A Journey Into School Safety
Reflections by Dee Beaugez, Founder of the Safe to Learn Community Project
1/14/2016 - I am the Founder of the Safe to Learn Community Project. I am also a wife, mother and grandmother who is deeply concerned about school safety and the future for our children and grandchildren. I am the president of a software company specializing in software and online solutions that support school emergency preparedness. I am also an experienced professional photographer; teacher of digital data collection; and director of documentary films; and a community organizer who has been responsible for developing school safety programs and supporting national emergency preparedness projects. All of these experiences have provided me with a variety of lenses to view school emergency preparedness and education over the last 21 years.
With the increase in school violence, catastrophic human-caused incidents and devastating natural disasters, I realized I had to do more than teach others how to photograph their facilities and collect and input emergency plan data for administrators, principals, emergency mangers, and school police.
I made a choice to invest the past 5 years listening, communicating and searching for answers that could actually support school safety programs and find resources to help support their concerns. During my journey I have been fortunate enough to work closely with innovators, administrators, principals, teachers, educators, emergency managers, emergency first-responders, school police officers and parents who have been willing to share their time, experience, skills and wisdom to guide me along the path to create the Safe to Learn Community Project.
I made a choice to invest the past 5 years listening, communicating and searching for answers that could actually support school safety programs and find resources to help support their concerns. During my journey I have been fortunate enough to work closely with innovators, administrators, principals, teachers, educators, emergency managers, emergency first-responders, school police officers and parents who have been willing to share their time, experience, skills and wisdom to guide me along the path to create the Safe to Learn Community Project.
Our family had moved from Nevada to Washington state in 1999. Due to s set of unusual circumstances, I was fortunate enough to continue working as the City of Sparks (NV) Project Impact Coordinator. I actually worked remotely from Washington State and booked flights to Nevada to attend meetings and that is when I started working on projects that supported school safety.
It was November 26, 2001 when I attended the Governor’s Conference on School Safety in Las Vegas, Nevada and I had the opportunity to hear a presentation by Gregory Thomas, “Coping with Crisis – the New York Board of Education’s Response to the World Trade Center Disaster”. Thomas had been employed by the New York Board of Education as the Executive Director of Division of Student Safety & Prevention Services on 9/11/2001. His presentation focused on the principals who were responsible for the students and staff at the eight schools around Ground Zero on September 11, 2001. What I learned during that conference changed my life forever.
I kept thinking about the importance of leadership and school safety . I will never know why it took me until November 2010 to contact Thomas. I emailed him saying. “Your words from November 28, 2001 changed my approach to school safety and school emergency preparedness! Do you have time to talk?”
Thomas responded and suggested I read “Uncommon Sense, Uncommon Courage: How the New York City System, Its Teachers, Leadership and Students Responded to the Terror of September 11” that was published in 2004 by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health – National Center for Disaster Preparedness.
My life changed again reading “Uncommon Sense, Uncommon Courage”. I read it over and over again, and made a copy with numerous notes and questions. I finally found enough courage to contact Dr. Anne (Nancy) Degnan. Dr. Degnan was responsible for managing project, writing, editing, and also providing the leadership to not only complete the “Uncommon Sense, Uncommon Courage”, but to make sure the quality of information would be sustainable for years to come. Because of “Uncommon Sense, Uncommon Courage” I soon made the decision to contact Principal Ada Rosario Dolch.
Ada Rosario Dolch had served as the Principal of the High School for Leadership and Public Service in lower Manhattan for six years and the school was situated only two blocks from where the south tower of the World Trade Center. Despite her own personal pain; knowing that her sister was ever present on the 103rd floor of Tower 1 at the World Trade Center; she had to focus on the safety of the students and staff. Even though all 9,000 children plus staff were safely evacuated on that tragic day this amazing story was never printed on a front page of a newspaper or featured on any TV News station. In the midst of chaos students ranging in ages from three to eighteen years – grammar, middle and high schools were safely evacuated without injury from less than a quarter mile of Ground Zero.
Ada Rosario Dolch was one of those 8 principals. “I knew I couldn't run. I had a bigger responsibility in my hands; to maintain calm, provide security, and fight to make sure that every individual in the school building would be safe. Could I guarantee that? No, but I was going to fight with all of my might to make sure I would.” Her story of leadership made me stop and think how important it would be to have her share it with other principals because it was real – this was not a movie, no second take, no editing. She was the leader, the one who had to make the hard choices that day and in the middle of the disaster because she knew that everyone at that school was depending on her to make sure they were safe!
> Coming soon - A Journal Into Preparedness
Ada Rosario Dolch had served as the Principal of the High School for Leadership and Public Service in lower Manhattan for six years and the school was situated only two blocks from where the south tower of the World Trade Center. Despite her own personal pain; knowing that her sister was ever present on the 103rd floor of Tower 1 at the World Trade Center; she had to focus on the safety of the students and staff. Even though all 9,000 children plus staff were safely evacuated on that tragic day this amazing story was never printed on a front page of a newspaper or featured on any TV News station. In the midst of chaos students ranging in ages from three to eighteen years – grammar, middle and high schools were safely evacuated without injury from less than a quarter mile of Ground Zero.
Ada Rosario Dolch was one of those 8 principals. “I knew I couldn't run. I had a bigger responsibility in my hands; to maintain calm, provide security, and fight to make sure that every individual in the school building would be safe. Could I guarantee that? No, but I was going to fight with all of my might to make sure I would.” Her story of leadership made me stop and think how important it would be to have her share it with other principals because it was real – this was not a movie, no second take, no editing. She was the leader, the one who had to make the hard choices that day and in the middle of the disaster because she knew that everyone at that school was depending on her to make sure they were safe!
> Coming soon - A Journal Into Preparedness