For Dr. Amy Klinger, Ashland University professor and Director of the Educational Leadership Program in the Dwight Schar College of Education, what started as a conversation around the dinner table with her son in 2006 grew into a national movement.
Soon after turning 18, Dr. Klinger’s eldest son took a position with the local volunteer fire department. At this time, Dr. Klinger was decades into a career teaching English and serving in a variety of administrative roles at middle and high schools across the region.
But when she sat down next to her son, she never expected their discussion to change her life’s trajectory. As he described the intensive training he was undergoing at the station, she realized something she had never fully understood before.
“I told him I considered myself to be, as an administrator at the time, the first first responder,” she says. “If a kid in my cafeteria is injured, I’m responsible for him before the EMTs arrive. But there was a huge disconnect between the training and resources my son was given as an 18-year-old kid in a rural, small-town fire department and what was made available to a school employee–even though I was supposed to be the decision maker in this emergency situation, the leader in this crisis.”
The question stuck with her. As she continued her Ph.D. work and started on her dissertation, instead of finding answers, the disconnect became even more apparent.
“The question I kept running up against felt like an important one,” she says. “For a new teacher whose first job is being responsible for 25 kids, or for someone who gets their principal’s license and is now in charge of 800 kids–if they have no more safety or crisis training than the average person on the street, what are they supposed to do when, inevitably, something bad happens?”
Along her journey to find the answers, she founded the Educator School Safety Network (ESSN), currently the only non-profit educator-focused organization of its kind in the nation.
“Throughout this process,” she says, “I needed to become a dual expert.” She had expertise on the educational side, given her years of experience as a teacher and an administrator. At the start, however, she wasn’t an expert in crisis management. She knew crises and violence happened in schools. But she didn’t know the why or how behind it. And once she found the answers she sought, she needed to figure out the best means of passing on this knowledge to the educators who so desperately needed it.
Her learning curve was long and arduous. Once she became the dual expert necessary for the role she felt called to step into, however, she saw almost immediately the sheer amount of good she and her organization could do.
“Once I had a foot in both worlds,” she says, “I could start to build a bridge between the emergency responders who show up four or five minutes after an emergency call and the people in the school wondering what they should be doing. This bridge-building is what ESSN is designed to do.”
The organization has gained national attention and recognition, even appearing on the front page of USA Today, for its work in connecting both sides of the response to violence and other safety concerns in schools nationwide. While much of its research is unfunded, ESSN has been lauded nationally for its ability to gather and analyze timely data far more accurately than what states are able to compile.
Along with her continuing work with ESSN, Dr. Klinger teaches and serves as Director of Ashland’s Educational Leadership Program.
“My job at Ashland,” she says with a wry smile, “is to move teachers to the Dark Side.”
Which–for the record–is a subtly ironic way of describing her work preparing current teachers for administrative roles. While those who choose to move away from their school’s classrooms and into its offices often find themselves under fire from parents and fellow teachers, Dr. Klinger views this transition as an unmitigated good.
“I’ve found, down through the years, the best administrators have one thing in common,” she says. “Every one of them once made a vow to never leave the classroom. They didn’t want to ever leave their kids behind.”
But these teachers, she says, also experience a moment of realization: if they want to make the educational environment better, they need to leave the classroom.
“The problem with reality,” she says, “is that it always intrudes. At some point they realize that if they want to make substantive change, they need to work in administration.”
She did this in her own life, and has no regrets about it today: “I tell them, I never left my kids. Instead, I just expanded the number of kids under my care.”
From her perspective as a teacher and leader at Ashland, one of the University’s most powerful qualities is not just the volume of the attention professors are able to give each student, but also the quality.
“About five years back,” she says, “I started asking each student I have in class why they chose Ashland.” In response, student after student told her a story about how they were influenced by a leader in the field of education who, along with taking the time to connect with them, also did two key things. One, they inspired them to do more to make their particular educational environment better and pursue the changes they saw as necessary. And two, they gave Ashland University a sizable portion of the credit for their own success.
“Again and again,” says Dr. Klinger, “I found their answers to be astounding. For leaders in education to direct attention back to the University as a formative time in their own lives and encourage others to do the same? It’s the best compliment Ashland and its professors could ever receive.”
