The office also launched an AI Assistant feature that allows staff to receive answers to their safety resource-related questions within seconds.
WASHINGTON — When safety incidents arose in the past, D.C. charter school leaders said they often felt like they were on an island. A new central safety office hopes to offer them a life raft.
Students heading back to class at PCS Congress Heights are focused on greeting their friends, meeting their teachers and starting a new grade. But their principal has another test to ace first.
“If the schools aren’t safe, kids can’t learn,” Principal Niya White said.
White has served at the helm of Center City Public Charter Schools Congress Heights Campus for 15 years, and has been teaching even longer.
“It is now at a time where the kids that I used to teach have kids,” White said.
It’s a building she’s used to and faces she’s familiar with, but DC has launched a new tool for this school year that she’s never had access to before: the first-ever centralized School Safety Office.
The office connects DCPS, public charter schools, and private schools with agencies and resources as well as with each other.
“I like to think of ourselves as a bridge,” the Executive Director for the DC School Safety Office, Phillip Copeland said. “We talk to the schools individually, we collect their needs from traffic safety related concerns to community-based concerns, behavioral health concerns, and then we’re being that connective tissue to the agencies and the providers that already exist.”
White couldn’t be happier.
“Amen. Long time coming. Where were you years ago?” she said.
Before this central office, White said responding to incidents that involved students from another school or that were just off their campus was a challenge.
“It all depended on in the past of who you happen to know and what your network was capable of putting in front of you or what their external reach was,” White said. “This levels the playing ground, and that is exactly what needed to happen.”
Quick access to behavioral health services and safety response agencies is exactly what these schools need.
A 2024 report from the Deputy Mayor of Education shows that D.C. schools reported 7,757 violent incidents in the 2022-2023 school year, and more than half of middle school students have been involved in a physical fight.
White recalls a time when she saw a fight breaking out in the parking lot of a nearby school in Congress Heights.
“You tried to go, as I have, OK, well, let me Google the number and try to find the number for the main office and try to get through. If the answering machine is going or the folks didn’t necessarily know you, you couldn’t get through to the right person that you needed to speak with to say, hey, I have one of your kids that was involved in a situation. Who can I contact to support them?” she said.
Over the past year, though, Copeland and the School Safety Office have piloted some inter-school communication channels. The one in Congress Heights connects 20 different schools that span charter and DCPS.
“So if an incident occurs, the team puts it in the chat,” Copeland said. “If they need coordination with the neighboring school who may be DCPS or charter, they talk directly to each other.”
He said his goal is for teachers to know exactly where to turn when a problem arises, which he said wasn’t the case when he worked as a classroom teacher.
“I think we ask teachers, administrators, school buildings, period, to do so much, and we keep asking them to do more, more, more and more, keeping in mind they’re managing hundreds of children every day. So my goal is how can we be supportive for the schools? How do we make their jobs easier?” Copeland said.
Another tool they’re adding to the school tool box is a new AI Assistant.
“[If you have the questions] ‘What am I supposed to do? Who am I supposed to contact?,’ you can actually put all of that [into the platform] verbatim, and it gives you … all the contacts that are out in the universe that we don’t necessarily get prepackaged,” White said.
When White says ‘the universe’, she means the internal safety office universe full of vetted and verified resources – which she says do make her job easier.
The School Safety Office is also offering school safety inventories, which are “triennial assessment processes that identify individual school safety needs while also surfacing neighborhood-level trends across school communities.”
The office said to date, 37 inventories have been completed across four communities, with a goal of assessing 75 to 100 campuses annually on a three-year cycle.
“We can’t have that next doctor, that next lawyer without this office, without the work of Mr. Copeland, without the city getting behind it and pulling the resources to make it happen,” she added.
With safety supports in place, she can focus on leading her school; her teachers can focus on educating the students; and the students can focus on learning.
