1. What did CPS officials and Community-Based Organization (CBO) leaders believe was important and/or distinctive about the development of the WSS Framework?
2. What goals did CPS officials and CBO leaders hold for the development of WSS Framework? What did they intend to accomplish in the development and implementation of the WSS Framework and why?
3. What did CPS officials and CBO leaders believe were the appropriate ways to measure the success of implementing the WSS Framework and WSS Planning Process at the school level?
This field scan captures the experiences and perspectives of Chicago Public School (CPS) officials and Community-Based Organization (CBO) leaders who served on the district’s Whole School Safety (WSS) Steering Committee and co-developed and supported the district’s Whole School Safety Framework between 2020 and 2024.
Between 2020 and 2022, district and CBO leaders worked together to develop the WSS Framework. This framework emphasized the role of local school communities in developing and implementing holistic approaches to prioritizing students’ physical safety, social-emotional well-being, and local context.
Key Learnings:
- CBO leaders characterized the collaborative process used to develop the Whole School Safety Framework as healing and restorative.
- CPS officials and CBO leaders believed that the Whole School Safety Framework helped ground safety plans in individual communities’ perspectives, facilitated power-sharing, and supported the reimagining of safety.
- District officials and CBO leaders believed that the impact of the Whole School Safety Framework should be assessed along multiple dimensions including student and parent engagement, student outcomes, district resource provisions, and students and families’ experiences of their school communities.
This field scan is part of an ongoing study being conducted in partnership with the Center for Childhood Resilience (CCR) at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, and the University of Illinois to examine the effects of the Chicago Board of Education’s 2020 request to phase out SROs in high schools, and the district’s subsequent partnership with community-based organizations to develop the Whole School Safety Framework.
