Promoting Your Voice on School Safety : A Practical Guide for Teachers

This hands-on guide helps teachers understand the complexity and humanity behind school safety and security issues―and their role in promoting, using their professional knowledge and expertise, a safe school environment.

While other books teach security techniques (lockdowns and drills), this unique resource focuses on acknowledging a teacher’s role at the forefront of maintaining safe schools, as they spend the most time with students throughout the day. The book offers comfort and resources to these teachers on the front lines, with comprehensive guidance on how to identify, advocate for, and collaborate on school safety issues. It also provides invaluable information on classroom management, responding to trauma, striving for more equitable outcomes, and finding and using other voices.

Each chapter is filled with reflection questions, tools, and "What would you do?" scenarios, making this the perfect resource to work on with a colleague or study group. With the practical advice in this book, you’ll feel more prepared and confident to tackle difficult decisions on both a small and larger scale.

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Dr. Lori Brown is an experienced teacher, school administrator, and grant/RFP writer who has designed professional learning for schools around the globe. Following 15 years in the public schools of North and South Carolina, she worked for the world’s largest education company (Pearson) designing school transformation plans, leadership initiatives, and personalized offerings for classroom-based teachers. She has worked in the for- and non-profit sector designing and implementing educator focused professional learning plans. Her publications include a peer reviewed journal article, a book chapter on the theme of violent student writing, and frequent educational articles in various publications.

Gretchen Oltman is a lawyer, author, and educator. She currently works as an associate professor of organizational leadership at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. Her career spans over two decades in education, from serving as a high school English teacher to leading in an administrative capacity at the university level. Her first book, Violence in Student Writing: A School Administrator's Guide won the National Association of Secondary School Principals’ High School Level Dissertation of the Year award in 2009. Her work focusing on violence in student writing informed the National Council of Teachers of English’s position statement “Beliefs about the Students’ Right to Write.” She is also the coauthor of Law Meets Literature: A Novel Approach for the English Classroom, The Themes that Bind Us: Simplifying the Teaching of US Supreme Court Cases in the Social Studies classroom, and Prepare to Chair: Leading the Thesis and Dissertation Process and most recently the ASCD publication What’s Your Leadership Story? A School Leader’s Guide to Aligning Who You Are With How You Lead.