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Upon completion of the Principal Certification Program I plan on becoming an Associate Principal in Mansfield Independent School District where I currently teach and coach and then pursu a Principal job within the next five years.  I currently hold a Bachelors Degree in Mathematics with Secondary Education (7-12). I plan on using my leadership background from a career of high school coaching to develop into an effective Principal.

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Mansfield Independent School District K-12 Public Education in North Texas. A great place to live, learn and teach

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Mansfield Independent School District is one of the fastest growing school districts in the state of Texas. The district boundaries encompass sections of Mansfield, Arlington, Grand Prairie, Rendon, and other areas, which add up to 94.5 square miles of Tarrant and Johnson Counties

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Step 2 - Option 2: National School Boards Association (NSBA)

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Step 2 - Option 2: National School Boards Association (NSBA)

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Bullying is an issue that has long been serious that schools are beginning to give it attention.

Children cannot be expected to learn in a hostile environment and it has to stop. Students who live in fear of others or fear coming to school are not capable to perform at high level and reach their maximum potential.

What this means for teachers:

- staff can help prevent bullying by enforcing rules and policies that define how are expected to treat one another

- find your role in bullying prevention

- what are the steps in reporting a case of bullying

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We are the leading advocate for public education

Working with and through our state associations, NSBA advocates for equity and excellence in public education through school board leadership. We believe education is a civil right necessary to the dignity and freedom of the American people, and all children should have equal access to an education that maximizes his or her individual potential.

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Working with and through our state associations, NSBA advocates for equity and excellence in public education through school board leadership. We believe education is a civil right necessary to the dignity and freedom of the American people, and all children should have equal access to an education that maximizes his or her individual potential.

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Step 2 - Option 2: National Education Association

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Step 2 - Option 2: National Education Association

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Upon review of the Issues and Actions section on the NEA website, gun violence has become a major issue in today's schools and society.  NEA supports solutions to limit access to guns.

In the most recent 2018 spending bill, NEA successfully got language in the STOP School Violence Act to include language that prohibited funding for purchasing firearms or firearms training for educators.

However, with broader gun control laws sitting at a standstill, this makes our schools and students less safe.

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In the wake of the school shooting in Florida and the ongoing epidemic of gun violence plaguing our nation, we must continue to advocate for common-sense steps to help make our communities safer. We know from a recent survey, that three quarters (77 percent) of NEA members believe it is too easy to access guns in the United States.

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Step 2 - Option 3: Firestorm Erupts as Betsy DeVos Weighs If Districts Can Buy Guns With Federal Money (Ujifusa & Blad, 2018) 

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Step 2 - Option 3: Firestorm Erupts as Betsy DeVos Weighs If Districts Can Buy Guns With Federal Money (Ujifusa & Blad, 2018) 

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The U.S. Secretary of Education is deciding whether or not to let schools buy guns using federal money.

Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants, established when Congress passed ESSA in 2015, is a $1.1 billion program for districts to spend on student wellness and health, education technology, and a variety of other priorities. It can also be used to cover costs related to student safety. The statutory language governing the grants does not prohibit using the money for firearms.

However, the question that is being raised is safe and drug free schools and the use of Title IV grants where the money is supposed to be used for education and student health and wellness.

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News that U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is considering whether to let school districts use federal money to buy guns set off a cascade of anger from lawmakers and others, and put the polarizing issue of arming teachers back at the center of the debate over school safety.

At the request of officials in Texas, DeVos and her staff are considering an idea that a grant program under the Every Student Succeeds Act could be used by school districts to pay for firearms and firearms training for school-based staff.

The Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants, established when Congress passed ESSA in 2015, is a $1.1 billion program for districts to spend on student wellness and health, education technology, and a variety of other priorities. It can also be used to cover costs related to student safety. The statutory language governing the grants does not prohibit using the money for firearms.

The idea that DeVos would back plans to use these grants for guns, first reported by the New York Times, has been "blown way out of proportion," according to Liz Hill, the spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education. A Trump administration official said the potential use of the money did not originate with DeVos, but with Texas education officials who inquired in a letter to DeVos' department about whether districts could use the support and enrichment grants to purchase firearms.

A spokeswoman for the Texas education department said it had simply passed along questions from districts in the wake of the Parkland shooting about whether certain expenditures could be covered by Title IV grants, including guns. Janet Robinson, who was the superintendent of Newtown, Conn., schools during the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary massacre, said she tells people that having been impacted so directly by a school shooting, she believes giving guns to school staff is not the answer.

"The government is not giving us enough money for social-emotional learning and equity," said Robinson, who is now the superintendent of Stratford schools in Connecticut. "And we're going to waste money now on a danger we're inserting into the classroom?"

The proposal was roundly condemned by Democrats on Capitol Hill and a broad swath of the education field. Arming teachers is not generally a popular idea in the education community. However, the Federal School Safety Commission-established by President Donald Trump after the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., in February and led by DeVos-has heard from educators who support the idea. Some states-Texas among them-do allow school staff to carry guns for safety reasons under certain conditions.

In a March Gallup poll of teachers, about 70 percent of respondents said they do not think they or other school staff members should have guns in school, with nearly 60 percent saying that guns would make schools less safe.

In a poll of public school parents released in July by PDK International, 26 percent said having armed staff would make their child safer at school, compared to 36 percent who said it would make their child less safe. Republicans and gun owners were more likely to support such measures. President Donald Trump has expressed support for the idea in the past.

'Safe and Drug-Free Schools'

The ESSA-related dollars in question-known as Title IV grants-are controlled and spent at the district level, and are intended to support a well-rounded education and student health and wellness.

Congress approved a $700 million increase for the Title IV grants for this current federal fiscal year shortly after the Parkland school shooting. Lawmakers from both parties said the money would help districts pay for services such as additional mental counseling, crisis training, and violence prevention in schools, among other priorities. They did not mention guns as a possible expense.

Supporters of the grants have also highlighted how schools can use them for programs promoting academics such as dual enrollment, arts education, and similar initiatives.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has tried unsuccessfully to eliminate the grants in its first two spending proposals.

In June, AASA, the School Superintendents Association, reported that in a survey of more than 600 district leaders, 63 percent said they planned to use their Title IV grant cash to create "safe and drug-free schools." The survey did not specifically ask if district leaders would use the grant money for guns. (AASA officially opposes arming school staff.) The second-most-popular use of the grants was additional school counseling, for which 43 percent of districts reported they'd use the money.

Among the ways districts plan to use the money to improve student health and safety, the most popular option for districts was positive behavior interventions, at 63 percent, according to the AASA survey results. Meanwhile, 26 percent of districts surveyed said they planned to use the money for "school safety equipment." Again, districts were not asked by AASA specifically about guns.

Each of the nation's school districts is supposed to receive at least $10,000 under Title IV. However, a district that gets a grant of more than $30,000 must use 20 percent of its funding on at least one activity that helps students become well-rounded, and another 20 percent on at least one activity that helps kids be safe and healthy. The rules of the grant are silent about guns.

Swift and Strong Reactions

A senior Trump administration official stressed that DeVos did not come up with the idea herself of using Title IV for guns, stating, "Department officials have been researching the issue, like they do with every issue, in response to this Texas letter."

Among the questions shared by the state with the Department of Education was: "Many have asked due to the increased focus on school safety, will allowable purchases under safe and healthy students also include such things as guns, gun training/marshal training for school personnel, metal protectors, bullet proof entries, or other services associated with crisis management?"

The Texas department "simply sought clarification on allowable uses of Title IV funding for school safety purposes. These were questions being presented to us by some of our school systems," said the spokeswoman, DeEtta Culberson. "To date, [the U.S. Department of Education] has not provided us with a final answer on this specific issue."

But lawmakers and advocates rushed to weigh in, and many expressed harsh opposition to the idea, including groups such as the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and the American Federation of Teachers.

"This is absurd and appalling," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the Senate education committee and one of the principal authors of ESSA, in a statement. "It's not surprising that Secretary DeVos would have the gall to try to sneak guns into schools through a program intended to support students and provide academic enrichment opportunities."

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., tried, unsuccessfully last week after the report to insert an amendment into a spending bill that would ban the Education Department from allowing its federal dollars to buy guns for schools. He called it a "direct contravention" of ESSA's language, as well as the intent of Congress.

"That is not what parents want. That is not what students want. That is not what teachers want," Murphy said on the Senate floor.

Earlier this year, Congress passed the STOP School Violence Act to help schools improve safety. It includes language that explicitly bans the law's grant funds from paying for firearms.

"It is way outside the scope of what Congress intended for this program," said Ally Bernstein, the executive director of the Title IV-A Coalition, which has lobbied Congress to boost grant funding. "In our conversations with the department, we were never made aware that they were considering this." (The coalition does not take a position on arming staff for school safety.)

However, Bernstein conceded that Congress would probably have to pass a law or else put pressure on districts in order to get the idea off of school districts' radar.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the chairman of the Senate education committee who was also a key ESSA architect, had a more circumspect response to the news: "I'm not a fan of arming teachers, but the safe schools block grant [Title IV] for many years has allowed states to make the decision about how to use those federal dollars to make schools safer for children."

'This is School'

DeVos' school safety commission has heard arguments both for and against arming teachers since the group began its work earlier this year.

Supporters of arming educators say schools are "sitting ducks" without the presence of armed adults to respond quickly in crisis situations. At a recent commission hearing in Arkansas organized by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, administrators from rural districts said arming select staff had given them a sense of safety despite long response times from law enforcement, who can take as long as 30 minutes to respond to a call in isolated areas.

"We're not willing to take that chance," Lake Hamilton, Ark., schools Superintendent Steve Anderson, who carries a gun at school, told the commission. "We need someone to protect our kids."

Still others, including educators who are survivors of school shootings, have actively opposed arming school staff. Some of them say suggestions that school attacks would have turned out differently had teachers been armed-a common argument of proponents-amounts to blaming of survivors.

"You must understand how fast shootings happen and how chaotic and confusing it is. There's no way to determine who and where the gunfire is coming from," Abbey Clements, who was a teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School, told the safety commission in June. She waited out the 2012 massacre in the Newtown, Conn., school by singing Christmas carols to her students to distract them.

"Say I had a gun. Would I have left my terrified children? Never," Clements said. "Would I have been able to find, approach, and fire at him, and not somebody else, without perhaps, a child getting in the way? It's completely unrealistic to think that an educator ... would have been able to navigate all of this in such a short period of time and take down the gunman without interfering with law enforcement's response, or harming or killing other educators, or God forbid, children. ... This is not the movies. This is school."

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Firestorm Erupts as Betsy DeVos Weighs If Districts Can Buy Guns With Federal Money

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News that U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is considering whether to let school districts use federal money to buy guns set off a cascade of anger from lawmakers and others, and put the polarizing issue of arming teachers back at the center of the debate over school safety.

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Step 2 - Option 3: Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act (Herold, 2018)

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Step 2 - Option 3: Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act (Herold, 2018)

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Florida lawmakers have mandated the creation of a database that will put state and local agencies information along with personal social media accounts together in order to prevent another incident like Parkland High School.

The landmark legislation has ways of imposing new restrictions on accessing guns, establishing a voluntary program to train and arm some school employees, providing $400 million for school mental health services and security measures, and establishing a new Office of Safe Schools within the Florida Department of Education.

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As part of their efforts to prevent school shootings, Florida lawmakers mandated the creation of a centralized database that will combine individual-level records from the state's law-enforcement and social-services agencies with information from people's personal social media accounts.

The provision, tucked within the 105-page law passed in March following the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, marks a potentially dramatic increase in the state's collection and sharing of data on individuals. While the new database could have big consequences for individual privacy and civil liberties, proponents described it as necessary to ensure public safety.

"What we saw after the Parkland tragedy is that there were clear [warning signs] that didn't end up being followed through on or processed," Fla. state senator Bill Galvano, a Republican who authored the bill, said in an interview. "It was very important that we create within our school system the opportunity to report the information that is out there, so that things are being captured and you don't have one group knowing something and not sharing it with another group."

To date, the far-reaching legislation, known as the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, has garnered attention primarily for imposing new restrictions on access to guns, establishing a voluntary program to train and arm some school employees, providing $400 million for school mental health services and security measures, and establishing a new Office of Safe Schools within the Florida Department of Education.

But a mostly overlooked provision of the legislation also directs that new office to "coordinate with the Department of Law Enforcement to provide a centralized integrated data repository and data analytics resource to improve access to timely, complete, and accurate information."

Work on the new repository has already begun. According to the law, data sources must include, at a minimum, the state's departments of Children and Families, Law Enforcement, and Juvenile Justice; local law enforcement agencies; and "social media."

Privacy experts, civil-liberties advocates, and researchers who specialize in "integrated data systems" around the country criticized the law as vaguely written and lacking in adequate safeguards.

"The people who created this system may not know the best practices, unintended consequences, and privacy pitfalls that occur when you combine all this information," said Amelia Vance, the director of education privacy at the Future of Privacy Forum, a Washington think tank."They may have gone into this work with the best of intentions, but intentions don't always shape how a law will play out in practice."

'Clear Messages That Were Not Acted Upon'

Across the country, dozens of existing integrated data systems-including at least two in Florida, with two more in Broward and Miami-Dade counties already under development-merge administrative data from various state and local government agencies. More than a dozen such systems include K-12 school districts.

Typically, integrated data systems use aggregated information for research and evaluation.

While a handful are used to provide case-management services to specific individuals, most only use individual data that have been de-identified, as part of large-scale statistical analyses looking for trends.

"The integrated data systems we work on are not about surveillance. They're about improving our understanding of how policies and programs work," said Della Jenkins, the executive director of Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy, an initiative at the University of Pennsylvania that helps state and local governments link administrative data across agencies.

Jenkins said the type of data system outlined in the new Florida law represents a "marked departure" from those that currently exist, because of its potential to be used to flag individuals for possible-law enforcement actions, and the inclusion of information pulled from social media.

Galvano, the Florida state senator, said both steps are necessary to "close the gaps in communication" that occurred leading up to the Parkland massacre.

Confessed shooter Nikolas Cruz, who had previously been expelled from Stoneman Douglas, was well-known to local mental-health and law-enforcement agencies. Among his many troubling posts on social media was a threat to become a " professional school shooter." Still, he was able to buy a high-powered assault rifle, enter the school's campus, and kill 17 students and staff members.

"How do you explain to a victim's family that there were very clear messages that were not acted upon?" Galvano said.

Data Governance, Tech Solutions, and Legal Issues

The law passed in response to the Parkland shooting calls for the new database to be operational by December 1, 2018.

Efforts toward that goal have already begun, led by working groups focused on data governance, technology solutions, and legal considerations, according to Florida Department of Education press secretary Audrey Walden.

The centralized database will "allow users to search across multiple criminal justice databases" and "access multiple data sources" through a single application, Walden wrote in an email.

In addition, she added, "the data analytic resource is a monitoring tool that is intended to aid districts with social media monitoring services."

Walden's statement appears to reference services such as those offered by companies like Geo Listening and Social Sentinel, which have been aggressively pitching schools on the promise of algorithm-driven technologies to monitor students' public social-media posts for everything from school-shooting threats to suicidal ideation. Walden said she could not answer additional questions seeking clarification, citing the state's pending procurement process and confidentiality reasons.

Galvano, however, articulated a different vision for how information from social media might enter the state's new data repository. He described it as "more of a reactionary thing," in which citizens could report suspicious or threatening social media activity to a central database, which state workers might then "utilize for investigatory purposes, or for reaching out to or monitoring [the person] who might have said it."

"It's not intended to randomly surveil or monitor students without cause," Galvano said. "If that's how it starts to move, then we need to make adjustments."

Evaluating Unintended Consequences

Such confusion is part of what's driving the concerns of people like Faiza Patel, the co-director of the Liberty & National Security Center at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Whatever the intent of Galvano and other lawmakers, Patel said, the actual legislation's imprecise language seems to allow for open-ended vacuuming up of any and all social-media information, not just reported threats.

And even just the latter could allow for a great deal of unvetted, low-quality, and biased information to flood into the system, she said. Just look at the rash of recent incidents in which white people reported black people to law enforcement for "suspicious" activities such as sitting in a Starbucks, napping in a college dorm, and grilling in a park.

In addition, said Patel and other experts, it's unclear exactly who will have access to the information in the new Florida database, what specific purposes the data can (and can't) be used for, how it will be secured, how long it will be retained, or what rights individuals may have to review and contest the information that is held about them.

It's also unclear how a new state system might interact with related local efforts.

Just last month, for example, a public-safety task force established in Broward County following the Parkland shooting recommended that the school district and area municipalities " initiate social-media monitoring protocols " and called for the expansion of the Broward County Data Collaborative, currently being developed with the help of Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

For his part, Galvano said Florida's new data system is a work in progress, and that he would "personally look out" to make sure that it doesn't become a vehicle for privacy and civil-liberties abuses.

But experts said such concerns are typically resolved at the outset of the creation of such systems and detailed in data-governance documents and extensive legal and data-sharing agreements. Getting such an infrastructure in place by December 1 will likely prove a major challenge.

"Nobody wants to allow another school shooting to happen," Patel said. "But we have to be clear about the purposes of this system, how we ensure that the information that goes into it is not rife with error and bias, and how we avoid casting suspicion on a very broad range of kids."

Published in Print: July 26, 2018, as Florida to Create New Database to Stop School Shootings

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To Stop School Shootings, Fla. Will Merge Government Data, Social Media Posts

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As part of their efforts to prevent school shootings, Florida lawmakers mandated the creation of a centralized database that will combine individual-level records from the state's law-enforcement and social-services agencies with information from people's personal social media accounts.

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Step 3: Legal and Ethical Issues for Gun Violence in Schools

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Step 3: Legal and Ethical Issues for Gun Violence in Schools

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Gun violence is a leading cause of premature death in the U.S. Guns kill more than 38,000 people and cause nearly 85,000 injuries each year. As a longtime advocate for violence prevention policies, APHA recognizes a comprehensive public health approach to addressing this growing crisis is necessary.

The issue of gun violence is complex and deeply rooted in our culture, which is why we must take a public health approach to ensuring our families and communities are safe. We must place a renewed emphasis on improving gun injury and violence research. Ongoing work is needed to ensure firearms do not fall into the wrong hands and to expand access to mental health services to those who need it most.

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Step 5: Legal and Ethical Issue Pertaining to Gun Violence (Lunenburg, 2010)

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Step 5: Legal and Ethical Issue Pertaining to Gun Violence (Lunenburg, 2010)

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In this class I will begin to explore the topic of gun violence and how it pertains to schools and respective safety. This issue is one that is highly controversial in today's educational climate without a concise resolution.

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Step 4: Academic Source (Warnick, Kim, & Robinson, 2015)

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Step 4: Academic Source (Warnick, Kim, & Robinson, 2015)

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Source taken from Porter Henderson Library

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Gun Violence and the Meaning of American Schools

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Step 4: Internet Source (Skiba, Simmons, Peterson, & Forde, 2006)

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Step 4: Internet Source (Skiba, Simmons, Peterson, & Forde, 2006)