EPSB’s SRO vote: the missing social innovation lab report
EPSB held school safety consultations in October and November 2023 — where’s the full report?
This story is part two of a series on EPSB’s SRO decision.
Following up on yesterday’s article about the report and how the decision was made, I have a lot of questions about the process that remain unanswered. Some of these may never be answered, but they’re questions I hope people ask their trustees and consider as next year’s school board election starts to heat up. I’ll go through some of those over coming days as a series of posts.
Several months after the board finally released the report to the public in June 2023, the division announced that they would be entering into consultations with the community. The call went out on Friday, October 13, for people to register to participate in a series of social innovation labs. Despite the claimed importance of these meetings, people had less than a week to register before the deadline of noon on Friday, October 20.
Anyone who works in the communications world knows that you release information on Fridays, preferably late in the day, if you don’t want it to receive too much attention. Many journalists have already filed their stories; unless something is massive, it probably won’t appear anywhere until Monday.
On that Friday, especially because the Monday of that week had been the Thanksgiving holiday, parents and caregivers would likely have been tired and just trying to transition to the busy lives most families lead over weekends — that is, of course, except for parents who would be working over the weekend, maybe even at a second job. Many families don’t even look at SchoolZone until Sunday evening or Monday morning. The following week was also a short week with a PD day on the Friday.
Further, although these events were not limited to current students and their families, many members of the community would not have been aware. A search of division social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X shows the information was posted twice, once on October 13 and again October 18, with graphics that read “Apply now: Share your ideas about school safety.” Some trustees also shared information. The information appears not to have been picked up by news media. With a short time window, it is likely that many people wouldn’t have been aware
However, it was not readily apparent that these were consultations related to police in schools, and few social media users who are not currently involved in some way in EPSB would be paying attention. Even for those of us who are, it was easy to miss — word didn’t start getting around in my circle (which includes a lot of people involved in education!) around October 17–18.
It’s hard to know who signed up or whether there was significant uptake, but the short timeframe, vague title, and limited distribution of information outside of closed channels are consistent with containment practices used by organizations to manage public participation through performative consultations.
This exclusion was furthered by the times at which the social innovation labs were held. Participants in the full labs would need to be available over two successive weekdays, from 9 am to 3 pm for the first session and 9 am to noon for the second. Although these sessions were theoretically open to anyone, in practice, many people would be automatically excluded by the time commitment and the choice of daytime hours — current students who might not be permitted the time away from class, for example, or anyone working during those hours who could not just take a day and a half off work. Many parents of course fall into that second category, with many of them using any time off they might have for PD days and children’s sick days (which spiked dramatically with the tripledemic).
The evening sessions were more accessible but offered substantially less opportunity for people to engage deeply as they were held over a single 2.5 hour session. Meals were made available before the meetings, which can improve inclusion, but the choice of a location several blocks from the nearest transit stop in the evening when bus service is poor still presented a barrier to some people’s participation.
This exclusion would be less significant if one of the commitments from the events had been kept. As seen in the screenshot below, the trustees committed to three followup actions:
- understand school safety from a variety of perspectives
- create a report from participants’ feedback, which will help Trustees develop an online survey that will be shared with the public in the coming months
- propose a recommendation and pathway for how we move forward on a shared approach to school safety
Further, the event information stated explicitly that people who were not selected to participate would have future opportunities to share their experiences and feedback over the coming months.
However, despite these next steps being clearly outlined on the step, thus far, there has been no further consultation available, nor has there been an online survey shared with the public. There is no clear recommendation or pathway evident other than handing authority over to the superintendent to make a deal with the Edmonton Police Service.
It’s not clear that the majority of the board listened much to other perspectives, either, given how public input was largely dismissed by the majority of trustees on April 30 — or in the case of Julie Kusiek, that she appears to have listened to the large number of people who came to the board to share their concerns about police returning to schools. She sat and listened to researchers with expertise in the area, including the principal investigator of a national SSHRC-funded study on SROs — a study that will provide Canadian evidence the pro-SRO advocates claim is missing, which is used to dismiss the large body of literature from the US and other countries, and which is not beholden to a school division, police force, or NGO.
Kusiek even said it was her duty to listen. And yet she seems to have decided to instead base her decision on heavy pressure from administration, anecdotal claims not backed by the data, and a room intentionally packed out with principals. She listened and then voted against the public interest she was elected to represent.
Finally, there has been no release of the full consultation report. On April 24, just days before the special board, a highly redacted summary report was released, likely in response to questions about why there had been no follow up. The document, which is described as a “brief overview,” is certainly brief. Of its eleven total pages, about three pages are taken up by the title page and illustrations. Actual outcomes are reported over four pages — four and a half if you count a table outlining the tensions between different views.
What it does say is vague and mostly boils down to “there are many opinions about school safety.” The report identifies three categories of pathways (reform-based, school-based, and community-based) but only offers one example for each and offers no suggestions for what the board might do next. The overview report hints at a much larger report, but the document that was released doesn’t even qualify as a summary.
The remaining pages describe the social innovation lab’s process and outline the next steps, which once again include a commitment to a subsequent online survey that would “dig deeper into the themes heard.”
To date, no public survey has been released, and with the decision to go ahead with bringing back SROs and the trustees’ astonishing decision to abdicate any responsibility by handing all authority back to the superintendent, it is highly unlikely a public survey will ever materialize. Some relevant questions were asked in the 2023–2024 district feedback survey, but that survey is only open to current students and their parents/caregivers, which leaves out many groups who were invited to participate in these consultations, and a handful of questions won’t do much to dig deeper into themes from multiday consultations.
Some preliminary 2023–2024 results about school safety were attached to the documents for the SRO special meeting, although the regular district feedback survey results are not (these reports are usually brought to the board in the following school year). I’ll explore that partial report in the next post.
In the 2022–2023 report, which covers a much broader range than the preliminary report, it shows that despite the terrifying tales of schools in chaos described at the special board meeting, 91.4 percent of staff reported feeling safe or very safe at work.
One more interesting thing about the 2022–2023 feedback survey results: while staff almost universally felt safe, with 87 percent of parents saying they felt their child was safe at school, only 73 percent of students said the same. One might interpret students’ feelings of safety as cause to bring in police, but answers to some other questions indicate the division might need to look internally, not externally, to address the issue and consider what it actually means for a child to feel safe.
Only 65 percent of students felt staff knew them as a person, and 69 percent felt like adults at their school care about students. When it comes to belonging, 70 percent of students felt they belonged and 64 percent said school is a place where all students feel like they belong. Finally, 67 percent said they felt like they could be themselves at school.
Overall, with some variation, only about two-thirds of students described feelings of care and belonging at school. For a child, feeling a sense of care and belonging is deeply connected to a child feeling safe. A large minority of students reported that they don’t feel the adults who are already in their schools care about them — it is difficult to see how adding another adult with a gun and no specific training to work with children and youth is going to fix that.
We are in a crisis in schools — it is a crisis of underfunding, of children who lost two years of normal socialization to a pandemic, and of a mass social trauma that affected children and adults alike. Safety for people who are traumatized by a global pandemic doesn’t come from police. Children’s development is not advanced by having someone around who can handcuff them if they make mistakes. And money spent on police in an already under-resourced system is money that doesn’t hire the mental health workers, social workers, and educational assistants that we desperately need to foster feelings of being cared for, belonging, and being safe in schools.
