Positive School Cultures Thrive When Support Staff Included
The whole village concept for improving schools stresses the importance of all school employees working together to help students succeed – everyone from principals, custodians and bus drivers to teachers, nurses, administrators, security and food service workers. The objective is to create a school culture that helps students reach their full potential academically, socially, and emotionally.
“Everything that goes on in a school is important,” says Dr. James Comer, a child psychiatrist with the Yale University Child Study Center and renowned child development author. “ESPs (education support professionals) are involved in ways that support everybody in the school and decrease behavioral problems.”
With almost 3 million school support staff working in our nation’s public schools, Comer says it’s imperative to the well-being of students that ESPs be included in school activities. During a webinar titled, The Village and the Whole Student, Comer says ESPs can help impact student learning and performance when they are respected and included as workplace partners.
“ESPs are often available in ways the classroom teacher is not,” Comer says. “You ask a child 20, 30 years later and they will tell you that what that person (an ESP) thought was very important.”
Partners in Education
Approximately 75 percent of ESPs live, vote, worship, and work in the same school district. They often live in the same neighborhoods and shop at the same stores as students and their families.Positive School Cultures Thrive When Support Staff Included: