PSYCH 424 blog

If you pay attention to the news media cycles, you will no doubt have an intimate knowledge of the school shootings that make national headlines several times a year. The most recent one that stirred the pot of controversy surrounding school violence, mass shootings, and gun violence happened on February 14, 2018, in Parkland, Florida. A former student entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and killed 17 of his former classmates and staff members, injuring many more. Immediately afterward, our country was driven apart at a fracture, with people wondering how we can keep letting this happen to our children and having wildly different views on what can be done to prevent these things in the future. Impassioned pleas from traumatized students and grief-stricken parents filled the news waves for gun control, arming students and teachers, more armed security across school campuses nationwide — anything. They begged us, please do something.

Figure 1. School-associated violent deaths from 1992-2015. Courtesy of the CDC. Click to enlarge.

By all accounts, after being witness to the fallout of such a traumatic event and the intense media coverage given to these tragedies, you would think they are extremely common, that it’s an epidemic, even. But what does the data tell us? According to data offered by the CDC (2018), violent deaths that happen at school have remained fairly steady from the reported period between the 1992-93 school year and the 2014-15 school year (see Figure 1). And while even one violent death at school is too many, these numbers are not entirely indicative of a sudden epidemic or dramatic increase in violent school-related deaths. But at the same time, one has to wonder: With these incidents becoming more prevalent in the media without necessarily becoming more prevalent in everyday life and with more resources than ever before aimed at curbing these numbers, why haven’t we been seeing a steady downward trend? To me, that is the most alarming thing. After over two decades of school violence on a massive scale being front and center in the media and being the hot topic of proposed policy changes and community outrage, why has seemingly nothing changed? Perhaps the answer lies with the strategies used to try and combat this stream of violence.

As Americans, we tend to embody a culture of “let’s throw money at the problem and see if it helps.” It a lot of cases, it’s true, more money spent in the pursuit of a solution does yield favorable results, but first, you have to make sure you’re funneling the money to the solution that is actually going to make a difference. A study done by Nathaniel Bryan in 2009 looked at the correlation between the money schools spent on safety programs and their overall level of violence. What he found was pretty surprising, to me at least. He found that there was no significant correlation between a school’s financial investment into safety programs (security guards, metal detectors, cameras, etc.) and a school’s level of violence (Bryan, 2009). In other words, it did not appear to matter how much money a school spent on security measures as there was no link between more money (and more robust security systems and programs) and lower levels of violence. I mean… wow. Isn’t that what you hear all the time, that we need more guns, more guards, more cameras, more lockdown drills, more money for these programs to keep our schools and children safe?

This is an incredibly complex issue, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the solutions will not be so straightforward or easy to implement for immediate results. It’s definitely not as easy as throwing money at schools and turning them into fortresses. This is an inside-out issue: We need to fix the inside first – how students relate to one another and themselves which begins as early as preschool.

In an article by Astor et al. (2005), a study was outlined that compared the effects of low-quality and high-quality preschool programs on future violent crime and criminal activity. The findings showed that the children who attended higher quality preschool programs were significantly less likely to be involved in violent and criminal activity than those who experienced a lower quality preschool (Astor et al., 2005). The study followed these children until the age of 27 and found that these effects persist through early childhood and into adulthood with those who had attended low-quality preschool programs being, at age 27, five times more likely to be arrested five or more times with a large portion of these arrests being for violent crimes (Astor et al., 2005). Because preschools tend to focus on social responsibility, decision-making, empowerment, and conflict resolution, these children are gaining these important and necessary skills at a critical point in their development which the researchers believe is what has the tempering effect on violent crime (Astor et al., 2005). And if you think about it, it makes sense. Children’s brains grow and develop at an exponential rate, so giving them these skills at such an early age gives them time to integrate them and provides scaffolding for later experiences.

In 2017, only 40% of 3-year-olds were enrolled in full- or part-time preschool (NCES, 2019). This is alarming and kind of sad. Preschool, especially a high-quality program, has been shown to be an effective possible solution to the problem of violence in our schools. Which is why a good direction to go in is to offer free or affordable preschool options to all children in our country. Many children don’t have any real experience with their peers in a learning environment until they start Kindergarten, having missed the opportunity to learn these skills at a much earlier age which puts them at a major disadvantage.

School violence is a phenomenon that has been carefully cultivated over several decades, and there will not be an easy or quick fix to it. We have to look at our values as a society and make the conscious decision that our children deserve better… and not just the eventual victims of school violence, but the perpetrators of it as well. We are continuously failing all of them and we have to start doing better. We can’t throw money at the problem in the form of increased security, turning schools into strongholds, and we can’t expect adolescents to suddenly learn skills that have not been continually modeled starting from the time they are virtual babies. If we want to fix this problem, it has to start early, and everyone needs to have an equal opportunity to grow and thrive.

References

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