What’s In: Handheld communications and data storage gadgetry. Community antiviolence summits. Biometric recognition. Increased training and certification for school resource officers. “Shelter in place.” Arts-based prevention intervention. Conflict-resolution skills development. School crisis planning. “Online social cruelty.” Truancy focus. Antibullying laws. Risk management analysis.
What’s Out: Videotape recording surveillance systems. Zero-tolerance policies. Referring all troubled students to family court. “Old-fashioned” suspensions.
These lists show how rapidly the school safety field has evolved over the past decade. Theories deemed cutting edge five years ago have been replaced -- sometimes two or three times -- by new programs and approaches designed to combat fighting, bullying, and behavioral issues that arise in schools every day.
For administrators and board members, keeping up with these rapid changes in the field of school safety remains a constant challenge -- one that is complicated by budget cuts that curtail investments in the latest technology, training, and staff.
But some news shows that these school safety efforts are working. Violent crime against students in schools fell 50 percent between 1992 and 2002, according to “Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2004,” a joint report from the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The report, released in November 2004, indicates that young people ages 5 to 19 were at least 70 times more likely to be murdered away from school than at school.
Still, six years after two students murdered 13 people at Colorado’s Columbine High School, school boards and administrators are faced with daily questions about safety and security. Given the pace at which things are changing, schools are finding that technology is helpful, but only to a point. To ensure safe schools, you also have to collaborate, motivate, and innovate.
The power of collaboration
Beyond choosing a curriculum to improve school climate, hiring an expensive safety consultant to provide staff training, or purchasing labor intensive surveillance equipment, collaboration -- between school and home and between schools themselves -- remains the most effective way to address safety issues.
In 2002, the Department of Education reviewed 19 types of violence-prevention activities in schools and found that too many programs “do not meet minimal quality criteria along a number of basic characteristics, including financial support, frequency of participation by students, and monitoring and evaluation.”
The same report listed common characteristics of what it called “low disorder schools.” Instead of simply reacting to problems, these schools “worked to ensure that problem behavior did not occur or that small problems did not escalate.” Characteristics of these schools include strong principals, staff members who believe they work together as a team, and teachers who are actively involved in maintaining order both inside and outside the classroom. In addition, the report said, the relationships among students, teachers, and administrators in these schools are generally positive and characterized by respect and collegiality.
The team concept that works inside the school works outside as well. In a number of cases, schools and districts are partnering effectively to confront disorder and discipline challenges, even across urban-rural boundaries.
One example is Indiana’s Allen County School Safety Commission. The 27-member group is made up of county public school corporations, or districts, as well as private schools, area colleges, and local law enforcement and emergency agencies. The group began with a meager $2,000 in funding from a state program created just a few months after the Columbine shootings in 1999. It has focused on the one thing its leader says is crucial to solving problems such as school violence: relationships.
“We have created what I think is an excellent level of coordination between schools and responding agencies here that simply did not exist before,” says Anita Gross, the commission’s chair and a clinical social worker for Southwest Allen County Schools. “We have so many local experts right here at home -- people we had never sat down with before.”
Gross says the agencies have pooled funds to pay for shared staff training and stayed in touch with each other to learn what works and what doesn’t. All the agencies have learned one important lesson: They have access to a large number of valuable resources right in their own communities.
Allen County includes rural, suburban, and urban schools. Gross says working together in a countywide school safety organization allows them all to learn from each other, regardless of demographics or neighborhood.
To help emergency responders, the commission installed large, standardized numbers near the entrances to schools across Allen County. The numbers, which can easily be seen from the street, help the responders know which door they are entering. A software program, also purchased by the commission, gives first responders fast access to photos, diagrams, and a myriad of other campus features and information.
In 2003, commission members also established student safety councils at many of Allen County’s schools. Today, however, the commission’s larger focus is on building connections among its members and seeking funding to pay for future proj- ects. The commission recently received a $333,000 Emergency Response and Crisis Management grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
“You have to have people in schools and law enforcement and emergency responder personnel who trust each other, who can pick up the phone and be honest with each other on some sensitive stuff,” says John Weicker, security director for the Fort Wayne Community Schools, an urban school district and Allen County’s largest, with 46,000 students. “You don’t have that in a lot of places.”
Motivate and communicate
A good defense against problems like school violence is to get people talking about the issue. When that doesn’t happen, situations can escalate. Bullying is a case in point.
Thirty-two states have passed school safety legislation relating to bullying. That development points to another trend: public backlash against the escalating burden of legal worries and responsibilities schools must endure.
“Students now typically invoke a set of legal rights and entitlements in cases that largely involve school violence, weapons, drugs, and general misbehavior,” says Richard Arum, a sociologist at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education.
According to Arum, students and their parents are challenging “even minor school discipline, such as after-school ‘double detention,’ in-class time outs, lowered grades, and exclusion from weekend basketball games.” In states such as California and New York, he says, school discipline and student socialization “have been hampered even more” by student rights’ advocates and the courts.
Arum says the rights advocates are doing students no favors -- particularly students in high-crime neighborhoods. But metal detectors and court intervention are not the solutions Arum advocates.
Instead, he says, schools should admit that student alienation exists and seriously work to engage students through large-scale curriculum reform. If school is boring, disorder will flourish, he says. Arum also calls for legal reform. Courts should get out of the business of deciding day-to-day discipline concerns at school, he says. Such decisions should be left to school administrators.
While school crime reporting remains an issue, some districts are working hard to better inform their communities about safety issues. The Chicago Public Schools, for instance, hosted a glitzy antiviolence teen summit this past November. Present were 250 students from 40 CPS schools, along with civic leaders, educators, motivational speakers, and youth violence experts. The event also was beamed via videoconference to three other schools and to Chicago State University.
“The best way to attack these problems is to get our students talking about them and to let them know that they have the power to change things,” says Michael W. Scott, president of the Chicago Board of Education. “The summit is an excellent way to use technology to bring students together in an academic setting to discuss these important issues in their lives.”
