Schools looking for ways to stop violence before it starts
Spencer
Counselor Dianne Shewmaker worries about an Owen Valley Middle School student who has premonitions of her classmates being gunned down at school.
"She sees the faces of her friends after they've been killed," Shewmaker. "I was concerned because she was absent the day the students in California were shot. I thought she might be afraid to come to school."
Area educators and researchers say schools are one of the safest places for children despite rising fears caused by incidents such as the one in which 15 people, most of them students, were shot by a classmate in Santee, Cal., March 5.
Two students died in that shooting, but national studies show that less than 1 percent of homicides on children are school-related and the frequency of violent deaths at schools has not increased in the past decade.
Safe schools researcher Russell Skiba of Indiana University said the perception of increasing violence in schools is created by a few highly publicized tragedies and by uncivil school environments, where verbal abuse, harassment, bullying and minor fights are common.
To address these problems and reduce the likelihood of school shootings, Skiba is working with three schools in Spencer and two in Ellettsville to develop safety strategies that will be shared with schools throughout the country.
"If you walk into a school where this incivility is going on, you're not going to feel safe," Skiba said. "Maybe there's too much attention on the big incidents. The place to start is with what happens on a daily basis."
Skiba says one of the keys to improving behavior in schools is to change the ways schools punish students for improper conduct. He shares the view of many teachers that suspensions and expulsions are not effective in discouraging students from repeating negative behaviors.
Skiba said 96 percent of all suspensions in Indiana are for general disruption of school, not serious or dangerous behavior. Overuse of school suspensions has the short-term benefit of getting troublesome students out of schools temporarily. However, suspensions lead to more bad behavior and dropouts in the long run, he said.
Teacher Mary Lou Fretz said Owen Valley High School has experienced increasing numbers of student discipline referrals in recent years because many students don't fear such traditional punishments as being sent to the office or suspended.
Students agree. They say serious insults of other students and minor fights are an everyday occurrence.
John Goodall, an Owen Valley Middle School eighth-grader, said some students try to impress their classmates by being sent to the office.
"They think it's funny," Goodall said. "They kick back while they're waiting at the office to show you they're not worried. And their parents don't care what they do. What those students are thinking about is what they're going to do to the person who got them in trouble."
Skiba, director of Indiana University's Institute for Child Study, and Professor Reece Peterson from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, are heading up a three-year study that began last year, assessing violence prevention methods.
The "Safe and Responsive Schools" study is funded by the U.S. Department of Education and includes five schools in Nebraska and five in Indiana — Edgewood High School, Edgewood Junior High, Owen Valley High School, Owen Valley Middle School and McCormick's Creek Elementary.
Teachers at the five Richland-Bean Blossom and Spencer-Owen community schools worked with parents and students last year to determine needs in making each school more safe and civil. "We found that if schools have the time and facilitation efforts, there is tremendous creativity among teachers," Skiba said. "They can solve their own school's problems."
This year, the schools are implementing the initiatives they planned last year. These range from prevention programs that teach elementary students to treat each other well to intervention programs that aim to keep problem behaviors from becoming ongoing situations.
Teachers and administrators at the participating schools say the initiatives have demonstrated significant promise for ongoing reductions in behavior problems, and in some cases have already reduced the number of students being disciplined.
"Our numbers of students in fights and other violent problems are down," said Shane Killinger, assistant principal at Edgewood Junior High School. "The student problems I see this year are non-violent problems such as tardies."
The schools have designed their violence prevention programs so they will continue after the three-year federal grant ends next year. Skiba will be responsible for production of a manual, based on the experiences of the Indiana and Nebraska schools, that identifies "what works best." The project will add urban Indiana schools next year to offer a more diverse base of experience.
Skiba said he is confident the approach taken by the schools in his project will prove more effective than schools that have invested in metal detectors and adopted "zero tolerance" approaches, which involve aggressive policies for suspending and expelling students.
"Some schools are really making the attempt to do something that will improve behavior and reduce the likelihood of having angry, alienated students," Skiba said. "Others are just digging in harder with harsh, quick-fix policies for which we can't find any evidence they're working."
03/19/01