Connecting the Dots in Public Schools:
An Ecological Systems Approach to Responding to Conflict and Injustice in Local Communities

School violence impacts more than the lives of students directly affected. If we consider the problem of urban school violence today, we see at its root complex interactions between poverty, lack of personal opportunity and responsibility, racism, alcohol and other drug use, gangs, inadequate gun control regulation, disinvestments in schools and after-school programs, ineffectual responses from teachers and school officials, family and media violence and poor social skills. We believe in what we call an ecological approach to working with violence in school communities: working in partnership with other providers to offer a constellation of services to the school and its community. We are entering into a four-year project with five phases that include developing the capacity of the community in the areas of conflict resolution and social justice. We are also integrating from inception participatory action research ( PAR) as a means of ensuring all stakeholder voices are heard and integrated and as a way to document progress as we move forward. At the end of this four-year project we hope to develop a model to prevent and lessen the occurrence of school violence and that can be applied more broadly to schools in the New York City area, as well as, across the U.S.