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Annual Report on School Safety--October 1998
For the majority of American children, schools offer safe environments. All too frequently, however, community violence spills over into the schools. The result is a compromised learning environment that endangers students and teachers. Many communities are successfully reducing school crime and violence by adopting a strategy that takes into account the specific safety problem experienced by the school and then identifies an appropriate intervention. This problem-solving approach requires that stakeholders in the community collaborate to develop and implement a comprehensive school safety plan. This plan reflects the needs of the community and employs the best programs and strategies to meet those needs. Schools, parents, business leaders, law enforcement and juvenile justice agencies, community organizations, students, elected officials, and government agencies play an important part in preparing a comprehensive plan.
This chapter presents steps for developing and implementing a comprehensive school safety plan: (1) establish school-community partnerships; (2) identify and measure the problem; (3) set measurable goals and objectives; (4) identify appropriate programs and strategies; (5) implement the comprehensive plan; (6) evaluate the plan; and (7) revise the plan on the basis of the evaluation.
This chapter also describes what schools, students, parents, police and juvenile justice authorities, businesses, and elected officials and government agencies can do to ensure the plan's success. Preparing a comprehensive school safety plan is a complex process that does not end with development and implementation. It requires the stakeholders to continue to work together, overcome barriers, monitor their progress, and evaluate the effectiveness of their strategy. These efforts can achieve improvements to the plan that will promote success.
These recommendations are derived from reports provided by school staff and their program evaluators, other guides that summarize violence prevention experiences, and nationwide survey data. Reports from schools have been compared to identify actions that have been effective in diverse settings and can be taken by schools across the Nation. Several prevention and intervention guides were examined, and two were particularly useful: Early Warning, Timely Response: A Guide to Safe Schools by the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice (1998); and Creating Safe and Drug-Free Schools: An Action Guide by the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (1996). The recommendations have also been influenced by conversations with teachers, parents, students, and other community members. Risk and protective factors that can be addressed through prevention were derived from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the Monitoring the Future Study, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, and the School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey. |
[What Communities Can Do]