Roosevelt School Program:
Whole-School Approach to Conflict Resolution Education for Staff, Students, Parents,
Students with Special Needs and their Caregivers
The goal of this program is to support Roosevelt Elementary School in developing conflict resolution skills among faculty, parents and students, enhance the school’s capacity to address and resolve conflicts, and promote a culture of non-violence and respectful dialogue among all members of the school’s community.
Based on the Western Justice Center Foundation’s (WJCF) success in resolving conflict and decreasing violence at Cleveland Elementary School in Pasadena, the WJCF has committed itself to a new challenge working with Roosevelt Elementary School, also in Pasadena, to design a conflict resolution education system for faculty, staff, students and parents. While mirroring the ethnic and cultural demographics of Pasadena Unified School District’s other schools, 30% of the student population at Roosevelt is moderately to very severely disabled. The Roosevelt program is currently working with the school to engage its population in actively addressing and resolving conflict, and forming systems that will support that engagement.
WJCF will work with the Principal as well as a team of stakeholders to discuss issues of conflict and engagement. WJCF will also provide conflict resolution training and support through-out the partnership to the staff of Roosevelt school. WJCF will also facilitate the implementation of conflict resolution curriculum to the students, as well as provide ongoing parent training. WJCF will eventually train staff to train other staff, students, and even parents to maintain the level of skills gained after WJCF has left the partnership.
In February of 2007, WJCF introduced a majority of the staff to conflict resolution, and as of the summer of the same year, Roosevelt school agreed to host the same parenting workshops currently being developed through our Healthy Families Cooperative program for the parents of the school. These teach conflict resolution concepts in English and Spanish workshops, and allow the parents the opportunity to practice the concepts through the use of role-plays.
In the last year, the Western Justice Center provided more than 500 parents with conflict resolution education and training so they can effectively resolve conflicts in schools, and successfully overcome language and cultural barriers as they interact in the school system.
For three consecutive years, the Western Justice Center has partnered with B.E.S.T. (Building Educational Success Through the Arts) Arts to explore the boundaries of conflict resolution education and the arts by training hundreds of preschool teachers to use the arts in their classrooms as peaceful tools to resolve conflict.
The Western Justice Center trained representatives from Armenia, Bangladesh, Columbia, Egypt, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Uganda and Zimbabwe in effective conflict resolution methods and how to prevent ethnic - based conflicts.