents model. They teach their children the values that they hold. So dad says, ‘Look, if someone pushes you at school, you push back.’ Sometimes children bring those values from home and they get expressed at school. The good news developmentally is we know that, as children approach early adolescence, they begin to individuate and to differentiate between messages from home and making choices for themselves in a different environment where there are no parents around. We can help young people understand that part of the developmental learning curve is to discern what’s appropriate in one place and what’s appropriate in another. That’s part of helping them develop their inner-moral compass. So, yes, parents play a role. We have to have all the stakeholder groups singing from the same songbook if we are going to make systemic and sustainable change occur in our schools.

Q What makes a program successful in schools?

A In looking back – you know, 12 years, 1,200 schools – the program has flourished, thrived, showing great metrics for changing the culture and climate in terms of discipline indicators. Some places have been okay and in others it’s failed and just stopped. So you ask, ‘What is it? Is it fundamentally something in the program? I think most people will agree: the seed is primarily the same, it is the gardener that helps it grow or not. Primarily, the driver is administrative buy-in.

If school leaders commit to establishing a positive social school climate, see young people more as contributors than consumers, commit to restorative and not just punitive practices, then you have leadership that recognizes the value of a program that equips kids with confidence and will ensure that it is nurtured and supported. Leadership matters.

Staff buy-in matters. You have to have staff who want to volunteer to support the kids. We’re putting young people on the front lines, asking them to take social, and sometimes physical risks to raise their voices and speak up. They need a support network of adults who have their back, provide further training, and help them to process their emotions.

Young people want to do this work. They want to take care of their friends. They want to stop people hurting the people they care most about. That’s their motivation to get involved in a program like Safe School Ambassadors. It’s self-interest that arcs out and exponentially grows to increase their citizenship capacity. But the program’s success is really dependent upon the adults more than the students.

Q I like your image of the gardener and the seed. When does the seed start to flourish? How long does it take to show positive results?

A Often staff will notice behavioural shifts within 4 to 6 weeks of the program being implemented. Moving about the campus, they may see some kids interrupting where they might have walked by before. Or they’ll see a student who goes up to an excluded or isolated student and says, ‘Hey, you want to come and sit with us during lunch or play during gym period or play period?’  So there’s anecdotal observational data that happens quickly because we’re mobilizing kids who were leaders before we ever met them.

Within a year, though, we can begin to look at pre-imposed data around discipline. We like to look at discipline indicators like referrals to the office, detentions, and suspensions. When young people step up, do we see fewer incidences of negative behaviours? Can we also track the attendance of chronically absent kids who often stay home because they are afraid more than they are ill. Can we look for groups to study and attendance pattern changes among some of the kids? It usually takes a good year. Our experience over 12 years is that, within two to three years, there are significant decreases in the various trouble spots and the behaviours that were causing schools to spend a lot of time dealing with discipline every day.

Q That’s great news that it can actually be measured with data. Can you point to school districts that have adopted the program and show how it helped or turned them around?

A Yes. We have multiple districts and we’ve done some evaluation that appears on our website at www.community-matters.org. We’ve analyzed schools that have the program and schools with similar demographics that don’t, and looked at suspensions and discipline. We have school districts throughout California and school districts in Texas and Florida where the program has had five to eight years to really be systemically sustainable. You start to get exponential leveraging over time from elementary kids who become middle school and junior high students, who then become high school students, and you begin to – the rock in the pond effect – see social change over time. Many districts in California over two to three years have the discipline measures and metrics to show improvements, which is part of the reason the program is sustained in those districts because the decrease in behavioural issues have a direct correlation to finances. See, when you reduce suspensions, you recover dollars. When you increase attendance, you increase dollars. When you have administrators spending less time processing behavioural problems, you are using your dollars and your staff time more constructively. These are all metrics that school districts are looking for and I’m proud to say that we’ve been viable and growing because these metrics are in place.

Q Are there any anecdotal stories of kids whose lives were changed by the process?

A Yes. We get letters and reports and hear from staff and kids when we go back to the schools to do training. For example, we had a seventh-grader at a school who was an ambassador and, by chance, happened to see a boy who had gotten a crowbar into the school in his backpack. He overheard the boy say to an eighth-grader that there was going to be a fight of rival groups after school and he was prepared. If you are a seventh-grade kid trained, who had a moral kind of crisis or nexus about, do I snitch? Am I a snitch if I tell? What do I do? What’s my obligation or responsibility? In the program, we tell a kid if you can interrupt it or intervene do, if you can’t then report it because reporting is not snitching, reporting is trying to stop somebody from getting in trouble. These ambassadors understand that because they are empowered. So this young, brave boy took the information to his principal, who kept his name anonymous, and over a course of two or three periods during the day was able to uncover all of the players and by three o’clock there was no fight, nobody got hurt, and there was no tragedy. This boy, by his courage and his understanding of his role and responsibility, may have saved lives. This is not an unusual occurrence. We’ve had young people intervene to defuse and de-escalate things that could have led to suicide, fights or dangerous things happening because they had the courage and competence to do or say something to interrupt it before it became an offence, incident or tragedy. I’m so proud of the thousands of young people who have the courage to say or do something when the see their friend do something that is going to get somebody in trouble or hurt.

Often special education kids are targeted because they are different. We often ask the ambassadors to keep their eyes out for those kids and be invisible mentors. Many times schools have reported that by cross-mentoring, some of our ambassadors befriend kids who traditionally do poorly in school socially, who don’t have many friends, who are isolated because they are different or their sexual orientation or perceived orientation is different, or have a learning disability. The ambassadors keep a look out for them socially and there are major changes in their sense of esteem and worth and then their participation and ultimately their performance improves. We’re just leveraging relationships.

However, the secondary school culture does not by itself promote this because of the pressures and mandates that schools and staff have to drive kids to make sure that they meet all their syllabus and curricula requirements. Social-emotional learning takes a significant back seat and we see more kids not knowing what to do. As a result, we normalize incivility. This is one strategy, not an end-all strategy, but one strategy that simply leverages the power of our students because they see, hear and know things that adults don’t and they can intervene in ways that adults can’t. It’s logical that young people are positioned, but the position isn’t enough. We have to get them the support, the tools, the responsibility to make them the peacemakers and leaders we wish them to be.

Q What do schools need to do to implement this model? What’s the next step?

A I think the next step is to gather a group in the building – staff, students, parents, small stakeholder climate committee or prevention committee –and determine that there is the social will and a level of readiness to do this work.  If we skip over that part and we don’t create that buy-in and the sense that this is a priority, that it’s connected to the outcomes that we want so desperately to achieve, it will just be putting a Band-Aid on a problem. It will be buying a program and programs come and go. We really want that investment, so if that yes is there and we want to commit to that inside-out approach, we recognize that young people can take an increased role and we’re going to put the time and resources in to help them acquire the competence, then contact us, contact Community Matters. We’re a non-profit organization committed to helping schools implement or take the principles of this model and apply it to programs that are already in place. We must do more than we’ve done if we want to get better outcomes. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Allow us to help you. We’ve got a ready, applicable model that could be easily implemented in any school, in any province, at any time.

Q Thank you, Rick. I want to go back to the first thing that you talked about, which was post-Columbine, when the US government responded by throwing tons of money into tangible things that could be seen. Community Matters isn’t addressing outside intruders per se, is it?

A You’re right. This is not an ingress or egress program.  The things that the provinces are going to get in terms of support for thicker doors and better glass, I understand. Unfortunately, when an incident of that magnitude happens, everybody wants to make sure that they’ve secured the school from people coming in. But the truth is that, proportionally, thank goodness, there is a .0001 per cent likelihood of these things occurring.

What’s happening today or any day in schools, however, is that thousands of kids are being harassed, mistreated, excluded, put down and made to feel unsafe. That is not about security. It is about getting the people in the building to believe it’s in their own best interest to look out for each other. I don’t believe it’s an either/or. But it has to be proportional and as you said it looks better when you’ve got the perimeter walls, and it soothes parents when they see a uniformed person outside the building.

You can check the guns at the door, but you can’t check the kids at the door. They bring in weapons that get past adults and metal detectors – the weapons of prejudice, the weapons of bias, grudges from the neighbourhood, values from home, and on a day-to-day basis, that’s the best opportunity and the most cost-effective place that we can begin to create change, not overnight, but over time. So, while we don’t want to look away from the need for security or securing the perimeters of our schools, there has to be balance and we have to allocate resources in the right proportions. I think that’s what we are speaking about here, putting our resources in a place where we’re likely to get the most result and that’s really on the inside-out.

 

To learn more about Community Matters, go to community-matters.org.