Public Relations Campaign Against Violence in Schools

 

Executive Summary:

Our plan is to reduce violence against teachers by students in South Philadelphia Public High School by 50% by the end of the 2017 school year. Additionally, we hope to increase awareness of violence in schools by 75%. We want to improve relationships between students and teachers in the process of this campaign, so that violence against teachers can be in the past. Our target audience for this project is African American males ages 14-18 in South Philadelphia High School. We plan on holding five different focus groups with roughly 9-12 members of our target audience in them. During these focus groups we will gain an understanding of why there is violence against teachers in school and how we can solve this problem. We have several strategies planned to solve this problem and are aware of possible setbacks that we may face. By partnering with South Philadelphia Public High School to work during school hours or use the school facilities, this campaign has the ability to be successful. We believe the public high school will agree to partner with us because it is a serious problem that occurs at school and effects its faculty. Once we have partnered with South Philadelphia Public High School, we plan on holding info sessions during school hours where we will bring in successful community members to discuss the importance of having positive relationships with teachers. Additionally, we want to have teachers speak about their experiences with students who have acted violently towards them. Our goal of this information session is student will understand the negative affects of acting violently towards teachers and the positives of having strong relationships with them. We also plan on holding after school pizza parties once a month for both students and teachers to attend. We want this to be a fun way for students and teachers to build relationships outside of the classroom setting. For many students the classroom is seen as a negative place, so by having fun after school events students may be more willing to build stronger relationships with their teachers.

Problem: The PR problem we decided to research was violence against teachers in the classroom by students. This has become a growing problem and is reported in the media frequently.

Client: Department of Education, US.

Situation Analysis:

The problem of violence against teachers has become a huge epidemic over the last few years, and needs immediate attention. According to The American Psychological Association, 43% of city schools, 31% of suburban schools, 11% of town schools, and 15% of rural schools reported acts of violence in the classroom. Thus, we see how students from city schools need to be studied the most. According to U.S. Department of Education, 127,120 public school teachers from K-12 grades were physically attacked at school during the 2008-2009 school year. In addition, over 222,460 teachers were threatened at public schools. 55% of threats were done in secondary schools, which narrows down our age range for classroom violence to ages 14-18. To reduce our target audience, we decided to research the most violent high schools in the U.S., and South Philadelphia high school peaked our interest the most with 530 reported assaults in a period of 5 years. South Philadelphia is predominantly populated by African Americans, which leads us to target African American males. We picked males because when we researched examples of classroom violence, males were the most common to act violently in the classroom.  This narrows our audience down to African American male students in South Philadelphia high school, ages 14-18.

There are a few barriers that we face when dealing with this problem. The biggest struggle will be getting the South Philadelphia Public High School to partner with us. Many times schools are unwilling to work with public relations professionals because they want to protect their students. However, we feel strongly that given the problem the South Philadelphia High School will work with us. Since it is a problem that directly affects the teachers of South Philadelphia Public High School, we think the school will want to partner with us to solve it. Another challenge that we face is participation among our target audience. We plan on holding five different focus groups of 9-12 students, which we know will be a challenge. However, by including incentives to the students who participate with think we will be able to get enough students to attend the focus groups. Also, if we hold our events during school and after school hours, it will be much easier to get our target audience to attend.

Further Research:

We decided that we would want to start with secondary research to find examples of violence in schools. We gathered statistics on the percentages of schools reporting acts of violence against teachers as well as examples from accredited media sources. We would want to conduct primary research to better understand the problem and all parties’ perspectives. We would use qualitative research to decipher why this problem is present. We would hold focus groups and interviews with students to get a well-rounded understanding of the problem. It is important to understand the student’s perspectives on these acts of violence as well as the circumstances of these events. Was it because they are under stress at school? Are they having problems at home? A greater look at ethnicity, gender, and overall demographics would add a lot of insight to this problem.

South Philadelphia High School has been reported to have 530 assaults in a period of 5 years. We decided that in order to motivate students to participate in our focus groups, we would start by guaranteeing anonymity in order to ensure the students safety. The average household income in South Philadelphia area is $53,568. Knowing this, we decided that holding the focus groups during school lunch hours and giving them a free lunch would incentivize them. If they were present for the duration of the focus group we would provide them with $15 Visa Gift cards. For each student a participant recruits to be a part of the focus group, $5 will be added to their Visa Gift Card. This will only be in effect when each recruit attends an entire focus group and was actively participating.

A problem that is similar to the one we are trying to solve was done by SAVE- Students Against Violence Everywhere. SAVE is a unique approach to youth safety because it recognizes the role that young people can take in making schools and communities safer. The Mission of SAVE is “The National Association of Students Against Violence Everywhere (SAVE), Inc. is a public nonprofit organization striving to decrease the potential for violence in our schools and communities by promoting meaningful student involvement, education and service opportunities in efforts to provide safer environments for youth.” SAVE started 26 years ago when students lost a classmate, Alex Orange, due to a fight at a party he was trying to break up. Alex’s friends formed Students Against Violence Everywhere, SAVE with the vision that all students will be able to attend a school that is safe, secure, free of fear, and conducive to learning.

An audience that is similar to the one we are trying to reach was targeted by the African American Male Achievement (AAMA). The African American Male Achievement project stops the epidemic of failure among the black males in the Oakland Unified School District. The project was launched in 2010 to analyze and assess the systemic inequalities that lead to these failures among the male African American population. AAMA worked directly with Oakland principals to figure out what black achievement should mean to these young boys. The executive director of the Office of African American Male Achievement believed this was a problem with the school districts themselves and they were the ones that needed to be held accountable for the failure of these young boys. Today, the AAMA is still leveraging partnerships, studying and implementing instructional practices and paving the way for reforms that will affect future generations in the Oakland Unified School District. AAMA offers programs and services to try to empower the African American male population. Some of these services include: the Manhood Development Program, Parent Engagement, Student Leadership Council, and Khepera Campaign.

Primary Research: (focus groups)

Focus groups consisting of 9-15 African American male high school students.

  1. Client: South Philadelphia Public High School
  2. Problem: an increase in violence towards teachers by the students in inner city public schools
  3. Audience: African American Males, ages 14-18

Secondary Research: (campaigns we find)

  1. SAVE – Students Against Violence Everywhere: problem is similar
  2. African American Male Achievement (AAMA): audience is similar

Target Audience (Focus Group): African American males, ages 14-18 in South Philadelphia High School.

Focus Group Questions:

  1.   How do you feel about going to school?
  2.   What are your feelings towards your teachers?
  3.   Do you think your teachers care about you and respect you?
  4.   Can you tell me about a time that you saw another student physically attack a teacher?
  5.   Can you tell me about a time you saw another student verbally insult a teacher?
  6.   If you have ever physically attacked a teacher, can you explain why you did it?
  7.   If you have you ever verbally insulted a teacher, can you explain why you did it?
  8.   Can you tell me about a time a teacher ever attacked you or verbally insulted you?
  9.   When have you seen a teacher attack or verbally insult another student?
  10. How many times have you seen teachers and students fight?
  11. Can you talk about your home life?
  12. What’s your relationship like with your parents?
  13. Can you explain when a teacher has ever provoked you to be violent?
  14. Do you think women teachers are an easier target than male teachers?
  15. Have you ever been punished for being violent in the past?

Secondary AudienceFemale high school teachers

Tertiary AudienceYounger African American males, ages 11-13

Messages:

Teachers are not the problem. They are there to help students succeed and achieve their goals; so inflicting violence on them is bad.

Goals:

  1. To reduce the number of assaults on teachers by students at South Philadelphia Public High School by 50% by the end of the 2017 school year.
  2. To increase awareness of violence against teachers and its negative effects by 75% by the end of the 2017 school year.  
  3. To build stronger relationships between students and teachers.

Objectives:

  1. knowledge(what do you want them to know): The importance of respecting their teachers, and that violence towards teachers is not an acceptable behavior to portray in school.
  2. Predisposition (what do you want them to trust in): To trust their teachers and realize that they are there to help them succeed in life.
  3. Behavior (what do you want them to do): Respect their teachers and to not act violently or aggressively towards their teachers

Strategy (Direction):

We want to inform students that it is not acceptable to exercise violence against their teachers. Whether they do it verbally or physically, we want them to know that there are consequences for both of these types of assaults. We want to target students because they are the ones inflicting these acts of violence. If we can infiltrate classroom etiquette into their minds, then hopefully assaults against teachers will go down significantly.

We plan on holding in-school information sessions that host successful guest speakers from the community to talk about their positive experiences in school. There will be roughly four guest speakers all who will talk about why how their teachers helped them to achieve their goals and how a good relationship with teachers will help you be more successful later in life. Additionally, we will have teachers speak about experiences they have had with students acting violently towards them and how they feel about it. We hope that through this in-school session students will have a better understanding that teachers are there to help them succeed.

Additionally, we want to host an after school pizza party once a month where lunch is provided for both the teachers and students. We will host a local DJ to come in and entertain the students and teachers who show up, parents will also be welcome. These pizza parties will be a fun way for students and teachers to get to know each other outside of the classroom, and will hopefully help to build more intimate relationships.  

SWOT Analysis:

Strengths

  • If we work in schools our target audiences will be easily reachable
  • We are willing to spend a lot of time in Philadelphia to get a good understanding of our problem
  • We understand the problem that we want to solve and have strong ideas on how to solve it

Weaknesses

  • Finding funding to hold focus groups and incentives
  • We may not come off as relatable to the students we are trying to infiltrate our message to
  • We do not understand our target audience well enough

Opportunities

  • Partnering with the South Philadelphia Public High School
  • Partnering with local businesses in the area that will draw the attention of our target audience
  • If we work with schools detention hours we would be targeting the students that are part of the problem we want to solve

Threats

  • Safety of us working with violent students
  • South Philadelphia Public High School not being willing to work with us to solve the problem
  • Us not having the ability to gain the attention of our target audience
  • Us being in a different demographic that has trouble relating to the target audience
  • Students might not show up to detention
  • Parents not allowing us to do our research with their kids

Evaluation:

  1. We will prepare for our focus groups by developing insightful, thoughtful questions that we can ask students in our focus groups. We will use our secondary research to provide us with a better look into how our campaign is likely to go so we can prepare for any obstacles that may come our way.
  2. We will record our focus group sessions in order to properly count how many answers were similar to each other. We want to count how many common words or trends that the students suggested throughout their focus group session. We hope to find a trend in the students responses that can give us an answer as to why violence is present in the South Philadelphia high school classrooms.
  3. We hope to give more awareness to the violence in classrooms and show students how it is not ok and normal for it to happen. We hope to see a 50% decrease of assaults against teachers by 2017. We hope that we will promote a better relationship among students and teachers by getting to the bottom of why students act violently against their teachers.