Chapter 1: The Importance of School Safety & Violence Prevention
Introduction
Making School Safety a Priority
● Making School Safety a Priority - YouTube
● This video presents the issue of school safety as an expansive topic that includes
multiple areas of concern, and one that affects the whole community. There are a number of
effective ways for schools to improve safety and security of their students, staff, and facilities.
This video recommends three proven areas schools should focus on to further their school
safety efforts; including acquiring specialized training, utilizing customized resources, and
allowing for youth involvement. The Texas School Safety Center offers resources and services
to support all three of these areas which will aid in making school safety a priority.
● Involve youth in school safety discussions
About School Crime & Safety
● About School Crime and Safety | National Institute of Justice (ojp.gov)
● schools must cultivate a climate of respect, free of disruption, drugs, violence and
weapons.
● Educators have responded by implementing programs and adopting policies to address
issues of school safety and violence prevention.
● A growing body of evidence shows that violence prevention programs can help to reduce
opportunities for criminal behaviors and effectively instruct young people on other ways to
resolve conflict and express their feelings safely. Schools and communities can work together to
make these programs available and prevent violence before it occurs.
Chapter 1: Introduction to School Safety and Violence Prevention
Data on School Violence & Bullying
● Schools are generally safe places, despite media reports of rampant violence
● Single events are suggested to represent overall patterns which causes public
misperception
● Crime and school misbehavior generally declined since 1990, though increased in 2018
due to several major events
● Major reports are: Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), the National Crime Victimization
Survey (NCVS) and the Health Behavior in School Aged Children (HBSC)
Bullying
● In general, about 20% of high schoolers report having been bullied
● Being a victim of bullying is more likely for female students
● Bullying is more likely in middle than in high school
● About 15% of students reported being cyberbullied on 2013, also higher for females than
males
● White females report higher levels of electronic bullying than black and Hispanic females
● About 75% of students report experiencing some form of cyberbullying
Outcomes of School Violence & Bullying
● Students who experience school violence, disruption and bullying demonstrate
○ increased anxiety
○ Difficulties maintaining positive relationships
○ Social exclusion and loneliness
, ○ Reduced self-esteem
○ Increased risk for depression
○ Attention problems
○ Cognitive processing difficulties
○ Reduced motivation
○ Disengagement from learning activities
○ School avoidance
● Media draws attention to major severe events such as school shootings, but most harm
actually comes from low-level aggression and incivility in schools
● Perceptions of a safe school are closely tied to sense of connectedness, overall school
climate and experiences of incivility at school
● Victims of bullying experience elevated levels of depression, anxiety, social adjustment
difficulties and health problems compared to other students
● Victims of cyberbullying also show increased suicide ideation and suicide attempts,
lower academic performance, reduced school engagement
● Bullies have high risk of adult transition problems and criminal justice system
involvement
● Linkage between incivility & experiences at school and harmful outcomes for students
● Bully-victim: experience multiple types of psychological problems
What is a Transdisciplinary Approach?
● Cross-disciplinary: considering work from the viewpoint of another discipline
● Interdisciplinary: Collaboration between disciplines
● Transdisciplinary: a higher level of synthesis across disciplines, transcending discipline
specific views. (can yield benefits that may be unobtainable through a more narrowly defined
singular theoretical orientation) Approaches (frameworks) here include:
○ Cognitive/social-ecological: Psychological and environmental
○ Developmental: Human developmental stages over time
○ Behavioral: The way that a person or group of people will react to a certain situation
based on factors in the environment.
○ Public health: School safety/violence as a public health issues
○ Multicultural: Impact of culture on events, behavior, thought patterns, actions
○ Life-course: An integrated continuum where biological, behavioral, psychological, social
and environmental factors interact to shape outcomes across the course of a person’s life.
○ Educational: The impact of educational systems, structures, curriculum, administration,
management, academic requirements
○ Legal/Justice: The role of the justice system in preventing and responding to issues of
school crime, violence & safety
Logic Models & Theories of Change
● LOGIC MODELS: Charts that include data on intervention inputs, activities, outputs to
theoretically predict short, immediate and long-term outputs.
● THEORIES OF CHANGE: Detailed and nuanced predictions to explain how and why
change is expected to happen by understanding assumptions and indicators to help determine
whether, and to what degree, certain components are likely to affect outcomes
● A transdisciplinary approach can leverage different theoretical models
,Bridging Research, Policy, & Practice
● Research, policy and practice are all necessary for effective change (17 year gap) ○
Due to the gap, ineffective policies are used, like with students with disabilities
● Glasgow and Emmons (2007) call for the need for translational research, transporting
evidence-based tools and methods to the real world of practice in naturally occurring settings,
apple to authentic populations and local contextual factors
● Intersection can be bound by historical, political, financial, and institutional factors
● These components are often loosely aligned and resistant to efforts to function
integratively to produce change
● Disciplinary silos inhibit transdisciplinary progress (reaching across disciplines, rather
than in one area only, such as psychology, sociology, public administration, public health,
criminology and so on)
● Individual academic disciplines can allow deep investigation into focused phenomena,
but limit ability to see more complex factors that can explain human conditions
● Public policy may allow insufficient time to consider research that would create most
effective and efficient practice, creating a “research to practice gap”
● As a result, practices may be outdated, ineffective or impractical (eg, “zero-tolerance”
policies)
● MULTIPLE BARRIERS FOR DEVELOPING EFFECTIVE PRACTICE FROM
RESEARCH:
○ A.Intervention characteristics (resources, insufficient time, money, necessary training,
competing initiatives, user resistance, resistance to sustainability)
○ B.Situation of intended target settings (competing program demands, program imposed
from outside with limited knowledge of inside conditions or culture, financial/organizational
instability, client needs)
○ C.Research design (limited relevancy to clients/settings, limited evaluation of cost,
implementation and maintenance)
○ D.Intersections between and among all these areas
Goals of the Text
● Leverage a transdisciplinary base linking research to practice and policy
● Frame key issues and challenges that have impact and relevance across stakeholder
groups
● Stress collaborate health promotion and prevention and Pre-K intervention approaches
● Focusing mainly on school related issues for pre-K-12
● Using data effectively
● Understanding tensions and tradeoffs for addressing structural and systemic barriers to
success
● Critique and assess trends in school safety and youth violence.
● Understand the importance of school culture, climate and discipline on school
misbehavior, crime and violence.
● Identify how schools interact with the justice system that directly affect the degree to
which schools are seen as safe learning environments.
, ● Develop knowledge to critically evaluate various crime data, policies, and explanations to
better understand the concept of violence in schools and public policies that attempt to deal with
that problem
● This text can be valuable across school psychology, counseling, school leadership
teams, school administration at the local and state levels, human services agency
administrators and staff at the local and state levels, and executive legislation and judicial
branch officials at the local and state levels
Other Articles:
A look at the dangers posed to students by law enforcement and how to invest in real safety for
our nation’s children
● resrep27072.3.pdf (jstor.org)
● As the movement for racial justice forces a reckoning on police brutality, school districts
across the country are reconsidering the place of police in our schools
● School Resource Officers, or SROs, are sworn-in police officers who are assigned to
patrol the hallways of schools and have the capacity to both arrest and use force on students
○ their policing has disproportionately targeted low-income Black and brown
students, LGBTQ+ students, and students with disabilities
■ Black students, who represented 15.4% of all enrollment in the 201, were
40.6% of those suspensions
○ This has been increasing the frequency at which students are funneled from schools to
prisons
○ any proposal to terminate a school’s contract with the police will likely be met with
pushback from local police unions
○ studies on the effects of these stringent security measures have found no evidence that
policing in schools is effective in preventing school violence or
increasing student safety, yet there is substantial evidence to suggest that the presence of
SROs harms students’ development
○ Students can be benefited by disinvesting in policing and criminalization and instead
investing in critical social, emotional and academic supports
○ states should proceed to move cops out of schools entirely. Instead, psychologists,
guidance counselors, and social workers can be added to schools
○ nearly 60 percent of all schools and 90 percent of high schools now have a law
enforcement officer at least part time
How Safe Are Our Schools?
● How Safe Are Our Schools? | American Institutes for Research (air.org)
● It turns out that highly publicized school attacks and media reports of school violence
skew the picture of how safe our nation’s schools really are
● overall national level data show that schools are safer today than they were in the early
nineties
○ the percentage of youth homicides occurring at schools remained at less than 2 percent
of the total number of youth homicides over all available survey years (1992–93 to 2010–11)
○ Data also shows that students are carrying less weapons
● Students’ reports of being afraid of attack or harm at school are collected through the
School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey.
