I mentioned in my previous blog entry that issues of school safety came up throughout my travels from El Paso, through New Mexico, and into Arizona.  That prompted the following comment from a reader:


School safety is a complex question.  Are we talking about violent crimes occurring in school---including those involving firearms, knives, and other weapons?  Violence of any sort, even that only resulting in a black eye or a disrupted classroom?  School climates free of in-person bullying, cyber-bullying, and hazing?  The presence or absence of gangs?  Crisis planning, conflict resolution, and adequate safety drills?  Are we referring to incidents between students, student-adult issues, threats by outsiders to students inside or around the campus?  Sexual abuse and statutory rape issues? 

All of those examples, and more, are elements of school safety.  Any attempt to quantify them as a generalization of whether or not schools are safer now than they once were is bound by the limitations of methodology, definition, context, and perhaps most importantly, variance among the seemingly countless school campus cultures operating across this country.

I may try to further wrestle with this big picture in future blog posts.  For now, though, I will address the specific concerns I've heard over the past few weeks....even as recently as today when I arrived back in Arizona after a brief stay in Nevada.  In particular, I'd like to address student accountability as a component of school safety. 

Schools can be safe without heightened student accountability.  I don't believe they can reach their full potential without heightened student accountability, but they can be safe.  Having said that, schools with a challenging demographic, schools that lack a deliberate plan of relationship building, and/or schools where discipline consequences are threatened but not enforced, tend to have real or perceived school safety issues beyond the average.

In Arizona I heard the same concerns in four different cities from four distinct groups of people: 

I spoke with five high school girls who currently attend a Catholic private school.  They all wish they could attend the local public high school.  Were it not for one issue they all said they would do so.  As recently as this year, two of the five girls did attend the local public school before switching mid-year.  Two of the other three had attended a public school at one point in their lives.  Were it not for the single issue of perceived personal safety, all five of them indicated they would be attending public school.  They were scared for themselves; their parents were scared for them.

Their issue as they voiced it to me really boiled down to the lack of student accountability in the public schools they attended.  They claimed that many of the teachers were intimidated by certain individual students, groups and even gangs of misbehaving students, and even parents who will defend misbehavior by their son/daughter to the point that school personnel concede because enforcing certain rules is simply not worth the resulting hassle from enabling parents.  One cited as an example her teacher who refused to confront a student about wearing a hat because she was afraid of what he or his friends might do to her in retribution.  There were other more and less serious examples---> all suggesting a lack of student accountability on the front-end. 

A teacher I spoke with raised the issue of a lack of student accountability on the back-end.  Students at her school get in trouble, but consequences are not followed through.  Teachers at her school don't trust that their effort to enforce compliance will result in consequences with follow-through, thereby deterring future bad behavior.  Students are not held sufficiently accountable for reported misbehaviors, so why bother in the first place?

A college student I spoke with also recalled teachers intimidated or otherwise unwilling to enforce basic rules.  She wished they had.  Students need clear boundaries, she rightly exclaimed...and deep down they want clear boundaries.  She recalled the clear boundaries her cheerleading coach imposed.  As a high school student, she expressed a degree of resentment for them.  Deep down, though, she recalls respecting and even welcoming them.  I know, as an assistant principal, many of the students who respected me the most were ones I had to be the toughest with.  It is a counter-intuitive---yet very real---phenomenon!

Yet another adult I spoke with (who doesn't have children herself, but who has numerous friends who are teachers) suggested that the gang issue is very real in her city's public schools.  According to her, an educator who "messes with" the wrong gang member sometimes fears consequences beyond the school grounds.  She noted that her city has neighborhoods even the cops don't want to enter at night.  Can you imagine trying to enforce school rules consistently with a staff making this calculation?

This blog post was intended to further specify the complexion of school safety issues expressed to me over the past few weeks.  It was intended to characterize these as examples of student accountability matters.  Future posts will look into this aspect of school safety in more depth.