Efforts to enhance school safety must involve students at an early age and be reinforced throughout their education. Many communities have reduced school crime, violence, and substance abuse by developing comprehensive safe school plans that are integrated into the overall school improvement process.

As noted in Safeguarding Our Children: An Action Guide (Dwyer and Osher, 2000:2):

Schools that have comprehensive violence prevention and response plans in place, plus teams to design and implement those plans, report the following positive results:

• Improved academics.
• Reduced disciplinary referrals and suspensions.
• Improved school climate that is more conducive to learning.
• Better staff morale.
• More efficient use of human and financial resources.
• Enhanced safety.

Numerous risk factors beyond the control of educators affect school safety. A child's home environment, for example, has a profound influence on the manner in which he or she interacts with the surrounding world.

Although certain risk factors for violence exist outside the purview of schools, schools can lessen their impact and avoid exacerbating them. When schools foster resilience, students are empowered to overcome risk factors that could lead them into making dangerous choices. And when schools enhance protective factors, they offer youth the ability and opportunity to redirect their energies toward achieving success.¹

Essential Components of Safe School Planning

Although some may perceive schools as dangerous, schools remain the safest place for a child to be (U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Justice, 2000). Schools must ensure the safety and security of students by adopting a comprehensive approach to addressing school safety that focuses on prevention, intervention, and response planning. Staff, students, and parents must be able to better identify the early warning signs of violence and respond in a timely manner to protect students and teachers from potential danger.

Isolating individual factors that contribute to school safety can be a difficult challenge for even the most skilled analyst. Safe schools are typically the result of numerous interrelated and collaborative efforts guided by a variety of stakeholders. The National Resource Center for Safe Schools has identified several components that are essential for creating safe schools.² When effectively implemented, these components provide a school with the foundation and building blocks needed to ensure a safe learning environment. The following are 10 essential components of safe school planning:

• Creating schoolwide prevention and intervention strategies.
• Developing emergency response planning.
• Developing school policies and understanding legal considerations.
• Creating a positive school climate and culture.
• Implementing ongoing staff development.
• Ensuring quality facilities and technology.
• Fostering school/law enforcement partnerships.
• Instituting links with mental health/social services.
• Fostering family and community involvement.
• Acquiring and utilizing resources.

Developing School/Community Partnerships

School/community partnerships are the key to building safe schools and communities. Students, teachers, parents, law enforcement officials, and civic and business leaders have important roles to play in reducing school violence and improving the learning environment. The ways in which schools and communities can collaborate are limitless, and they should be tailored to respond to the needs of each partner.

The following examples are school/community partnerships that involve Safe Schools/Healthy Students grants:

• In Colorado, Denver public schools have hired school safety officers and promoted effective communication between the school district and the Denver Police Department. They have established community/school assistance teams and hired quadrant liaisons who provide training and technical assistance to schools, families, community members, and collaborating agency staff. The training and technical assistance address the mental health and social behavior needs of students and their families. In addition, a council—comprising representatives from Denver public schools, the Mental Health Corporation of Denver, the Denver Police Department, two parent representatives, the Mayor's Office, the Denver Juvenile Probation Department, and other organizations—is responsible for coordinating the initiative.

• Polk County, Iowa, developed an action plan designed to enhance the quality of life of its youth. The plan was created by 100 individuals representing more than 50 organizations. Through this initiative, violence and the use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs will be targeted by developing a comprehensive drug and violence prevention curriculum and by increasing parental involvement. Comprehensive mental health and social services to parents and families are provided through school-based intensive case management services, mental health clinician services, drug and violence prevention programming, a school transitioning program, and Parents as Teachers programming.³

Once effective community collaboration has been established, schools can begin a comprehensive needs assessment to gather the data necessary to make informed decisions and institute change. Because most schools have limited resources, prioritizing needs is essential. A needs assessment will point out the nature and extent of problems, identify existing efforts and activities, and help establish the school's priorities. Crucial steps in conducting a needs assessment include the following:

• Creating a planning team. The team should include all the stakeholders: administrators, teachers, staff, parents, students, and community members.

• Collecting data. Schools can collect data using a variety of means, including community forums, surveys, and questionnaires. Social indicators are another important source of data and are typically drawn from descriptive statistics found in public records and reports. At the school level, this type of data usually includes incidence reports, suspensions or expulsions for violence, substance abuse statistics, and possession of weapons. At the community level, indicators are sociodemographic characteristics of a community's population and social behavior as related to crime, substance abuse, and other factors. Often, much of this data has already been collected.

• Developing a school/community profile. A school/community profile describes a school's community, facility, staff, students, programs, policies, culture, and milieu. A profile will also point out the strengths and challenges of a particular school and substitute facts for hypotheses. Profiles give educators a means to assess the value of their activities and to identify necessary changes. Through the profiling process, diverse viewpoints held by school and community members are shared, acknowledged, and understood. Finally, profiles establish a baseline for improvement efforts. Schools and communities that use data to inform decisions are more likely to use their resources effectively.

After the school/community profile has been completed and the challenges facing a school have been identified through data analysis, the planning team can begin to prioritize problems and designate goals and measurable objectives that address the school's needs. In prioritizing the problems the plan will address, the planning team should focus on schoolwide prevention and interventions, especially those for targeted students. This comprehensive safe school plan must become an integral part of the school improvement process. For example, after looking at the data and school profile, the team may determine that bullying and harassment are problems. In addition, data may show that discipline problems in the school are more prevalent among boys than among girls, and surveys could indicate that parents underestimate the degree of violence at school.

After the planning team has identified the problems, it should draft a general goal statement to serve as a focal point for prevention and intervention efforts: for example, "For the next 3 years, Golden Valley Elementary School will create a respectful, peaceful, and disciplined environment." Once the goal has been established, the team must determine measurable objectives. An objective could be measured by using data captured in the school profile as benchmarks. In the example above, a measurable objective could be to reduce the incidence of bullying and harassment over the next year by 25 percent as determined by school-administered student surveys. Goals and objectives should incorporate the 10 essential components of a comprehensive safe school plan previously noted.

Identifying Strategies and Implementing Programs

The next step in the process is to identify strategies and programs that effectively address the specific needs of students and their families. A program's popularity or the availability of funds to implement it is an inadequate criterion for selecting a program. Educators should take sufficient time to adequately research proposed initiatives, visiting schools implementing similar efforts and thoroughly familiarizing themselves with new strategies. Slow, steady progress is the recipe for sustained success. Staff buy-in is another essential ingredient, for if teachers are not in favor of proposed change, success will be unlikely. Buy-in can be advanced by involving staff in the planning and implementation of the comprehensive safe school plan. In addition, throughout the selection, training, and implementation process, schools must monitor and evaluate a program's effectiveness, modifying it as needed to better address their particular needs.

Comprehensive plans need to be developed at all levels of implementation. Schoolwide primary prevention strategies promote academic success and emotional/social skills development in a positive climate. Dispute resolution is an example of such a strategy. Training staff and students to identify and resolve disputes often results in a reduction in fighting.

Targeted early interventions should create services that address risk factors and build protective factors for students at risk of developing academic and behavior difficulties. Such interventions can include tutoring, instruction in problem solving, and conflict resolution provided by counseling and mental health staff. Another potential intervention is mentoring, which has been identified as effective in preventing problem behaviors and has a positive effect on most youth (e.g., improving their academic performance and their sense of self-worth).

Intensive interventions provide child- and family-focused services that are coordinated, comprehensive, sustained, and culturally appropriate. These services can include home visits, mental health services, and social services. The Multisystemic Therapy Program, for example, is an intensive family- and community-based treatment effort that addresses the multiple determinants of serious antisocial behavior in juvenile offenders (Henggeler, 1997). The multisystemic approach views individuals as being nested within a complex network of interconnected systems that encompass individual, family, and extrafamilial (peer, school, neighborhood) factors. Intervention may be required in any one or a combination of these systems.

Evaluating the Program and Sharing Outcomes

Once a program or strategy has been implemented, the process of comprehensive safe school planning is still not complete. Evaluating program results should be a crucial component of every plan. Evaluation consists of five steps:

• Focusing the evaluation.
• Designing the evaluation.
• Collecting the information.
• Analyzing the information.
• Reporting the findings.

The goals of evaluation are to inform schools about what is and is not working so that they modify their plans accordingly. Once the goals of the evaluation have been established, the planning team must determine what questions should be addressed and which performance indicators should be used. The team must also decide who will manage the evaluation and how the data will be collected, analyzed, and interpreted. The data must then be collected and analyzed and the findings reported in a manner that will facilitate their use. Upon completion of the evaluation, the comprehensive safe school plan should be reviewed in light of its findings and modified accordingly.

Characteristics of a Safe School1 Focuses on academic achievement. Involves families in meaningful ways. Develops links to the community. Emphasizes positive relationships among students and staff. Discusses safety issues openly. Treats students with respect. Creates ways for students to share their concerns. Helps children feel safe expressing their feelings. Has a system to refer children who have been abused or neglected. Offers extended day programs for children. Promotes good citizenship and character. Identifies problems and assesses progress toward resolving them. Supports students in making the transition to adult life and work. 1 Adapted from Dwyer and Osher, 2000.

Evaluation helps foster accountability, determine whether programs have made a difference, and provide personnel with the information necessary to improve service delivery. Most important, evaluation can identify whether the implemented program has had any impact on participants' knowledge, attitudes, and actions regarding violence, anger, and other targeted behavior. When integrated into the fabric of a program, evaluation can be an important tool in improving the program's quality. The two principal types of evaluation are process and outcome evaluations:

• Process evaluation analyzes program implementation, describing the interaction of components and their relationship to outcomes. For example, program staff might systemically review the curriculum to determine whether it adequately addresses the behaviors that the program seeks to influence. A program administrator might observe prevention specialists using the program, write a descriptive account of how the students respond, and provide feedback to instructors.

  Evaluating the progress of a program's implementation assists the planning team in determining if program goals are being met. For example, after a new safe school policy has been adopted, how is it enforced? If the policy mandates parent conferences for all first infractions and suspensions for subsequent infractions, is the policy effective? If not, why? What would be one way to achieve better enforcement? Establishing the nature and extent of program implementation is an important first step in studying program outcomes.

• Outcome evaluation studies the direct effects of the program on its participants. For example, after attending a 10-session program aimed at teaching anger management, can the participants demonstrate the skills successfully? The scope of an outcome evaluation can extend beyond knowledge and attitudes. It also examines the impact of the program on reducing aggressive behavior.

Communities across the Nation are beginning to take proactive approaches to reducing youth violence in schools. While many school districts are mandating the formulation of safe school plans, schools must go beyond merely creating crisis response plans, which do little to prevent violence. Schools that understand the complexity of youth violence and the steps necessary to address it effectively are developing comprehensive safe school plans that require collaboration among community agencies. They are gathering data and using that data to shape planning and implementation decisions to target specific needs. Recognizing the need to go beyond single-focus responses, they are developing primary prevention plans that begin in kindergarten and are reinforced across grade levels. Comprehensive safe school plans support the development of social skills (e.g., conflict resolution) and a school environment that helps students manage anger, solve problems, and treat others with respect. Such plans also provide the intensive interventions needed by youth at particular risk for violence.

Unfortunately, comprehensive safe school planning will not ensure the elimination of every act of violence on every school campus. Schools that engage in such planning and implement their plans effectively, however, are more likely to foster safe environments for their students and teachers.

Resources

ACCESS ERIC. 2000. School Safety: A Collaborative Effort (Special Issue). The ERIC Review (7)1. Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement.

Hamilton Fish Institute. 2000. Effective Violence Prevention Programs. Washington, DC: Hamilton Fish Institute.

McGill, D.E. 1997. Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. Boulder, CO: Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, University of Colorado at Boulder, Institute of Behavioral Science.

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. 1996. Creating Safe and Drug-Free Schools: An Action Guide. Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Notes

¹ Protective factors include caring and support (especially the presence of a caring adult), positive expectations, opportunities for involvement and participation in school and community life, and respect for culture, language, and heritage.

² Funded by OJJDP, the National Resource Center for Safe Schools at Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Portland, OR, assists schools and communities in creating and maintaining safe learning environments free of crime and violence. The Center supports the development of comprehensive safe school plans within the context of school improvement efforts. For further information, visit the Center's Web site at www.safetyzone.org or call 800-268-2275.

³ For additional examples of school/community partnerships, see U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Justice, 2000.

References

Dwyer, K., and Osher, D. 2000. Safeguarding Our Children: An Action Guide. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Justice, and American Institutes for Research.

Henggeler, S.W. 1997. Treating Serious Anti-Social Behavior in Youth: The MST Approach. Bulletin. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Justice. 2000. 2000 Annual Report on School Safety. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Justice.