How can we help students feel safe at school?

Kristi: We are totally positive in our approach, and we get directly to root causes. So a lot of school safety efforts are focused on reacting to a threat. We are focused on preventing a threat from ever occurring. So how do you prevent someone from engaging in an act of violence, either to themselves or with others? I think that in order to do that, we have to get to the root causes.

Kevin: According to the CDC, more than 800,000 high school students skip school at least once per month due to fear for their personal safety, and almost 200,000 teens skip school each day due to bullying. From fear of bullying and school shootings to facing mental health and behavioral issues, many students are feeling uneasy when it comes to school. What issues are students experiencing in school and how can we support them? How can we help students feel more connected to their school and their peers? And how can we help students feel safe at school? I’m excited to continue the conversation on building a safe school culture with this week’s guest, Kristi Krings. This is “What I Want to Know.”

Kristi Krings is the CEO of Rachel’s Challenge, a nonprofit organization created after the Columbine High School shooting in honor of Rachel Scott and the other victims lost that day. During her tenure with Rachel’s Challenge, Kristi has delivered programs to over one million people. Kristi, welcome to the show.

Kristi: Thank you so much for having me. It’s such a pleasure. It’s an honor to be here with the great Kevin.

Kevin: Well, I tell you, this is part of a series of special episodes that we’ve put in place to deal with the issue of school safety generally. And I want to talk about Rachel’s Challenge, but I would be remiss to not start off by talking about your talented music career. You’re a platinum recording artist, and this is obviously your passion. And I’m always so kind of jealous and envious of those that have real, true musical talent. Did you always have it? Did you always know that you could sing and have that, you know, you start with piano, but that whole talent thing, because it’s a gift that not many have?

Kristi: Oh, my gosh, I didn’t know we were going to talk about this today, but thank you for asking. You know what? I did not grow up in a particularly musical family. I was in choir, mandatory class in elementary school, and our teacher in that class, Mrs. Rider, would do this terrifying thing. She would, while everybody was singing, she’d come right, get real close and put her ear right up to your mouth and listen to you sing, so she could hear you in the crowd. And she did that with me one day, and she said, “I want to talk to you after class.” And she was kind of . . . She was respected, I’ll say that. She was not feared, but respected.

So I thought, “Uh-oh, did I get in trouble?” And she pulled me aside and she said, “I want to give you a solo in the next musical.” And I went, “What?” I’d never done anything like that. And so she gave me a solo, and that’s how I found out that I could sing, and it was through a talented educator who was passionate about identifying young people’s talents and strengths and helping to develop them. And from there, I’ve been singing ever since. I am multi-platinum under the artist name Nation of One in the genre of EDM, which is very fun. I do music because I love it. But over the pandemic, we went multi-platinum with several songs, and so that was just a real pleasure and a real gift.

Kevin: Well, a number of educators listen to the show, and your story is important and instructive for them because great educators know that they can mine out the talent and give young people confidence in believing in themselves. And that story illustrates that as much more than anything. But in addition to your singing talent, you kind of self-taught yourself in terms of learning to play the piano, right?

Kristi: I did. I did. Yeah. I was sort of a tomboy. I was very heavily into sports when I was younger. And my sister was the one that took piano lessons. And I heard her playing, and I, as a young kid, would sort of when everybody else was away, I’d go play the songs that I wanted to hear again. I’d remembered a song or a tune that I’d heard, and I just really wanted to hear it again. And so I figured out how to play it on the piano, and that is how I learned to play my instrument, other than my voice.

Kevin: You know, I want to talk about that transition, and I don’t know if that’s the right word or not, in terms of your advocation, your musical career to becoming involved with Rachel’s Challenge. But I guess the starting point is, have you always been a cause person, because you just don’t move into something like that without having a deep commitment to try to make a difference?

Kristi: Yeah, absolutely. I would say absolutely yes. I’ve kind of always, my whole life, and I’m sure that there are many other people who feel this way, possibly yourself included, but my whole life I just was very aware that time was my one unrenewable resource, and that I really wanted to spend my time in a way that felt worthy of my time on Earth. I just, I wanted to help other people. I wanted to do what I was supposed to do here on the planet. And so I’ve always had that sort of deep sense of purpose for my life.

And I think that ideas can change the world, and I think that every important change that’s happened started as an idea first. And so minding what’s in our thoughts and our hearts as human beings is a core challenge in our lives. And so if I can be a part of helping people do that, help people recognize their true potential, their true value, their purpose, their worth, the work that they have to do in this life, then I am all about that.

And so music is one way to do that. I think that music is a language that transcends a spoken word, that can sort of speak directly to the heart and help people to feel differently than their circumstances may warrant, which is very important. When you’re feeling hopeless or when you’re going through a rough time in your life, music can be healing. I think other forms of media are very powerful in that way as well.

And the transition for how I went from musician to Rachel’s Challenge is that I was fully involved in making an album, a cause-based album that I felt had a very strong message, essentially that you are sort of the hero of your own life, that nobody may be coming to save you, but that you can save yourself. And that’s actually where my artist name Nation of One came from is that sort of similar idea that you are a very powerful person, and that a strong group is made up of many powerful individuals who can work together toward a common vision.

And the music industry has been one just fraught with disruption over the, during . . . While I’ve been coming up, it’s been fraught with disruption. It’s totally changed business models, and as was typical at the time, the record company I was working with went bankrupt. My intellectual property was tied up for a long time. I actually couldn’t add to it. I couldn’t make music for a while there.

And in that time, I heard about an opportunity to go speak for Rachel’s Challenge to implement the programs that we implement in schools every day. And I thought, oh, my gosh, what a gift to get to use my voice in a different way . . .

Kevin: Wow.

Kristi: . . . to get to share a story and a program that has the potential to sort of awaken in young people their true power, what they can be in their lives, and to help them have hope. And so I jumped at that opportunity, and I for many years implemented our programs directly in schools. Probably have spoken to over a million students at this point just over the years getting to implement our programs. Such a tremendous gift to, again, get to use my voice in that way.

And that’s how I transitioned into Rachel’s Challenge, and in parallel with that, I had a career in business, sort of e-commerce Madison Avenue type stuff in New York City. And at the end of 2019, got the call that it was my opportunity to come back to Rachel’s Challenge full-time, be a part of the executive team and part of a transition and a succession plan for our beloved CEO, who was with us for many years, Rob Unger, as he retired from his work with us. So that’s sort of how that came to be.

Kevin: Well, you know, it’s interesting because I think many people have heard about Rachel’s Challenge. It has become an embedded resource in many schools. But talk a little bit about the origins of Rachel’s Challenge, who Rachel was, the family and what led to this organization coming into existence.

Kristi: So we are named . . . Rachel’s Challenge is named after Rachel Scott, who was the first person killed at the Columbine High School shootings on April 20th, 1999. Shortly after her death, her father, Darrell Scott and her stepmom, Sandy, began to share Rachel’s story with people. And as they did that, they noticed it had this profound impact on the people that heard it. It caused them to kind of stop and ask themselves how they wanted to treat themselves and others moving forward. And from there, Rachel’s Challenge, now 25 years later, can you believe it’s going to be 25 years since Columbine in April? But now 25 years later, Rachel’s Challenge has developed into the concept that it is today, which is probably the largest school assembly program worldwide. We’ve reached over 30 million parents, students, and educators. We’ve been in over 20,000 schools.

And I think that the core of our story of what Rachel’s Challenge does is Rachel’s story. Rachel was a normal teenager in many ways. But she was kind, and she believed that kindness could change the world. She believed that simple and small acts of kindness could change the world, and she wrote about it. She left her family with six diaries in which she talked about this concept often that she thought that she could change the world through compassion, and then she lived it.

And after her death, her family began to receive letters and emails and phone calls from a lot of the people that Rachel had reached out to and changed their lives for the better, and out of those stories, really our program was born. And what’s really powerful about that for young people is that when we implement our program, we’re talking about a peer. We’re not talking about ideas and concepts and teaching. We’re modeling for them how, a way of being that can change the world and change their lives for the better. That’s a very empowering thought. So that’s a little bit about the origin and history of Rachel’s Challenge and who Rachel Scott was.

Kevin: Now, how old was Rachel at the time of the Columbine shootings?

Kristi: Rachel was 17 years old when she passed away. She was a junior in high school.

Kevin: And talk a little bit about the program itself, because we’ve looked at school safety from different lenses. I mean, you have the politics associated with this. So some people say, “Well, we need to arm teachers.” I mean, that’s one extreme over here. Then you have folks say, “Well, we need to step up surveillance, and we need to make sure we engage in mental health services for students so we can identify students who may have some potential challenges or may potentially be a threat to other students.” And then there’s this whole school safety officer concept and the policing concept. But Rachel’s Challenge is so much different than all of those, and that’s why I wanted to make sure we unearthed sort of not just the core concept as has been found in Rachel’s diaries, but the programmatic aspect of it. Talk about the program when you go to schools.

Kristi: Absolutely. Great question. And you’re right to point out that school safety is multifaceted. There is sort of this physical safety point of view. It’s hardening the target. It’s bulletproof glass. It’s metal detectors. It’s tech and hardware. It’s all good and important, and it receives a lot of attention and funding, as it should. And I think we have to be really careful that we aren’t lulled into a false sense of security with some of those efforts. They are good, they are important, and I think there’s another side to school safety that is more preventative or is more focused on prevention than some of those maybe reactive efforts that, to be clear, need to be done. So on one end, we’ve got hardening the target, and on the other side, we’ve got softening the heart. And that’s really where Rachel’s Challenge lives.

So when we’re talking about school safety in general, what is it that causes young people to feel unsafe, what is making them unsafe, I think that there’s a really clear distinction here in all of the research and, of course, in our findings as well, and it’s that disconnection is rampant among young people. And why is that so important?

So when we’re talking about bulletproof glass, metal detectors, and the hardware and tech that go into sort of detecting weapons and things like that, what you’re really preventing there is you’re preventing school shootings, you’re preventing other forms of attack, things like that. And I want to just benchmark that threat. That is a safety threat, and it has to be addressed. But since Columbine, about 400 people have died from school shootings. It’s way too many. That number needs to be zero. It has to be zero. And we are losing about 7,000 students a year to suicide.

So when we’re looking at safety threats, suicide, youth suicide is a huge one that we need to be addressing. And you can’t detect a suicide threat on camera. A metal detector is not going to help you with suicide prevention. And so what’s the root cause of youth suicides? It’s that disconnection.

And so really there’s a key differentiator with Rachel’s Challenge when it comes to school safety, and it’s our approach. We are wholly positive in our approach. This is a fundamental philosophical shift that is a key differentiator between us and some other programs. While we are a very effective anti-bullying, anti-school shooting, anti-youth violence in all of its forms, anti-youth suicide program, we’re not anti anything or anyone.

We are pro solutions. We’re pro kindness and compassion, respect, helping others, reaching out. We’re pro inspiring hope, and then teaching the life skills for how to maintain it because hope is absolutely a life skill. We’re pro connection and teaching the skills for how to connect well with other people.

So we are totally positive in our approach, and we get directly to root causes. So a lot of school safety efforts are focused on reacting to a threat. We are focused on preventing a threat from ever occurring. So how do you prevent someone from engaging in an act of violence, either to themselves or with others? I think that in order to do that, we have to get to the root causes. And so that comes back to what I was saying earlier, that there is really one and only one prevention that they’ve identified for youth suicide, and that’s connectedness. It’s what the CDC calls connectedness, which could be very easily defined as human connection.

And when you prevent youth suicide, you go a long way toward preventing school shootings and other forms of violence, because the precursors, the warning signs for youth suicide are all of the problems that we’re seeking to address, right? It’s the mental health concerns that we’re seeing. So anxiety, depression, loneliness, those are precursors to youth suicides. They are also precursors to violence. And when we look at mass shootings, things like that, school shootings, those are suicide first. Those are suicide in slow motion. That shooter has already made the decision to die. It’s just that they often don’t have a getaway plan. They’ve made the decision to die. It’s just that they’re looking to take other people out with them. So when you address the root causes of youth suicide, you go a very long way toward addressing the root causes of mass violence, like school shootings and other forms of violence.

So that’s another key differentiator, is that we really look to address that isolation that is the root cause. So connectedness is the way to do that. What is connectedness? Defined as human connection, right? But it’s the ability to . . . it involves some skill sets as well. It involves the ability to ask for help, it involves the ability to relate well to others, to talk about things that matter, and it involves the ability to relate to others just in general. And that’s really what Rachel’s Challenge does.

Rachel’s Challenge helps young people connect to each other, connect to healthy adults, and connect to possibly, most importantly, their future possible selves. If you think about a young person who is at risk, who is feeling hopeless, who is struggling with their mental health, the person that they’re struggling to connect with most is a version of themselves that feels differently about themselves and others and the world than they do right now. And so that’s where hope really comes in, and that’s what Rachel’s Challenge does.

So very specifically what that program looks like is we have been now for almost 25 years, we send a presenter live to a school. They share our program, which is a story. Storytelling is a very good way to create connectedness. It’s probably the most longstanding way that humans created connectedness. It’s what we’re doing right now, right? Podcasts are telling stories to each other. That’s how we connect with each other. So we tell a story about somebody who’s very much like them, who was normal, but changed the world and has a legacy that has endured 25 years after her death, and tell them that they have that same power too, because it’s actually pretty simple what she did and you can do that too.

And what happens when you have an experience like that with people in the same room with you, with people that you maybe perceive as enemies, people that you perceive as friends, people that you’re indifferent to, your teachers, and you see them all seeing, feeling, hearing the same thing at the same time and being affected the same way you are, that tends to send a meta message, hmm, maybe I’m not alone, maybe I’m not so different after all. Maybe I’m not alone. And so that’s very powerful, and that’s really what the program does, and that’s how it works.

And then, after each assembly, we do enough assemblies to get the whole student body the opportunity to see it, and then we start what’s called Friends of Rachel Club in the school, and that includes an hour and a half long training and workshop, where we take the students through how to set up a club that will sustain the impact from the day that we have been there. And that’s a very . . . it’s magical. It’s my favorite part of every day.

We begin that program by allowing students to stand up, take the microphone and share how the program impacted them, what it got them thinking about. And you’ll hear amazing things in that student sharing process. I’ve heard young people say that they’re sorry to people that they’ve hurt in the past. I’ve heard people say what they want to do differently. I’ve heard people say all kinds of wonderful things in our FOR club trainings.

And so, from there, we define what the FOR club does, and then we ask them to sort of deeply engage in a respectful discussion about what needs to change in the school, what needs to change in their culture, what’s going wrong, and then ideate on how they can get to work to change it for the better. And getting to work is a really powerful way for young people to connect with each other in a positive way. When you are less focused on yourself, your circle of friends, and the drama that might be happening when you are not focused inward but you’re focused outward on a common goal working together, it’s a life hack for connection, and so that’s another way that we create connectedness with young people.

And these FOR clubs, they do amazing things. They come up with better ideas than we ever could. We share their ideas every day now at FOR club trainings throughout the United States, and we steal their ideas all the time with their permission, of course. But some of my favorite things that FOR clubs have done include creating closets and pantries where students can get access to resources totally anonymously and free of charge. We have one school that created their own app. They created their own app with access to resources in their community and with a peer-to-peer mentoring group that’s monitored by the school, which, you know, how wonderful of that school to put resources behind that.

We have seen FOR clubs create chain links of kindness, so each paper chain, so each link in the chain represents an act of kindness that’s recorded during the school year. So if you see somebody doing something kind, you’d write their name and the act of kindness down on a piece of paper, you add it to the chain, and it’s a simple idea, but I love it because it allows us to track something that’s very difficult to track and that’s sort of the culture of the school by how large those chains are growing.

And then we also have a parental resource. We have a parent community event for most secondary schools that we go to. We offer the opportunity for parents to come here, exactly what their parents saw in the school, and the added benefit there is that they often get behind the excitement of their children to help them continue this chain reaction of kindness that they’ve already started on the day that we’re there.

So anyway, that’s a very high level overview of what we do.

Kevin: Well, Kristi, it’s very powerful, and I’m struck by several things. One is what I like about the program, and you talk about getting to the root causes, is that it takes into account the day-to-day challenges that today’s children face. Many people really don’t understand and appreciate, though I think that is changing a little bit, but many people who are older don’t really understand and appreciate the deep-rooted challenges that young people today face. And the fact that you’re having kids look at themselves, but also look outward and in addition looking inward and start to build a culture around this notion of shared experiences and kindness is powerful.

And the other thing is, I mean, who would have known as a result of Columbine that a 17-year-old girl who would leave those diaries and really lead with kindness and compassion, that it would end up where it is? And this idea of a chain reaction of kindness is in many ways counter to some of the cultural challenges we’ve seen in this country and around the world. When it’s a tension-filled, the technology comes at young people fast. The brain hasn’t had a chance to develop. The bullying, the negative forces out there that kids have to navigate through to have that counterbalanced against this, you know, and I love the expression “chain reaction of kindness” that was seeded by Rachel is very, very powerful, and I’m not surprised you’re getting the results that you have. And indeed, it must be gratifying to see that with those 30 million children you’ve been able to present this to, that the results remain positive.

Kristi: Absolutely, because what we do is needed now more than ever because of the challenges that you just so eloquently outlined. The deck kind of is stacked against young people, I think, in a very unique way. We are in a very unique moment in history, I think. And it’s driven by technology. I think technology is driving a disconnect tremendously among young people.

Kevin: Yes. A human disconnect.

Kristi: Absolutely. Yes. And ironically in the name of connecting with each other more effectively, yeah, it’s a really very interesting time. You’re absolutely right. I think that young people are experiencing more disempowerment, more hopelessness, more mental health challenges, disconnection than ever before. We’re seeing increases in anxiety, increases in depression and in loneliness. The U.S. Surgeon General, what was it six months ago, declared an epidemic of loneliness among young people, which is stunning.

Kevin: Yes.

Kristi: It’s stunning. We’ve heard that phrase be used to describe a different population in the past, and that’s the elderly. Never young people who are hardwired to connect with each other. I mean, your friends are your most important thing to you when you are young, and we are seeing that there’s a disconnect that’s happening. Truly, across the board, all humans are struggling with that, but it’s particularly [inaudible 00:26:48].

Kevin: Yeah. You see it especially with young people. And it’s interesting when I’m driving to get coffee early in the morning, my wife and I, we see these bus stops with middle school students and teenagers, and there may be 20 or 30 kids at a bus stop, and literally 90% of them are looking at their device and they’re not interacting with each other. Now, 10, 15 years ago, it would have been the exact opposite. You know, boys and girls talking, playing tag, playing with each other, or whatever. But that sort of isolationism exists even in a room full of young people. And so it’s an interesting dichotomy because what has happened, we have the increases, as we’ve both alluded to, in terms of technology and all the advances, but it has exacerbated the loneliness we talked about.

I’m glad you went into the detail you did about the program, because we do have a lot of school leaders that listen to us, and many have heard about your program. But it is an important tool in the school safety toolkit, along with some of the more reactive things that are needed. And I have one last question. This is what I really want to know for your advice to school leaders who are listening, who are concerned that even though they may have the technological protections, they may have the school safety officer, they may have the metal detectors, but they feel that there are some root cause issues with a certain subset of students. What advice would you give them on beginning the process of, for lack of a better term, creating this chain reaction of kindness and compassion that allows a connectivity that is a big sort of preventive medicine source when it comes to these safety issues?

Kristi: Wow, what a great question. Thank you for asking that one. I guess that I would say that, obviously, it’s all about culture, right? And see something, say something needs to be a practice. It can’t become your culture. You don’t want see something, say something surveillance. You don’t want to create a culture of surveillance as your effort towards school safety.

Rather, you want to focus on that being a practice and creating a culture of acceptance and inclusion. And the way to do that is to help young people and your staff maybe even understand . . . There’s something that our founder, Darrell Scott says that I absolutely love about this. He mentions that tolerance is something that’s wonderful, that we’ve focused on for many years to kind of create peace among our differences. And that there’s something that may be even better than tolerance, and that’s acceptance, because I don’t know about you, but I’d really rather not be tolerated.

Kevin: Yeah, exactly.

Kristi: I’d rather be . . .

Kevin: Accept me.

Kristi: Yeah. You are accepted and appreciated. And really the only reason people don’t do that is that we tend to have cognitive dissonance about conflating acceptance with approval and conflating acceptance with agreement. I think we have to teach each other that we do not need to agree or even approve of everything someone says, does, believes, or the way that they act or live their lives in order to accept them as your friend. And so that . . .

Kevin: That’s right. And we can honestly agree to disagree.

Kristi: Yes, absolutely. I’m fine with that. We should all be fine with that because what a boring world it would be if we all thought the exact same thing. But one thing that we really can agree on is that we can accept each other without agreeing with each other.

And so how do you teach young people to do that? I think that it’s a show, don’t tell. You have to model that behavior, and then there are several exercises and things like that, that you can implement with your staff and with your students that can encourage that kind of acceptance.

But it all comes down to knowledge, knowledge about the people that you’re around. When people get to know each other’s stories, when they learn about each other’s backgrounds or histories and who they are and what created them, we tend to very much be able to resolve that cognitive dissonance and accept them when we say, oh, that person we labeled as a bully or as a troublemaker, that student who’s really not our favorite here, that student has gone through a really rough time. Or maybe they’re alone, or maybe no one’s reached out to them, or maybe they struggle with emotional regulation and it keeps other people at a distance, and if we now understand that there’s a reason behind those behaviors, we can sort of see through them instead of look at those behaviors. That’s something else that Darrell Scott, our founder, says. Don’t be a look-at-er, be a see-through-er. If you could do that, you can have compassion for people who we perceive as different than us, who we perceive as other than us, and connect with the things that we all have in common as human beings.

And so I would encourage you as step one to kind of just have that mindset, which I know there are so many talented educators out there that do. And if you need a program to help you do that in your school, Rachel’s Challenge is a great option, and there are many others out there that are fantastic at helping to create that culture of kindness and compassion, rather than a culture of surveillance as part of safety.

Kevin: Kristi Krings, very powerful. I am so appreciative of the work you’re doing and extremely personally appreciative that you would join us on “What I Want to Know.” Good luck to you and keep doing what you’re doing.

Thanks for listening to “What I Want to Know.” Be sure to follow and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app so you can explore other episodes and dive into our discussions on the future of education. And write a review of the show. I also encourage you to join the conversation and let me know what you want to know using #WIWTK on social media. That’s #WIWTK.

For more information on Stride and online education, visit stridelearning.com. I’m your host, Kevin P. Chavous. Thank you for joining “What I Want to Know.”