Preventing violence in public schools has been Sandy Hook Promise co-founder and CEO Nicole Hockley's mission since 2012, when her son Dylan was among the 20 children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. She and the team at Sandy Hook Promise are now a leading voice on making schools safer places and providing mental health support for students by focusing on “upstream violence prevention.”

“It’s really about how do you help someone months, weeks or even years before they ever reach the point of thinking about hurting themselves or hurting someone else,” Hockley says on the latest episode of District Administration‘s “Talking Out of School” podcast (listen below).

“We teach students across the country to recognize the signs of someone who needs help … who is potentially on this long spectrum of violence that we know escalates over time,” she explains.