Drafting the Student Bill of Responsibilities and Rights
Each school will set up their own process for drafting the articles of their SBRR. You may want to look at Palisades Charter High School’s original SBRR language for inspiration when identifying which articles are most relevant to your community. This can help in learning how to update an existing Student Bill of Rights to include the human rights lens.
Consider organizing single or multi-day drafting workshops with your coalition. You can model a two day event off of the “Student Bill of Responsibilities and Rights Summit” from Palisades Charter HS in 2015. This school also hosted weekly lunch meetings with students to draft the articles that were circulated for approval throughout the year.
For additional ideas for how to start drafting your SBRR, watch this explanation of the steps Palisades Charter HS took in 2015:
(Click to watch, 11:38)
Distributing the Student Bill of Responsibilities and Rights
In August 2016, Palisades Charter HS students, teachers and administrators brainstormed different ways to disseminate and implement their SBRR. Here are some of the notes from their brainstorm to help you get started on campus:
Dissemination Ideas:
- Everyone on campus must be educated on the SBRR s consider a program where everyone has to read, sign and return the SBRR by a deadline.
- Have students led groups focusing on how to make the SBRR visual in the classroom setting. You can post a copy in every classroom and ask students to relate rights and responsibilities to class curriculum.
- Introduce the SBRR to faculty through Human Resource mandatory lessons.
- Read a new article and responsibility each week over public announcements.
- Put the SBRR on the marquee with a rotating right and responsibility.
- Consider having an assembly where students and adults discuss the elements of the SBRR.
- Incoporate role playing at assemblies or 9th grade orientation. Role playing can include both students and teachers to help people in their understanding of what rights and responsibilities look like in real time. This can demonstrate both respect and violations of rights.
- Make it mandatory for incoming freshmen to take a training or watch videos about the SBRR. This can also include quizzes on the articles.
- Ask members of the development group to come to classes to share information on the SBRR.
- Consider mailing the SBRR to households, either U.S. mail or through virtual email blasts that include a virtual signature.
- Have the SBRR be a part of the enrollment process.
- Have a staff professional development day where teachers get together to do review each right and responsibility from their perspective.
Implementation Ideas:
- Visit schools with a similar code of ethics (i.e. Occidental College, Brentwood, Harvard-Westlake) to see how they run their disciplinary boards.
- Students can operate an Honor Board to hold other students accountable through restorative justice.
- Develop an advisory or freshmen seminar that would discuss HRE, intolerance, social and emotional awareness, along with other skills that students may need to develop, potentially be incoporated in the mandatory health class.
- Develop a counsel of representatives including upper and lower classmen, LSU, BSU, athletics, a student board member, a teacher, and a community member, such as a parent.
- Brainstorm how to turn some of these goals into tangible rights on campus.
- Gauge student ideas on helpful enforcement mechanisms.
- Following people’s comprehension of the SBRR, facilitate a communication skills training on what to do if you feel a right has been violated.
- Implement a student court and discipline committee.
- Develop a strategy for what happens after there is a violation or complaint.