(opening music) Laura: Hello and welcome to Carolina classrooms.

I'm Laura Ybarra.

In conversations about safety, school officials discuss how to keep threats outside the building, and how to plan for weather emergencies.

There is also a focus on what's happening inside the building.

On this episode of Carolina Classrooms we'll talk about the health and wellness of students and staff, and how that contributes to an overall safe school.

School Nurses and counselors care for the physical, emotional, and academic health of students and staff.

Ellen: So when you stop and think about the history of school nurses, people normally think about a school nurse is providing band aids and ice packs to their child.

But, you know, the positive note of the pandemic, it really brought the role of the school nurse into the spotlight.

The school nurse is really the epicenter of you know, good school health and wellness.

She's the person that connects our families to resources that may be out there.

She's the one that may identify that there are some health care concerns that haven't been diagnosed yet.

Elizabeth: We are talking a lot about physical activity in our district right now.

Recognizing that physical activity and physical education are two different things.

You know, our P E classes teach our children physical activity skills, and how to be physically active.

We also know that physical activity can increase your mood, it can strengthen your bones and muscles, there are so many benefits to being more physically active, also setting healthy boundaries for mental health practice.

And I think that also we need to take time for self care.

But self care is very important because we can't care for our students.

Our nurses can't care for their school population, if they are not cared for themselves, and they're not in a good place mentally and physically.

Dr. Nancy: Mental health affects everything we do.

It affects relationships , and affects our choices, effects.

How we learn if we learn will affect our focus if there are some deep rooted problems.

But our staff is becoming trained in Mental Health First Aid in suicide awareness.

And in crisis prevention, intervention, we all have to be prepared to help each other.

And not only to help our children, but to help our employees, from our bus drivers to our staff in the schools, as well as our community and our adults.

Fronde: School counselors address student needs and three domains, which include academic, personal, and then College and Career School Counselors are a vital part to school safety.

You know, obviously, students feeling like they belong in a school is very important, making those connections and those relationships are number one.

And I think that across the board contributes to school safety.

When a student feels comfortable with a counselor or a staff member, then they're more likely to approach them with information, where if they're not feeling safe, or if they are concerned about maybe another classmate.

So I think there's that contribution there.

That really is that overall school climate that I think is the big impact and how students feel when they're at school, do they feel connected?

Do they feel like they have a trusted adult in that building, and then someone that they can go to.

Laura: School climate, is a measure of how welcomed students and staff feel in the building?

And how engaged they are with each other and the learning process.

Techa: The school climate pillars are safety, being number one, social media is the next one, those interpersonal relationships, how strong they are the teaching and learning.

And the last one is the environment itself.

You know, is it?

Is it clean?

Is it safe?

Is it inviting?

Is it positive?

Is the lighting good or the halls are attractive?

You know, that's a part of, you know, how we feel when we go into spaces.

So those five things are really big in the climate of a school setting.

Zee: This has been a tense time that you got students coming back, you know, from being virtual, and socialization wasn't available at that time.

And so we need to offer opportunities for our students to engage in self care, maybe have a safe space for them to kind of go and either talk to each other or do some coping skills, art journaling, things like that.

And that's kind of what we're wanting to do.

Nami Mid Carolina, we wanted to get into the schools and offer hours on " Nami on Campus Programs".

And part of that is, you know, going in and teaching students about different coping skills, people cope differently.

And, you know, we'd like to be able to go in there and share some tried and true, you know, remedies with them and kind of empower them to share Hear them with each other.

And I have I have a son, he's, he's in the ninth grade.

And so I can kind of speak to that a little bit.

As a parent, I just think right now we're just everybody's in survival mode, we're just trying to get through the day, we're just trying to survive the day, we're just trying to get those great, you know, get the homework done, I think that where school used to be kind of a central gathering place, you know, that place where families got together, and we saw each other, and we, it was kind of social, that's kind of all gone now.

There is a way to make it welcoming, and if we empower the students to be that welcoming committee to be those to provide those opportunities for self care for the students, you know, opportunities for them to kind of detach or get away from the stress of, like standardized testing, or, you know, any, or the being afraid in their classrooms are those social anxieties and create a safe space for them to go and do some self care, maybe 10 minutes out of the day, I think it will be better.

But right now, I know, this is, I hope this isn't our new normal.

I hope we can get past it eventually.

But I know that things are stressful, and we just all have to kind of work together and work for the best of the students.

Techa: What the school can do to support school climate, really just raising awareness around what some of the issues are, knowing what some of the issues are, why students feel safe or not feel safe, you know, and talk to students really talking to students, I mean, students will be honest with you, they're not going to give you those one liners, and those catchphrases and those things that you know sound good on camera, they're going to be honest with you.

And then if they feel safe, they'll be honest with you.

But they, they really need to be able to voice how they feel and if they feel safe or not in school, and now with everything that's going on in our, in our country and our world and the things that are on TV that we see.

And the tragedies that have happened unfortunately, many of our students don't feel safe.

You know, and it's really sad because schools are supposed to be places where you can go and you feel safe, you feel supported, you feel seen, you feel heard.

And when unfortunate events happen and tragedies happen, that makes us work even harder in schools, we have to work harder when those things because we know those things are happening.

And it shouldn't be a given.

But we know that they happen in schools.

So that makes our job even that much more difficult.

And we have to be persistent and consistent with making sure our students feel safe all the time.

It's it's an every day.

It's an everyday battle.

Laura: 1988 Shannon Hill was in the first grade when a man entered her school in Greenwood, South Carolina and started shooting.

She shared that experience and how she advocates for School Safety.

This segment may be emotional for some viewers.

Shannon: On September the 26th 1988.

It was a Monday.

I was in the first grade at Oakland Elementary School.

And a teacher was Miss Eleanor Hodge.

And we had gone into the cafeteria to have lunch it was around 11:30 and just gotten seated at our table.

A gunman who was 19 years old at the time, entered the front of the school, walked past the front office and came into the cafeteria and came into the door that was directly in front of my table.

We didn't realize you know that he was there to harm anyone at the time, my teacher actually thought that he was a parent coming to sit at the lunch table with their child and she actually smiled at him.

And even when he held the gun up, we still didn't really realize what was happening.

And...

I that was sitting at the end of the table that was closest to where he was.

And beside my teacher who It wasn't until he had already shot her one time, that she realized what was going on.

And she got up from her seat.

And as she was telling the class to run and kind of turned he shot her again.

There are two other students in my class that were shot.

I hid under the table.

I don't really remember every detail.

I know that someone pulled me out from under the table.

It was an adult and I don't know who it was.

And it was chaos.

It was students on top of each other just trying to get out of the cafeteria.

And... We went out, there's a side door that left out, to the outdoor area.

That was right outside of the cafeteria.

And we ran and hid in the woods.

There were other students who ran across the street, there was an older couple who that were working in their yard.

And once students and teachers started running over to their home, they allowed them to go inside their home.

Some people hid in the freezer, in the cafeteria, in the kitchen, my teacher and another student were pulled into the freezer to hide.

Once he finished shooting in the cafeteria, he went down the hall to the girls restroom, and he reloaded his gun.

And at that point, a P E teacher tried to stop him.

where she was trying to keep it close and keep him from leaving, and entered to third grade classroom and opened fire again.

He ended up killing two girls in that class.

They're eight years old.

In total, he injured 11 people.

So seven students, two teachers and then murdered two girls.

Once we were in the woods hiding I don't know how long we were there, it must have been a while because whenever we finally came out, there was already police everywhere.

There's already a couple of ambulances there.

They're already parents there.

There were already classes that were seated in front of the school.

I have an older brother, he was in the fourth grade.

And I was able to find his class.

And they were sitting right by the road.

And when once I found him, I hugged him.

And his teacher told me I needed to find my teacher.

And I told her that I didn't know where she was that she had been shot.

So I sat there with my brother until my father showed up.

So it's kind of weird thinking, 34 years ago, no one had cell phones and kind of crazy how fast the word spread to everybody.

And it was basically by radio and word of mouth, by telephone calling into people's businesses and my mom's workplace.

The supervisor had told her that she needed to get to the school.

She didn't know why.

But um, so she, by the time she got there, my dad had already picked us up, and she didn't know.

So being a parent now and thinking, what they were thinking and what they went through.

It definitely gives me a different perspective.

Once we got home, you know, I had family that were there I was six years old, the fact that I can even remember the details that I can is amazing to me how the mind works.

I just remember being hungry, I wasn't at the time really wasn't upset.

But like I said, I had a lot of family that were there.

And you know, how everybody seemed to be glad to see us and there was a lot of talk with the adults.

And then for a couple of days after that, you know, we didn't didn't really talk about it a whole lot, unless we wanted to.

The principal and her family went back to the school, and they had to clean the school.

Stuff like this didn't happen.

Nobody really had a protocol of what needed to be done.

So that happened, the shooting happened on a Monday and we were back in school that Thursday.

So after talking with my parents about it, not that long ago.

They informed me you know, the parents walked their children back into the school.

And the principal was there.

She was meeting everybody with a smile and for a long time we had somebody that sat by the front door and not necessarily a guard but somebody that you know, just welcomed you as you came in and went to our classroom.

Of course I didn't have a teacher.

Couple of my classmates were missing and sat in the floor and had the assistant principal came in and sat with us and we talked about what happened and she let us know that we were safe.

And you know that it was okay to talk about it.

But we didn't have to.

And that's the last time I really remember talking about it.

It was encouraged that everybody just got back to normal.

So the only way that anybody knew to do that was to not talk about it and to move on.

So that's what we did.

All the way up until we graduated high school, I went to school with most of these kids.

And it was just this unknown.

So it always left you wondering, Am I the only person that still thinks about it?

And in the seventh grade, we were having an earthquake drill.

We had not had an earthquake in Greenwood, South Carolina, since I could remember.

And I asked the teacher, why don't we have drills for if someone were to come into the school with a gun?

And he said, Well, stuff like that doesn't really happen here.

I said, Well, it did.

And he really didn't have an answer for me.

I think he was shocked when I said that in the seventh grade and didn't know what to say.

But I think that's kind of how it was for, for the whole situation.

Nobody knew what to do with us.

It was 34 years ago, it wasn't like now whenever, you know, there's all these different resources, and it's more common than what it used to be.

That's when I started advocating for School Safety.

And my daughter started school.

She is almost 22 years old now.

And when she started school, in K-4, and I walked back into a school, I realized how easy it was to walk into the school without anybody, Knowing, it kind of hit me that we had not come very far.

And that's whenever I started going to the principal and suggesting the... suggesting things that would make the school safer.

That started with locking the front doors.

We didn't get the doors locked right away.

There was, I suggested a doorbell kind of like when you walk into a store and that lets you know that somebody has come in so that the front office would know that somebody had come in.

And they did install that in her school that turned to having the second set of doors locked.

So at least somebody if they came in the front door, they couldn't continue to walk in through the second door to gain access to the rest of the school.

And that eventually turned into the front door being locked, and then having a camera system and having to be buzzed in.

When she left that school, she went to another school within the same district.

And I started over because they had, they had only done it at the school where she was at.

And so I pushed for it to happen in all the schools in the district.

And eventually it did.

I kind of look at it.

Like when my daughter started school, I couldn't stay there with her and I couldn't protect her 24/7.

But if I could somehow make changes within that school district to make sure they were keeping her safe as much as possible, then at least that's something that's my way of protecting her, which is how it started.

And it's gone from protecting her to protect and everybody else.

Because nobody should ever have to go through that and too many people have had to go through it.

And the sad thing is that there will be more people that have to go through it.

And I just know that I'm going to do everything that I can to make sure it doesn't happen to somebody else.

Laura: Educator wellness plays a factor in creating a positive school climate.

Teachers who are comfortable and feel supported, will be better able to support their students.

Todd: Educators as a whole are very giving.

And they take their jobs as stewards of the next generation very seriously.

They will give their time they will give their own resources and they will deplete themselves I think as a Giving Tree, you know, so many teachers, it's like that they will just continue to give, give and give.

There is a point where that becomes exploitation.

There's a point where they give so much that they have nothing left for themselves and so many educators, find themselves working long hours expending so much of their personal time to meet the needs of students.

And the problem that we're having as a result of that is a lot of educators are leaving the profession, because they're struggling with managing that kind of atmosphere, that kind of culture.

We need educators to prioritize their own physical wellness, mental wellness, emotional wellness.

They need to have time to decompress from the day, they need to have time to exercise to go grocery shopping, and, and cook healthy meals, they need time to meditate or to pray, some of them pray, they need time to go to a yoga class, they need time to go out for a run, they need time to rest, they need to get enough sleep.

So they have to prioritize themselves.

And for some people, they're gas lighted, into believing that this is some form of selfishness that they're not putting students first, that mentality has to go away.

Educators have a right as human beings to take care of themselves and their needs.

We've got to help them see that prioritizing themselves doesn't mean that they're out there doing anything, negative to students.

And we've got to obliterate that narrative.

And help them see that.

And I think if we do, more educators will stay in the profession.

But that needs to come from the top down, we need leaders who send that message to educators, but not only to only tell educators to take care of themselves, but they give them give them the time and the resources to do that.

A lot of educators are hearing about, hey, you know, take care of yourself, do self care, practice mindfulness, practice yoga, and they're like saying, Well, if I didn't get home at seven o'clock at night, I wasn't completely exhausted.

Maybe I would.

But I'm so overwhelmed.

By the time I get home, I just kind of do the minimal things that I need to do, and I crash.

And then I'm back at it the next day.

We have to see them as human beings.

They're not just people preparing kids to take some type of standardized test.

They're not just cogs in the machine.

They're human beings, our students are human beings, we must look at their needs first.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs should not just apply to our students, they should apply to everybody who's in a school building.

Educators who are stressed out, are going to have stressed out students, they've done studies, they test the cortisol in the saliva of educators, when their cortisol levels go up, student cortisol levels go up.

When they come down, students come down.

Teachers are driving a large part of the culture of their schools, if we have healthy teachers in supportive working environments, are students who are going to have healthier learning conditions.

So we have to, it is a moral imperative for us to take good care of our teachers.

Give them the respect they deserve.

Listen to them, give them the love and compassion space that they need.

To be well, given the resources they need to be well read in the time we do that, and vicariously that's going to improve the lives of students because great educators will be able to stay in the profession will be healthy, they'll be well educated and student our students will get the benefit of being led by healthy well adults.

And they'll have a model for being becoming a healthier adult.

Techa: I like to say that well being practices and things that educators can do for their well being.

That shouldn't be professional development.

Learning is not just showing students how to, you know, pass a test or an exam, the work that educators can do on themselves and having that time and space and freedom to do it.

That is professional development, and schools have to know that.

Laura: Staying active will help you to stay physically fit.

There are mental and psychological benefits as well.

Betsy Dew is the lead teacher for the " Get Fit Magnet Program ".

at Summit Parkway, Middle School and Richland County School District Two.

Betsy: We are a personal health and fitness magnet that focuses on exercise science, biomechanical principles, and personal health and wellness for all students.

In our class they get to use specialized personal health and wellness equipment.

We have a cardio room and we have a weight room where they get to complete a specialized fitness plan for themselves where they goal set and achieve their goals.

And they also get served with the regular P E curriculum as well.

A highlight of our program as we get to get their water safety certification, their CPR first aid AED certification as well.

Each grade level focuses on a different physiological aspect.

For instance, in sixth grade we focus on the heart and heart rate, blood flow through the heart and how it supports exercise.

Seventh grade we focus on the systems.

The body systems, muscular system, circulatory system and then in eighth grade.

We focus on more biochem... biomechanical principles and the physics of how the body moves.

So we incorporate and infuse that along with the science standards for each grade level.

Our class is broken up into units.

Some possible activities that they are exposed to is we have a ropes course, where we focus on 21st century skills, communication, collaboration, working together to solve a problem.

We teach flag football, soccer, all your basic sport units, but also net sports such as badminton, volleyball, pickle ball, some things that they might not be exposed to at home or at the Rec Center or things like that.

So they come in each day, they dress out, and they get to participate in 60 minutes of full physical activity.

We teach social responsibility and how to put themselves out there.

We're a performance based class.

So it's really important for students to feel comfortable.

And really just get to explore the middle school P E curriculum is about exposing students to different physical activities so that they hopefully fall in love with one of them and continue for a lifetime and be physically active for a lifetime as well.

We try to teach our students that physical activity.

It builds confidence.

If you look good, you feel good.

We also it provides them an experience to socialize how to work together how to solve problems, and how they need to have that for a lifetime.

Laura: Thanks for joining us.

We'll be back on TV in January.

Captioned by: SCETV (closing music)