Yet security staffing continues to be dramatically cut by school officials. In a January story by WBTV, the district’s superintendent recommended cutting nearly $1 million from the district’s school law enforcement division, cutting about 32 campus security officers.

Last year the district cut about 60 campus security officers, according to the report.

Could these occurrences be related?

This school security “expert” has an analysis of the dramatic crime rise based upon my 25+ years of knowledge and experience: When you dramatically cut security staff, it is not unforeseeable that you can logically expect dramatic rises in criminal and violent incidents in schools.

Of course, a first grader could probably come up with the same analysis. 

Perhaps more school administrators and boards need to run their intended school safety cuts past their first graders before acting.  After all, many of these school “leaders” do not seem to be consulting with, and/or listening to, any school safety experts.

Ken Trump

Visit School Security Blog at:  http://www.schoolsecurityblog.com

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But according to a quote in the Keen New Service, a national gay legal and political news service, Kevin Jennings, the Education Department’s Assistant Deputy Secretary for Safe and Drug Free Schools, apparently believes they are the ONLY people who know what is going on in schools.

“This is a major step forward,” said Jennings, “ . . . because the only people who really know what’s going on in the schools are the kids.”

School Climate Survey Pilot Grant Program Awarded

That’s why the U.S. Department of Education announced a pilot project of $38.8 million in grants to 11 states as a part of its new Safe and Supportive School program spearheaded by Mr. Jennings.  This much smaller grant for a handful of states is being piloted after the Department and Congress eliminated $295 million in state formula school safety grants distributed annually to schools nationwide.

The grants require states to work with local school districts to implement in-depth surveys of students, family, and staff about school safety issues.  Grant money will then go to the schools that the students say have the biggest problems, according to Mr. Jennings, who in the past has said that schools will also get assigned “school safety scores” which they must publicly post.

Directing funds based on student feedback, he noted, is a new approach to school safety.

The Department awarded this first round of grants for this program on Friday.

My Take

I wonder if the students, since they are supposedly the only ones who know what is going on these schools, will also implement and manage the grants, including all the paperwork?

Student surveys and student involvement are important. My advice to the U.S. Department of Education is to encourage schools to  engage students in school safety planning.  

But don’t slap in the face the hard-working school administrators, school security officers, school resource officers, school safety and crisis teams, and others who work each day to keep our schools safe and secure. 

They know more than you’re quoted as giving them credit for knowing.  They also have great memories at election time.

Ken Trump

Visit School Security Blog at:  http://www.schoolsecurityblog.com

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The problem is not limited to Utah.  It is a national problem I have documented for years on my web site page on school crime underreporting.

While the U.S. Department of Education loves to say that school crime has declined since 1992, the reality is there is no federal mandatory K-12 school crime reporting.  In other words, there is no national collection of law enforcement data of crimes at K-12 schools. 

Their claim is based on an annual effort to assemble a hodgepodge collection of academic surveys which the Department of Education tries to pull together into one report.  The problem is this federal report tends to be filled with disclaimers, and you can’t make an “apples to apples” comparison.  It’s a good attempt, but the writers can only work with what they have available and what they have is not top quality.  And the Department of Education shows no interest in incorporating law enforcement data any time in the future.

So what does the Department of Education now want?  Answer:  More surveys.  Now they want to spend $410 million a year to incorporate widespread ”climate” surveys nationwide. If that’s not bad enough, they also want to create school safety “scores” for individual schools based on the results of these climate surveys. 

Stay tuned…this can only get more interesting.

Ken Trump

Visit School Security Blog at:  http://www.schoolsecurityblog.com

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Student Victimization in U.S. Schools: Results For the 2007 School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey was released this week.  It didn’t take long for Tweets to pop up on Twitter announcing the report’s citations on students who were victims of bullying. 

The report highlighted “findings” which were so obvious, one would have to ask why the federal government would even ask such questions and perhaps more importantly, why they would think it would be some major revelation to readers:

“The percentage of student victims of violent crimes who reported being afraid of attack or harm at school (23.2 percent) was higher than that of nonvictims (4.9 percent) (figure 5 and table 7)”

and

“A higher percentage of students reporting any crime avoided specific places at school because of fear of attack or harm than did nonvictims (13.1 percent vs. 5.4 percent) (figure 5 and table 7)”

Well, duh…no kidding?  And you spent how much federal tax dollar money to come to that conclusion?

Doesn’t common sense tell us that students who are victims of crimes at school would be more fearful of attack or harm than students who have not been victimized?  Wouldn’t one expect this to be an obvious and normal reaction? And wouldn’t you expect them to avoid specific places because of fear of attack if they have previously been victimized?

The U.S. Department of Education’s school crime statistics are, by-and-large, a joke.  They have been for many years. They typically reflect outdated data (this report is for 2007, published in mid-2010) and are based upon a limited number of academic research surveys instead of actual incident-based data and/or law enforcement data.

Why? The answer is simple: There is no federal mandatory school crime reporting and tracking for K-12 schools. 

The federal government’s response, while presumably well-intended, is based on a hodgepodge collection of academic research studies. The real story is often told in the fine print but unfortunately, the media and others who cite the report either rarely read the fine print or simply don’t care.

At the end of the second paragraph on page iii, the “Highlights” page, the report states:

“Readers should be alerted to the limitations of the survey design and the analytical approach used here with regard to causality.  Conclusions about causality between school or student characteristics and victimization cannot be made due to the cross-sectional, nonexperimental design of the SCS.”

So in short an educator or school safety professional can conclude nothing about causality because of how the data was collected and the project design.  So why bother doing the project and report?

Dig deeper into pages 2-3 and on page A-5, and you’ll find numerous data limitations and disclaimers.  While the researchers appear to have made a valiant effort, the report contains so many limitations and disclaimers that it creates the perception that one should take this report, and the numbers therein, with a grain of salt.  I think they’re correct.

We already know school crimes are often under-reported to state departments of education and to law enforcement.

Lessons learned:  Base your school district’s policy and funding decisions based  upon local school and public safety.  Include incident-based, law enforcement data in addition to surveys. And if you’re going to do something, do it right — which includes the media, who should also be reading the fine print disclaimers.

Parents Beware!  School crime and discipline data is sometimes not worth the paper (or web site) upon which it is written.  Start by reading the fine print first.  It may save you the time of reading the rest of the report.

Ken Trump

Visit School Security Blog at:  http://www.schoolsecurityblog.com

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