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"Safe Schools/Healthy Students"
Winston-Salem, North Carolina
| Partners: | Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools Center Point Human Services Winston-Salem Police Department | |
Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools serve a student population that is 56% white and 43% minority, primarily African American, in a small urban community. Infant mortality for both whites and African Americans is substantially higher than in the rest of the State. Approximately 18% of children live at or below the poverty level. Since l994, violent crime rates for youth under 18 have been higher than the State and national levels, and each year more than half of all young offenders in the county have been arrested for violent and assault crimes. Drug arrests among county youth have doubled since l994. Other risk factors include unsafe neighborhoods, families in crisis, truancy, high suspension and drop out rates, and child abuse and neglect.
Forsyth Futures, comprised of leaders from a diverse group of mental health, education, social service, law enforcement and community service agencies, have pledged their support for this initiative. The initiative will benefit from the direct involvement of agency heads who have the institutional clout to change policies, commit agency resources, and direct agency staff to the achievement of the initiative's goals.
The initiative will use a comprehensive strategy, focusing primarily on elementary and middle school students and their families. A maternal home visitation program will be implemented with teenage mothers to improve prenatal care and early childhood development. Pre-K and kindergarten mental health services will be expanded to link young children to mental health services and to remedy or improve problem behaviors early on. Elementary students will be provided with an age-appropriate and grade-sequential curriculum that will cover topics such as problem-solving skills, violence prevention, school drop out issues, and character education. Parents will be offered training in violence prevention, communication, discipline, and problem-solving. The training will address methods of child management as an alternative to corporal punishment, and the content will be culturally tailored. A newsletter will be distributed to parents throughout the school year to provide additional information on how to address substance abuse and violence. Students in high juvenile crime neighborhoods will be offered after-school programs designed to increase the involvement of caregivers/parents in their children's education and to provide extended-day care during peak hours of juvenile crime. Teachers and administrators will receive training in bully prevention, anger management, and violence prevention, and will be provided with intervention and referral information. The number of full-time school resource officers at middle schools will be increased to help reduce truancy rates. Surveillance cameras will be installed in schools located in neighborhoods with high juvenile crime rates.
The initiative will be evaluated by the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools Safe Schools Healthy Student Initiative evaluation team.
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[Cleveland, Ohio]