What to have at hand

Most of what a school leader needs in the first hours is not information. It is a phone number that works, a policy they can point to, and a record they can produce later. This page is for the parts that can be gathered in advance.

Who to call in North Carolina

The same organisations the action sheets name, with the date each entry was last confirmed. Where an entry has not yet been verified, its details are withheld rather than risk a dead number at the worst moment. This list is re-verified every year and whenever someone reports a change — see Support.

What the tool covers

Nine kinds of incident. Each link opens the tool at that branch.

Two of these — curriculum conflicts and Israel-related protest — produce a way of thinking rather than a checklist, because they are judgment calls without a clock. The pattern branch is built around a meeting.

Have these ready before you need them

Every one of these is asked for by at least one branch, usually in the first hour. Most districts discover they cannot lay hands on two or three of them under pressure.

• The name and phone number of your district's Title VI / civil rights coordinator
• Your threat assessment protocol, and who convenes it
• Your bullying and harassment policy, and the reporting path a teacher is supposed to use — and whether your teachers could describe it if asked
• How long your camera systems keep footage before overwritingMost keep fourteen to thirty days. Pulling footage is the step districts most often lose.
• Whether your discipline system can be searched for antisemitic incidentsIf the category does not exist in your taxonomy, you cannot answer "has this happened to this student before" — and that inability is itself a finding.
• Your public comment policy for board meetings, reviewed with counsel for viewpoint neutralityDistricts rewrite this under pressure, in public, after an incident. That is the worst possible circumstance in which to write policy.
• Your visitor and campus access policy — and evidence that it has been enforced on ordinary days
• Your walkout and student expression policy, if you have one, and the rule you applied the last time students walked out
• Whether your curriculum has a vetting process for supplementary material — articles, films, guest speakers
• Where required Holocaust instruction happens in your district: which course, which grade, taught by whom, with what materials
• Your board attorney's direct number, and whether they have read the branches you are likely to need

The standards underneath

The action sheets lean on a small number of legal standards. They are described here in plain terms so you recognise them when they appear. These are descriptions, not citations; your counsel will have the current ones, and the tool never substitutes for that.

Title VI and shared ancestry. Federal civil rights law bars discrimination on the basis of race, colour, and national origin in schools that receive federal funds. Antisemitism is addressed under it through shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics, not through religion as such. The questions that recur across the branches — was the conduct severe, pervasive, or objectively offensive; did the district know or should it have known; was the response prompt, reasonable, and effective — are the shape of that standard. The exposure is almost always the response, not the incident.

Student expression. Schools may regulate student speech that would substantially disrupt school operations or invade the rights of others. "Substantial disruption" is a real threshold, not a synonym for controversy. The rights-of-others half is where targeted harassment lives, and it is less developed in the case law than the disruption half.

Off-campus speech. A school's authority over what students say off campus is diminished but not eliminated. Serious bullying or harassment aimed at particular individuals is the clearest case where it survives. The question that helps is not where the speech happened but whether it targeted an identifiable student and whether its effects arrived at school — and even where you cannot discipline, you can almost always respond.

Public comment. A board meeting is a limited public forum. You may enforce reasonable, viewpoint-neutral rules of decorum that were written in advance and apply to everyone. You may not cut a speaker off for their viewpoint. What you may always do is respond, once comment has closed.

Holocaust education in North Carolina. The state requires Holocaust and genocide education in middle and high school social studies. You are not deciding whether to teach it; you are deciding how well, and an incident of denial in your classrooms is a signal about the answer.

In development

A readiness audit — a self-assessment a leadership team can complete together, scored in the browser, printed, and stored nowhere — and a facilitated tabletop exercise built on the same scenarios as the action sheets. Neither is available yet.