Creating Safe Schools by Building Safe Relationships

Jonathan Cohen outlines three types of goals for schools to pursue—systemic improvement goals, instructional improvement goals, and relational improvement goals—but states that it is impractical to expect schools to address all three at once. This study argues that it is in fact essential that relational improvement goals be pursued concomitantly with systemic and instructional improvement goals in order for the latter to succeed. Several foundational psychoanalytic precepts used to build the patient-therapist alliance apply well to building relationships with stakeholders within a school context, ranging from students and parents to teachers and leaders. We present our own experience implementing the School-Based Mental Health Collaboration (SBMHC) in a handful of public elementary schools in high-poverty neighborhoods in New York City. This program relies on classroom consultants who spend a half day a week in an assigned classroom co-teaching a social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum; consulting with teachers about students, classroom management, and the integration of SEL into the classroom culture; and referring children for community-based services. SBMHC staff take a mentalizing stance of nonjudgmental curiosity about the meaning and function of stakeholders' behaviors, while encouraging stakeholders to do the same with each other. This approach builds strong relationships in which stakeholders can reflect safely and thoughtfully about their own behaviors and that of their students. We find that it is within this “holding environment” that school stakeholders are best poised to undertake the difficult attitudinal and behavioral changes necessary to promote school safety.