SACSC Program Garners National and International Recognition

Canada
North America
International

Achievements within Canada

School districts and communities in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Ontario and the Maritimes are using the SACSC programs. The Ottawa-Carlton Board of Education, for example, has adapted the curriculum outcomes to reflect the Ontario curriculum and is translating the K–6 curriculum resource into French.

The SACSC programs played a role in bringing together individuals and organizations that are jointly applying for incorporation under the Canada Corporations Act to form a not-for-profit corporation that will be called the Safe and Caring Schools and Communities Association of Canada/École et Communautés canadiennes sécuritaires et beinveillantes. Its mandate will be to facilitate sharing across the country of resources, research, expertise and successful practices. This new organization elected its first national executive at the 2002 SACS conference in Vancouver.

The director of SACSC has been appointed to two national safe school advisory committees by Canada Justice and the Canadian Commission for UNESCO.

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Recognition within North America

In a project entitled “Research and Education for Solutions to Violence and Abuse” (RESOLVE), a team of researchers in the Department of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Calgary reviewed school-based violence prevention programs from across North America. Upon completing the review, RESOLVE Coordinator Dr Leslie Tutty had this to say about the ATA’s SACS Program:

" I have researched school-based violence prevention programs across Canada over the past decade and a half. With several colleagues, Dr. Wilfreda Thurston from Health Sciences, and Dr. Lynn Meadows, a chair in Family Medicine, and Cathryn Bradshaw, from the Faculty of Social Work, all from the University of Calgary, I recently completed a review of school-based violence-prevention programs with research evidence of their efficacy entitled “A violence reduction health promotion model”. This report concluded that no one program could adequately address the needs of students in schools with respect to prosocial and violence education. Further, we recommended the need for schools to integrate such curriculum into their everyday classes. We further commented on the need for programs to be directed to the entire school community not simply to children and for teachers and parents to be aware of the powerful role that they play in modelling respectful and non abusive behaviours and beliefs.

This year, RESOLVE Alberta, part of a tri provincial research institute on family violence of which I am the academic research coordinator, was awarded funding from the National Crime Prevention Program of Justice Canada to develop a resource manual of school-based violence-prevention programs. Our consultations with community members in Alberta about best practices in providing such education confirmed many of the conclusions that I mentioned earlier.

In looking across North America for model programs, we found no program as well developed and integrated as Safe and Caring Schools. Not only are most programs external to the schools and need considerable teacher involvement to adapt and integrate the material into the curriculum, but few focus on school climate and the school community. None take the extra step of developing components to address the community or the teaching profession, an essential step in truly creating change.

I hope that we have your permission to highlight the exceptional work of the Safe and Caring School program on the website that we are developing as part of this project. From my perspective, the program is the “flagship” of what violence education should embody. Further, as a research institute that has evaluated a number of violence-prevention initiatives, we would be more than pleased to further discuss how to document the impact of your program on children, schools and communities alike."

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International Recognition

In 2002, the ATA's SACS Project, which is now the Society for Safe and Caring Schools and Communities, was selected as a best practice by the Dubai International Award for Best Practices in Improving the Living Environment selection committee. Sponsored by the Municipality of Dubai in collaboration with the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat), the awards, which are presented every two years, recognize projects that help make cities and communities safer, healthier, more equitable and more sustainable. In addition to presenting best practice winners with certificates from the Sultan of Dubai, UN-Habitat adds a description of each winning project to its online database and to its CD-ROM of best practices.

In addition, representatives from governments, universities and teachers’ organizations in the United States, South Africa, India, Brazil and Argentina have travelled to Edmonton to learn more about the SACS project.

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