Students to participate in new crisis and violence plan

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    DAVENPORT, Iowa (Quad-City Times ) — Students will be able to participate in the Davenport Community School District’s new plan for dealing with crisis and violence, according to an update on the plan’s implementation presented Monday.

The district is working with the Iowa Department of Education to address citations the district received from the state. Those citations concern a number of issues including providing equitable education for Black students. The effort is under the oversight of the Iowa State Board of Education.

The district has prioritized developing a uniform crisis response and violence prevention plan, which officials have said is an early step in addressing the equity issues.

“We know that the student-voice piece is going to be critical to us moving forward,” district Superintendent T.J. Schneckloth told the district’s school board during its regularly scheduled committee of the whole meeting.

The student teams will be developed in April and are expected to be among the elements up and running in the coming school year, Corri Guy, a district staffer who took part in the presentation, said.

There are already students who help with mediation and conflict resolution among their fellow students at the district’s high schools and they will be the model from which the broader program will be built, she said during discussions with the board.

The district wants to ensure that there is equity in those youth teams, Guy said.

“Does that team also reflect the true student body of the school?” she said.

Next steps for building the student teams include identifying candidates and scheduling training for the teams, Jabari Woods said.

“Being able to respond to conflict resolution, you need a team,” Woods said.

When students are engaged in that response — students from different backgrounds that reflect the building — sometimes it adds to the building’s response when a crisis occurs, he said.

The district’s work on establishing the plan has included building consensus among its staff about crisis response and violence prevention being a priority and also training that staff in a consistent set of actions it can take should an event such as a fight at a building occur, according to previous reports on the effort.

The plan includes multiple teams designed to support and provide feedback to each other when dealing with incidents– at the administrative level, at individual buildings and in the district community at large, according to the presentation Monday.

“There’s a solid building-level team, there’s a solid district- level team, there’s regular feedback coming through, there’s established student-voice teams,” Schneckloth said Monday.

The groundwork that is being laid for systemic implementation of the plan is pretty solid, Schneckloth said.

By the end of the week, about 95% of the district’s staff will have been trained in how to respond to violence or a crisis, Guy said. The building-crisis teams were trained last month.

The presentation and discussion about the plan lasted about 90 minutes and covered other aspects of the effort. A recording of the meeting, which includes more details, is available on the district’s YouTube page.

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