Mansueto Safer Together, a school safety and student support initiative

SGA Youth & Family Services proposes the Mansueto Safer Together program to serve the students, families, and faculty of Mansueto High School in the Brighton Park community on the Southwest Side of Chicago. Brighton Park is majority-minority and struggles with some of the city’s largest problems: gun violence, gangs, poverty, and unemployment. Students at Mansueto suffer from toxic stress and exposure to multiple traumas, which lead to aggression and lack of focus in the classroom. The purpose of Mansueto Safer Together is to reduce and prevent violence within the school, create a positive learning environment, address the impact of trauma, and build resilience among students, teachers, and the administration. The Mansueto Safer Together model responds with approaches from the Trauma-Informed Resilience Oriented Toolkit model which provide teachers with the skills, strategies and tools to support a positive school climate that prevents violence, while at the same time offering the violence prevention education and student behavioral health support to improve students’ coping, emotional regulation and conflict resolution skills. Specifically, Mansueto Safer Together utilizes several strategies to enhance school capacity to address school violence: it improves the specific locations where students feel unsafe in the school facility; implements anti-bullying and anti-harassment education in large and small group settings; teaches all school staff strategies and develops protocols to promote a positive climate, build consistency in student interactions, and increase teacher-student trust; creates a program of multi-level teacher support to reduce burnout and stress and build peer connections; includes participation of all students and staff in large group violence prevention, conflict resolution, and stress reduction activities; provides small group education and skill-building to youth with specific shared emotional or behavioral needs or risk factors for violence; and provides individualized behavioral health services to students with higher level needs or who have displayed violent or aggressive behaviors or been victimized. The program is a combination of safety enhancements to designated school areas, small and large group violence prevention education, individual behavioral health interventions, and teacher stress assessment and resilience building. These services foster resilience and increase potential to overcome the effects of trauma, improve learning outcomes, and poise youth for a brighter future.