President, Confluence PSG
In the fall of 2024, a 17-member task force convened to examine a question that Colorado schools had not answered well: how safe are educators, really, from aggressive and violent student behavior?
The answer the system had been operating on, based on available data at the time, was that incidents were limited and largely isolated. A problem, yes, but a contained one.
The answer 1,100 educators gave when someone actually asked them was different.
Over 74 percent reported that a student had attempted to cause physical injury to them or another adult in their presence. Over 50 percent reported having been physically injured by a student. Many reported it had happened more than once. Some reported it happening daily.
Those numbers did not emerge from a database. They were not sitting in a report waiting to be cited. They came from educators who had largely stopped expecting anyone to ask, let alone act on the answer.
That gap, between what the system believed and what the people inside it knew, is what the Colorado Educator Safety Task Force was designed to close.
“It has happened daily this school year, usually multiple times per day.”, Educator survey respondent
The absence of accurate information about educator safety was not an accident of data collection. It was a consequence of culture. Educators described being told that physical injury was part of the job. They described being discouraged from filing incident reports or seeking workers’ compensation. They described being made to feel at fault for their own injuries. The system had not failed to count these incidents. The system had, in many cases, actively discouraged the counting.
This matters for anyone designing a process meant to surface what an organization does not yet know about itself. You do not fix a data problem by building a better database. You fix it by creating conditions where people who have stopped speaking feel safe enough to speak again. That is a different problem, and it requires a different design.
Confluence PSG was engaged to design and facilitate the task force’s process and to conduct the educator survey. The survey produced findings that, as the task force report notes, were in stark contrast to the limited data available that suggested a limited problem with only a few isolated incidents.
What made the survey work was not the instrument. It was the environment the task force process had created before the survey launched. Seventeen members, including teachers from rural, suburban, and urban districts, school administrators, mental health professionals, a student, a restorative justice practitioner, and the Commissioner of Education, had been meeting monthly since September 2024. Four subcommittees added dozens more participants. By the time the survey went out, the process had demonstrated something that mattered to the educators who received it: people with real authority were actually listening, and the findings would not be minimized.
That environment does not happen automatically. It is built, session by session, through facilitation that treats the people in the room as the experts in their own experience rather than as stakeholders to be managed.
The findings did not stay in a report. The Colorado Department of Education incorporated the survey results and roadmap recommendations into its work. The Office of School Safety has made the findings and recommendations part of its ongoing work with schools and partners across the state. The picture the survey produced changed what state agencies believed was true about the problem, and that changed how they work.
The task force’s Roadmap for Action is organized around a four-part continuum: pre-incident preparation, incident response, post-incident recovery, and systemic and partner actions. Role-specific roadmaps break each category down for educators, building leaders, district leaders, state agencies, and educator preparation programs.
That architecture was deliberate. When a task force produces recommendations that can only be acted on by a single actor, the recommendations are only as durable as that actor’s willingness to follow through. The roadmap was designed so that action did not require any single actor. A principal can implement most of the pre-incident recommendations with existing authority. A district leader can act on the post-incident recovery recommendations without waiting for the state. A preparation program can begin integrating de-escalation training into its curriculum regardless of what the legislature does.
This is not a consolation prize for a process that could not get legislative commitment. It is a design principle. When the people most affected by a problem are given specific, actionable guidance at every level of the system they operate in, the problem does not have to wait for the top of the hierarchy to act.
The pattern the task force illustrated is not specific to schools.
Every organization has a gap between what leadership believes is happening and what the people inside it know. Most of the time, the people who know the most about a problem are the ones who have learned, through experience, that saying so does not help them. They have been told it is part of the job. They have been discouraged from reporting. They have been made to feel responsible for conditions they did not create.
Closing that gap requires two things that most processes do not provide simultaneously: genuine authority in the room, people whose attention actually matters and who can make things change, and genuine safety for the people being asked to speak, conditions where saying the true thing does not cost them something.
When both are present, the information that surfaces can change what decision-makers believe is possible. That is what happened here. The findings did not confirm what people expected. They changed what people knew. And when what decision-makers know changes, the range of solutions they are willing to consider changes with it.
That is what a well-designed process produces. Not just recommendations. A different picture of reality.
Berrick Abramson has designed and facilitated more than 50 work groups, task forces, and multi-stakeholder processes across AI governance, transit, healthcare, education, criminal justice, disability rights, wildfire resilience, and workforce development. He serves on the Colorado Commission on Higher Education, appointed by Governor Polis in 2019 and reappointed in 2023.
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