Contents

Introduction
Facts about Young Worker Safety and Health
Steps in Coordinating a Young Worker Project
Forming Partnerships with Schools
Developing Teen Peer Education Programs
Involving Parents
Linking with Job Training Programs
Including Healthcare Providers
Working With Employers
Reaching the Broader Community
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C

Forming Partnerships with Schools

Working with Community Partners

This section is organized according to the groups in a community that have a role in protecting young workers, such as schools, employers, and job trainers. For all of the groups, we have provided reasons for their involvement and strategies for working with them. We have also included many examples from our projects.

Please keep in mind that this section provides ideas for a broad array of groups and activities so that you have a variety from which to choose. We are not suggesting that you need to reach all of these groups or undertake all of these activities to be successful. Instead, we recommend that you begin with the one or two groups and activities that best fit your community.

Why should schools be partners?

Schools can be important allies in your work with teens. Schools have a direct responsibility to ensure the safety of teens in vocational education and school-to-career programs and an indirect responsibility to prepare students for adult life. Young people are better prepared for their adult work lives when they understand their workplace rights and responsibilities and can learn how to apply them productively. Also, because working too many hours can affect a student's school performance, educators are often interested in teen work.

Reaching out to schools in your community

Identify existing work-related programs.

Your goal is to integrate materials and information about occupational safety and health into the school's ongoing curriculum and activities. Meet with administrators, school-to-work staff, and guidance staff to point out how safety and health training meets school-to-work requirements and other State and local mandates. Meet with teachers, especially those involved in career-related classes and programs and core academic subjects. Find out how they currently address workplace safety issues and elicit their cooperation and ideas for new initiatives.

Raise awareness of the issue.

Staff and students are often not aware of the extent of workplace injuries and their impact on young workers. In addition to distributing materials, you can conduct surveys about the kinds of work students do, whether they have been injured, and what they know about workplace safety and health. Then provide this information to the school community along with personal stories of injured workers and State and national statistics.

Offer workshops and ready-to-use curricula ideas.

Teachers often want background information on teen safety and health issues, as well as tools they can use to integrate this information into their existing curriculum. Workshops that provide "ready-to-use" safety and health curriculum adaptable to core subjects like English, science, social studies, and vocational education will assist teachers in teaching the topic (see Project Resources).

Develop strategies for integrating materials and information into existing programs and classes, such as the following:

UCLA-LOSH develops a safety and health curriculum for Jefferson High School

After meeting with the teachers at the high school, we learned that all 9th graders are required to take an Education and Career Planning (ECP) class, but the teachers felt that the curriculum they were using was out of date and not interesting to the students. So we collaborated with the teachers to develop a 2-week unit for the class that includes information about safety and health, laws about child labor, sexual harassment, and workers' compensation. The unit is participatory, engaging students with case studies, videos, and role-play activities to help them identify risks and speak up on the job in productive ways. "We were looking for a curriculum that is relevant and engaging for the students," explains Ceci Grakal, an ECP teacher and work experience coordinator at the high school. "Too often, teens don't know what to do when faced with safety and health problems at work. This unit teaches them how to talk to other people about problems."

 Academic classes—Many classroom teachers are concerned about the safety and health of their students and are willing to integrate relevant materials into their curricula. In fact, occupational safety and health can be effectively integrated into science, social studies, English, health, and other academic classes.

 Peer-led education—Training teens to teach other teens about occupational safety and health is one of the most effective and rewarding methods of sharing information. See detailed information on peer education programs in the "Developing Teen Peer Education Programs" part of this section.

 Work experience programs—Many schools have work experience programs that allow students to receive academic credit for work outside school. The programs offer an ideal context for skills-based instruction on workplace safety and health hazards, students' workplace rights and responsibilities, and communicating effectively with employers.

Work Experience Coordinators Teach Safety and Health

UC, Berkeley-LOHP conducted a survey of work experience coordinators in high schools throughout California. The following are their suggestions for how work experience coordinators can help protect young workers:

• Inform employers about child labor laws
• Check job sites for safety records, training programs, etc.
• Use revocation of work permits as leverage with employers
• Report and follow up on unsafe conditions
• Give information about job safety and health to parents
• Have students look for hazards on the job and report these in class
• Provide students with fact sheets on their safety and health rights, child labor laws, protection against sexual harassment, and what to do if they are injured

In Brockton, the school district office processes work permit applications for teens. We discovered that the staff at the superintendent's office were passing out old brochures on child labor laws with the work permit applications, but they were interested in finding more up-to-date and attractive materials to distribute. In consultation with the work permit office, we developed brochures for teens and parents explaining the child labor laws and included information on safety and health. Now every teen applying for a work permit receives these two brochures (see p. 14).

—Robin Dewey

Steps in Coordinating A Young Worker Project

Developing Teen Peer Education Programs