Prevention
Community Matters
This morning I participated in an excellent webinar conducted by a non-profit organization called Community Matters. If I could wave a magic wand and distribute a one-hour message to our legislators, educators, administrators, and news media, it would be the ideas and recommendations summarized by the organizers of this webinar. They emphasize that current violence prevention efforts in schools have largely failed our youth because they have relied too narrowly on external security measures (metal detectors, security guards, surveillance cameras, etc.) and have not paid enough attention to the interpersonal climates within schools. School communities need greater support in enhancing their social and emotional climates. The full report and additional details are provided on the organization’s website: http://www.community-matters.org
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Ten Years after Columbine
Welcome to this blog, posted ten years to the day after the Columbine tragedy – an event that changed my life and my focus in research.
On April 20th, 1999, as a first year graduate student at University of Michigan, I was on the verge of quitting school, frustrated by what I considered a disconnect between educational research and the real world. That morning was my third day in attendance of a national educational research conference (ironically, I left a session on academic achievement motivation, determined that I should quit graduate school.)
Returning to my hotel room, I turned the TV on to the first scenes of breaking news at Columbine. In horror, I watched and cried, in disbelief that such an event could have possibly occurred. I searched the conference program to pull any and all sessions that were remaining on violence prevention in schools, surprised and saddened to learn that only a handful of research sessions focused in any way on school violence prevention. I wondered how the higher education/academic community would respond to this horrible tragedy… surely among the 10,000+ educational research conference participants, there had to be more than a few who studied school safety.
I knew that day that I had found my driving passion in research.
For the past 10 years, I have studied school climate, school violence prevention, and educational psychology. I believe that school safety rests far more in the quality of interpersonal relationships within a school than any exclusionary disciplinary policies or external controls, metal detectors, security guards, surveillance cameras, etc.
More on this later, of course, in future posts.
In the meantime, here are some links to get started
http://www.preventschoolviolence.org
(Check out the fact sheets)
And for those who think it’s a good idea to have more guns in schools…
http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=7312540
Please stay tuned for more soon.
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Safe Schools for Health and Learning 