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Annual Report on School Safety--October 1998
The recent school shootings have drawn heightened public attention to school crime and safety. Unfortunately, public perceptions of school safety are often fueled by media accounts that play up sensational events and fail to provide a real understanding of the accomplishments of schools or the problems they face. The heightened public attention does provide an opportunity to closely examine what is happening in schools today. As we learn more, we can use that knowledge to fashion rational policies and strategies for preventing crime and increasing school safety.
Assessing the safety of our schools, on both national and local levels, is a complex undertaking. This report brings together, in one document, critical information gleaned from numerous surveys and reports. While we do not know as much about threats to school safety as we might like, this document is a starting point from which an initial assessment of school safety emerges. As more schools and jurisdictions collect data on school crime and safety issues, we will be able to eliminate information gaps. Readers should note that this report specifically addresses intentional injuries and crimes against students and teachers. School-related accidents and unintentional injuries, which far exceed the amount of school crime, were purposely excluded.
The first section of this chapter presents national data on school crime and youth violence. Data on specific school policies and practices designed to increase school safety follow. The chapter concludes with selected data for individual States and localities.
| Data used in this chapter are drawn from several different studies conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Center for Health Statistics, and the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan. A complete list of the studies is included in the References section of this report. All studies used nationally representative samples, except for the data source on school-associated violent deaths, which tracked all school-associated violent deaths in the country. Data sources for the different studies varied. Some surveyed different populations of students, another surveyed teachers and yet another surveyed schools. Definitions of crime, age groups analyzed and time periods can vary from indicator to indicator. The reader should also note that definitions can vary across studies. For example, "at school" and "away from school" may have different meanings, depending upon the study. The same is true for urbanicity ("urban," "rural," "suburban"). For a more complete understanding of the data in this report, see Indicators of School Crime and Safety, 1998, or the original studies, listed in the References section. |
[A National Perspective]