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A Brave Space


The American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, famous for his “hierarchy of needs,” placed safety near the top of his pyramid. We’re all looking for a safe harbor. In Council as in psychotherapy, we want people to speak openly and honestly. We want them to feel safe enough to open. We have ways making a space safe, like privacy and rules of confidentiality. But sometimes people still feel unsafe.

 

As we designed our first charter schools, we were intent on creating a safe space for students living with mental illnesses. If it was going to be safe for kids and their parents, it would have to be safe for our team. Team members felt safe, even before we finished our first summer training, before our first students arrived, to share their own struggles with mental illness. When our students arrived, we knew we had another safety challenge. Our founding faculty was predominantly white; our kids were overwhelmingly students of color, immigrants and children of immigrants. Most lived in neighborhoods with high levels of violence. Some were living in violent households. Safety was an issue. Over the years, as we opened additional schools, as our student body and our faculty grew, out student profile remained largely unchanged. While we’d built a more diversified team, we still had a long way to go.

 

When George Floyd was murdered, in the aftermath, there were signs, even on Staten Island, that this was big. There were protest demonstrations all over the country. There were protest marches on Staten Island, but the largest march on Staten Island took place in Tottenville, one of the whitest of our little communities, farthest from the City, home to many cops and firefighters. The kids of cops and firefighters were marching. Maybe this was not just another incident of police violence against a person of color. Maybe we were all learning something. But Floyd was today’s news. He might soon be just another exhibit in the National Museum of African American History and Culture, maybe right alongside Emmett Till. I didn’t want this lesson to be lost. Not in our schools.

 

It was a difficult moment. Our schools were making the Covid pivot to zoom. How could we keep the Floyd lesson alive. I invited our staff of color and some of the white staff who I thought would be open, not to a planning meeting, to a meeting in which we could share our stories. I knew that our kids would return in September with Floyd and the aftermath very present in their lives. We would need to talk with them about their experience if school was going to have any relevance in their lives. We needed to be able to talk among ourselves before we could talk with our kids. I wanted our meeting to be a safe place where we could share our stories. Many did and their stories were powerful but, as we continued meeting through the year of zoom, some complained that they didn’t feel safe.

 

That’s when Crystal Rios, who’d joined our charter school team as a founding English teacher in our transfer high school and went on to become our first DEI director, suggested that we call it a “brave space” instead of a “safe space.”

 

What a wonderful teaching. It shifts the power and the responsibility. When I am looking for a safe space, I am looking to be taken care of. I am looking for mommy to comfort me, to tell me everything will be all right, that no one will tease me, no one will make fun of me, mommy will protect me. A brave space, I make for myself. No one else can be brave for me. The council circle is a place of courage, not a place of comfort.

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