in North Carolina
Peaceful Schools-NC Pilot
The North Carolina Psychoanalytic Foundation has chosen the Central Park School in Durham, NC (pictured top left) as the 2009-2010 pilot site for Peaceful Schools-NC. The Central Park School is a kindergarten through fifth grade inner-city charter school with 275 students of diverse ethnic and socioeconomic background. Central Park has a 40% minority population (primarily Black and Hispanic). Seventeen per cent of students have been identified as having special needs. NCPF is working with Central Park to survey staff, parents and students on the current extent and impact of violence in their school.
The immediate impact of this project will be to reduce violence within the Central Park School and its community. Research reports on the application of CAPSLE suggest that there may also be a related increase in academic achievement. We will monitor for such academic gains but this is not a primary focus of Peaceful Schools-NC. The long term goals of this project are to maintain the decrease in bullying within the middle schools and high schools which Central Park School feeds into. Ultimately we seek to replicate this project within other North Carolina schools and communities and to follow its effects longitudinally across the school system and throughout our communities and our state.
The Peaceful School's program is challenging our school to
simultaneously implement curriculum that will address both the emotional and
cognitive goals for our students. As an entire school community, parents,
teachers, administration and students, we are choosing not to have a
zero-tolerance policy or a head in the sand reactionary stance but instead
create a positively proactive approach that defines and teaches us how we all
want our entire school community, not just students, to treat each other.
Peaceful Schools is an extremely comprehensive program that is working to make
us all more aware of our behaviors and the power we possess to transform
ourselves and our community.--John Heffernan, Central Park School Director
Pictured bottom left: Central Park School for Children Director, John Heffernan, with NCPF Board Member and School Liaison, Dr. Renee Prillaman