by Sarah Kaldelli

Let’s Talk About It...

by Sarah Kaldelli, OLP Coordinator

At the 2019 CIS Child Protection and Safeguarding Conference in The Hague, just at the break of the pandemic, a profound yet simple statement was made by several speakers: “if you’re not talking about it, you’re not doing enough.” That statement was a hook that has stayed with me ever since.

ACS Athens has steadily expanded and solidified its Child Protection policy and has many systems in place to respond to issues that relate to children’s safety, protection, and well-being. One of the key connections we made as the Child Safeguarding Liaisons was between Child Safety, the Conscious Citizenship model, and that one single phrase stated above.

Our aim and process have been to educate our teachers and students by giving them tools to empower themselves when they’re in difficult situations. We want our students to feel safe among us, while also knowing that whatever situation they share with us, we will first know how to respond to it, and secondly, we will maintain high confidentiality in that response. At ACS Athens, we’re doing our best to talk about the difficult issues revolving around child safety.

We’re starting those conversations that leave people feeling uneasy, yet with greater awareness of what they should be looking out for. We want colleagues to be able to fully talk to each other when something feels “off”. As I learned at the CIS conference, the uncomfortable conversations are the ones we need to be having. During the March 16th Professional Development day of this year, we were given the opportunity to present to the entire ACS Athens Faculty and Staff. This included all our key players: teachers, supporting staff, maintenance, security, Administration, and finance - all departments were online and connected. The best result of our presentation was that our community members started coming forward, asking questions, pointing things out, and sharing their experiences or knowledge in this area. Some colleagues came forward to talk about how uncomfortable they had been with certain subjects and asked direct questions regarding how they could navigate discussions with students or parents.

Many of the questions don’t have immediate answers, yet they all contributed to that single commonality: we need to talk about it. Talking about what situations our students are experiencing at home, what they’re experiencing in school, and talking about what systems are in place to keep everyone safe on our campus is vital. Without these conversations, we’re not “conscious,” and without the connections we’re making, we’re not active citizens of our community either.

I like to find connections in ideas and relationships, and I see meaningful ones among our Child Safeguarding policy and ongoing development in this area, and in our Conscious Citizenship model. The Child Safeguarding Liaisons at ACS Athens invite all members of our community to be conscious, alert, and as active as the Conscious Citizenship model invites us to be. Through this model, we strongly advocate that we need to be “creating the conditions to expand awareness of social [...] conditions while being empowered to assume personal responsibility, by engaging in, committing to and initiating positive impact”. As a strong educational institution, it is our responsibility to be vigilant over our younger community members, so they are safe and empowered to develop into citizens of the world who, in turn, will be the next custodians of the future generations.