Aloha HE'E Members and Participants,

Happy New Year and Best Wishes for 2013!  

We would like to ask for a vote from our voting members to approve the action listed below, which is a recommendation to the Board of Education Student Achievement Committee on an additional indicator for school safety.  Please send your comments to cheri@heecoalition.org by end of day Friday, January 4, 2013.  If approved, we will send the recommendation as testimony before the January 8, 2013 Student Achievement Committee meeting.  

Voting Members: A NO vote is opposing the recommendation. A YES or BLANK vote is approving the recommendation.  All comments are welcome. We will include comments in the testimony to the Student Achievement Committee.  

Non-Voting Members:  You are welcome to send comments, which we can include in our testimony.  

1.  Recommending Center of Disease Control (CDC) Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) as an additional indicator for HIDOE's Strategic Plan, Goal 1, Objective 1a, on School Safety 

Hawaii's Department of Education (HIDOE) has proposed to use the number of students with zero misconduct occurrences and percentage of students whose composite rating on "School Safety and Well-Being" on School Quality Survey is positive, as metrics to measure school safety. The latest set of metrics provided to the Board of Education (BOE)'s Student Achievement Committee (SAC) for Goal 1 is listed here, and the entire DOE Strategic Plan is listed here. The last BOE committee meetings which will finalize all metrics for the Strategic Plan will be held on Tuesday, January 8, 2012. Therefore, it will be the last opportunity in which HE'E can provide testimony on these metrics.  

At HE'E's last Planning Meeting, the Department of Health's (DOH) Suicide Prevention Coordinator, Nancy Kern, gave a compelling presentation on teen suicides in Hawaii.  The survey used to track student data is the CDC's YRBS survey, a federal survey, which is administered to students by HIDOE.  It is a statewide, bi-annual survey, which is meant to track risk behavioral trends.  The Planning Team felt that the YRBS survey would be a good additional indicator for school safety, in particular, the questions in the  "Unintentional Injuries and Violence" section. For a fact sheet on the survey, please click here.  Please see questions to the 2011 YRBS here, and the Center for Disease Control highlighted results here.  

HE'E's recommendation would be to include the YRBS Survey as an additional indicator for HIDOE's Strategic Plan Goal 1, Objective 1a on School Safety.  HE'E also plans to recommend that wellness or well-being be included in the targets, along with safety. 

Please let me know if you should have any questions.  

Mahalo for you continued support!