Support Safe, Stable School Environments

Schools should be safe spaces for youth to learn and develop, and victimization at school can have lasting effects.  Youth victimized at school are more prone to truancy, poor academic performance, dropping out, and violent behaviors and often experience loneliness, depression, and adjustment difficulties.   To ensure learning and development in schools and to help prevent juvenile delinquency, policymakers should support safe, stable school environments. Some strategies that can be used to support safe, stable school environments include:

• Support efforts to prevent bullying. School bullying has serious short-term and long-term effects on youth’s physical and mental health and can be a precursor to a disconnection from school or to delinquent behavior.  Policymakers can support best practices in bullying prevention, including requiring schools to create culturally competent policies and practices for identifying and reporting bullying, requiring ongoing training for school staff to identify and prevent bullying and creating opportunities for youth to take an active and meaningful role in bullying prevention.  In 2011, the Texas General Assembly passed House Bill 1942, an anti-bullying bill that expanded the definition of bullying; required the State Board of Education to amend its health curriculum to address bullying awareness, prevention and intervention; mandated that each school district’s Board of Trustees adopt a comprehensive anti-bullying policy and amended the state’s Education Code to allow staff development to include training in bullying prevention, identification and reporting.
• Support efforts to prevent truancy. Research indicates that truancy is a risk factor for other problems, including substance abuse, delinquency, gang activity, serious criminal behavior and dropping out of school. Truancy itself can lead to or reinforce existing risk behaviors, since youth who are not in school are unsupervised and removed from the influence of positive peers and adults. In addition, truancy negatively affects classroom environments and disrupts other students’ learning. Studies show that effective truancy reduction programs—which aim to improve the overall school environment and its safety, connect youth and families to the school and enable schools to respond to students’ unique learning styles—can produce a significant decline in delinquency and crimes committed by school-age youth. Policymakers should support effective efforts to prevent truancy, including identifying at-risk students and targeting interventions to them, engaging youth and families in school communities, offering alternatives to adjudication for truancy offenses (such as community truancy boards), supporting mentoring programs and offering service learning and other alternative learning opportunities. Washington State legislature created community truancy boards, comprised of members of the local community in which a youth attends school, to address issues with school attendance before they become chronic and require court involvement, to connect parents and youth to support services and to connect the youth to a more appropriate learning environment if necessary.
• Invest in strategies to prevent drop-out and expulsion. More than a fifth of the U.S. population ages 18 to 24 have neither a high school diploma nor a GED. Students from low-income families drop out at six times the rate of those from high-income families, and students who fail to complete high school are less likely to be employed, more likely to be receiving public assistance and much more likely to be incarcerated.[1] State policymakers should invest in strategies that identify at-risk and high-need students and target early interventions to them and aggressively address drop-out factories   The 2009-2010 school year in North Carolina recorded its lowest drop-out rate in state history, citing ninth grade academies, smaller school settings, opportunities for credit recovery, career-themed courses and schools and alternative learning opportunities as elements of success.