Executive Summary
This case takes off from a school related incident wherein a fifteen year old girl was shot by another classmate. She died inside their school, Dillard High School at Fort Lauderdale. This case provides a preview of the greater case of increasing school related incidences at Broward County, Florida and the rest of the country. This case study selects a school based violence prevention program, which requires community-wide collaborative efforts from students, families, teachers, administrators, staff, social and mental health professionals, police officers, emergency response personnel, security experts, among others. There is remarkable evidence that violence in schools and programs to prevent bullying lessen violence and victimization. These programs have also evidenced to lessen some other instances of bullying. Aside from these programs, many federal laws have been implemented to keep school violence at bay. While most of these laws have not been very effective in ceasing violence in schools; it has been said to have remarkably lessened the cases of violent incidents which transpire inside the schools.
Formation of the Problem
This case involves a fifteen year old student known as Amanda Collete (South Florida Times, 2013). She died after being shot by an alleged female classmate inside their school, Dillard High School at Fort Lauderdale. Apparently, the shooting incident happened after the girls argued along the corridor. The shooter, Teah Wimberly, ran away and was apprehended at a restaurant called Captain Crab’s Take away near the school (South Florida Times, 2013). Her gun was also recovered. While there were speculations about the cause of their fight, it was reported to have started when Collete refused Wimberly’s romantic advances. However, school officials said the two girls were diligent students.
The problem with the Dillard High School, which is the same as the other high schools in the U.S., is that the guards are not strict. Its more than one thousand seven hundred students do not pass metal detectors. Officers and guards stationed at the gates with security cameras. Wimberly brought a very small gun, a .22 semi automatic caliber hand gun (South Florida Times, 2013). There was an initial misjudgment as though it was not a gun shot. The paramedics did not initially found blood. This was because the bullet encircled the girl’s wound. Dillard High School ranked as the top three school with the highest incidences of criminal and violent cases as compared to all other schools in Broward County (South Florida Times, 2013). But then, the school officials defended that it was an isolated case and there was no trend of school violence at Dillard.
Research Design
This case selects a school based violence prevention program, which requires community-wide collaborative efforts from students, families, teachers, administrators, staff, social and mental health professionals, police officers, emergency response personnel, security experts, among others (NREPP Website, 2013). The number aim of this research design is to reduce both victimization and perpetration. The main leads in this program are the school administrators who integrate all of the constituencies to create proper strategies for their own specific school and community needs. While school boards and administrators create the school safety, teachers should be more intimately involved and part of all stages of the program development and implementation (Wilson & Lipsey, 2005). As it is, the teachers make the first line of defense against violence since they have the most direct contact with students. They also have the great insight into the prospective problems and realistic solutions applied to their schools.
The main purpose of this school-based program is to reduce violence. This is designed to teach all students in a given school about the problem of violence and its prevention. They are also taught any of the following important topics or skills intended to reduce aggressive or violent behaviors. These skills include the following: self-esteem, positive social skills, emotional self-awareness, emotional control, social problem solving, conflict resolution, or team work (Wilson & Lipsey, 2005). The focus of this program in middle and high schools gears towards general violence and to more specific forms of violence, such as bullying and dating violence. The interventions use an approach which utilizes the use of social skills training and emphasizes the development of behavioral skills instead of affective processes, alterations in cognition and consequential thinking (Wilson & Lipsey, 2005).
Data Collection & Analysis
Over 200 research studies about the effectiveness of school-based programs for preventing violent behavior were searched through rigid search and integrated using meta-analysis techniques (Wilson & Lipsey, 2005). Most of the research found consisted of programs mainly implemented for the purpose of research or demonstration with a high degree of the involvement of the researcher. Compared to the total studies, only 15% involved program evaluations implemented under normative processes (Wilson & Lipsey, 2005).
After a series of school related violence in Florida in 2008, their SBBC’s Core Management Team (CMT) linked with the local county government to sponsor a summit gathering all the Florida county representatives to discuss youth violence (American Public Health Association, 2009). They were broken down into various groups arranged by their geographic location to determine resources and develop individualized violence prevention action plans. The action plans were based on the unique strengths and needs of the Florida communities involved.
There is remarkable evidence that school-based violence and bullying prevention programs reduce violence and victimization (National Center for Education Statistics, 2013). These programs have also been shown to reduce bullying in some instances. To illustrate, 31% of schools in the U.S. got involved in gang violence prevention programs and about 85% of schools also participated in violence prevention programs.
Different studies calculate the costs or economic impacts of different forms of violence, which include domestic violence, child abuse and interpersonal violence (American Public Health Association, 2009). However, there are extra constraints in school violence. These are basically data related and prevent the computation of direct and indirect costs. These constraints include the lack of reporting of incidences, the difficulty of isolating the significance of school violence as a factor leading to school dropout, truancy or poor performance, the limited quantitative data of school violence related to the decision to miss or abandon school, etc. (American Public Health Association, 2009).
In school year 2009–10, the incidences of theft, violence and other crimes took place in about 85% of public schools (National Center for Education Statistics, 2013). This amounted to about 1.9 million crimes. This figure can be expressed to a rate of an estimated 40 crimes per 1,000 students enrolled in 2009–10 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2013).
Many federal laws have been implemented to keep school violence at bay. While most of these laws have not been very effective in ending school violence, it has been able to marginally reduce the number of violent incidents happening inside the schools.
Conclusion
This is crucial since the U.S. has been entangled with different cases of school related violence. This is one of the many social problems hounding the government. Although the costs of violence in schools are not specified, it can be inferred that the lost of young lives is a critical cost factor which should enforce more rational in enforcing programs and policies against school violence.
References
American Public Health Association. (2009). “Building Public Health Infrastructure for Youth Violence Prevention. Retrieved on December 19, 2013 from, http://www.apha.org/advocacy/policy/policysearch/default.htm?id=1392.
NREPP Website. (2013). School-Based Violence Prevention Programs To Reduce Bullying and Aggressive Behaviors. Retrieved on December 18, 2013 from, http://www.nrepp.samhsa.gov/Bullying.aspx.
South Florida Times. (December 18, 2013). “Girl Shot Dead in School After Rejecting Another Girl’s Advances. Retrieved on December 18, 2013 from, http://www.sfltimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2122&Itemid=42.
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2013). Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2012 (NCES 2013-036).
Wilson, Sandra Jo & Lipsey, Mark. W. (2005). The Effectiveness of School-Based Violence Prevention Programs for Reducing Disruptive and Aggressive Behavior. Revised Report for the National Institute of Justice. School Violence Prevention Research Planning Meeting. Retrieved on December 19, 2013 from, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/211376.pdf.
