Built for the hours nobody trains you for

The First 48 is decision support for school leaders in the first hours after an antisemitic incident. A swastika in a restroom. A slur in a group chat. A student arguing in fourth period that the Holocaust did not happen. A family in your office saying this has been going on for two years and nobody did anything.

In those hours, the decisions that matter most get made fast, alone, and from instinct — and the instincts that serve a school leader well on an ordinary day are often exactly wrong here. This tool exists to put a steadier hand next to yours for the first day or two. It was built by a superintendent, for the person who is holding the phone.

How it works

You pick what happened from nine kinds of incident. Then you answer three to five questions by choosing from a short list — where it happened, who it was aimed at, whether it has happened before. There is nothing to type. From those answers the tool assembles an action sheet: what to do in the first hour and why the order matters, who to notify, what to say to the family and to staff, the Title VI questions you and your attorney need to answer in writing, the North Carolina organisations to call, and what to write down tonight.

Every answer stays visible and changeable, during the questions and on the sheet itself. Change one and the sheet updates. When you have it right, print it.

Two of the nine branches — curriculum conflicts and Israel-related protest — are not incidents with a clock running. They are judgment calls. For those, the tool does not give you a checklist. It tells you which question you are actually in, where the legal line sits, and how to run a process that survives scrutiny. A third, for a family reporting a pattern, is built around a meeting rather than a first hour.

What it deliberately does not do

It collects nothing. No account, no login, no form, no analytics, no third-party scripts. Nothing you select is recorded, transmitted, or stored — not by this site and not by anyone else. That is enforced at the server, not just promised on the page. It is why a principal can use this at nine at night without asking permission, and why a district can adopt it without a privacy review.

It renders no verdicts. It will not tell you whether a hostile environment exists, whether speech was protected, or whether a student should be removed. Those are decisions for you and your board attorney. The tool gives you the questions, insists you answer them in writing, and tells you when to make the call.

It is not legal advice, and it does not replace your district's own policies, your safety protocol, or your counsel. Where a threat is involved, it says so before it says anything else: your threat assessment protocol leads, and this page comes second.

It works without a signal. Open it once and every branch is available offline afterward.

How it is reviewed

No branch ships until it has been reviewed by counsel. Several carry additional review — school board association legal staff on the Title VI and free-expression analysis, law enforcement and the district safety lead on the threat branch, human resources on adult conduct, and Holocaust education specialists on the denial branch. Until a branch has cleared its reviews, the action sheet it produces says so in plain terms at the bottom.

Every organisation in the call lists carries the date its contact details were last confirmed. If an entry has not been verified, the tool says that too, and withholds the details rather than risk a dead number at the worst possible moment.

The content is written as documents, not as code, so that a reviewer can read a branch the way they would read any other guidance and mark it up.

Who built it

The First 48 was built by Rodney Trice, superintendent of Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools in North Carolina, as a project of the 2026 cohort of the Hartman Family Foundation Educators' Institute on Israel and Antisemitism, part of the Brandeis University President's Initiative on Antisemitism.

It is written for North Carolina districts first: the statutes, the reporting channels, and the organisations to call are North Carolina's. The thinking underneath it is not particular to any one state.

The name

The first forty-eight hours after an incident are when a district's response is decided — usually before anyone has had time to think. What happens in that window is what a family remembers, what an investigator later examines, and what every other student learns about what is tolerated here. This tool is for that window.

Questions, corrections, and requests to review a branch: see Support.