Inspiration and Resources for the Back to School Season

Create a Safe, Supportive School Environment

With the new school year quickly arriving, now is a great time to reassess your individual classroom culture and collective ideas about positive school climate, and commit to doing your part to put an end to bullying behavior by creating a positive, safe school environment where students feel valued, and are more likely to succeed.

Did you know?

Seven of the 40 Developmental Assets can have a direct impact on classroom climate and culture:

Asset #3: Other (nonparent) adult relatonships, Asset #5: A caring school climate, Asset #7: A community that values youth, Asset #8: A community that sees youth as resources, Asset #10: A safe environment, Asset #12: School boundaries, Asset #16: High expectations,

Check out the Take Action tips below to help you foster these important assets in kids of all ages.


The Safe and Supportive Schools Technical Assistance Center, a division of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, is one of our most-recommended resources for educators and school administrators. Here you’ll find a rich offering of free webinars and face-to-face events on a wide variety of topics related to improving conditions for learning (preventing disruptive behaviors such as bullying, harassment and violence, and substance abuse).

To help you get back into the swing of the new school year, we recommend viewing the following archived webinars:

Lead with Integrity

In their research covering six diverse high schools in Connecticut, authors David Wangaard, Ed.D., and Jason Stephens, Ph.D., discovered that over 90 percent of students participate in some form of cheating during the average school year. Creating a Culture of Academic Integrity aims to reverse this trend, and it provides the following:

  • A research-based justification for schools and communities to make academic integrity a priority.
  • Tools, resources, and strategies to improve students’ sense of scholastic honesty and help them resist cheating.
  • A discussion of plagiarism and tips to prevent it.
  • Activities on reproducible handouts.