Why school violence is declining

In this small town just outside Chicago, several hundred restless Garfield Elementary students were summoned to the school auditorium last week for a lecture on gang violence. The assembly - spurred in part by Maywood's recent spate of homicides - is part of a wider effort, both in the district and nationwide, to combat violence at younger and younger ages.

Ever since Columbine, schools have been far more vigilant in responding, almost instantly, to violence. But it's their turn toward proactive, preventive approaches that may be paying off: A federal report released last week shows that non-fatal violence dropped dramatically between 1992 and 2002. While some data show an uptick since then, and a rise in school-related violent deaths for 2003-04, many laud schools' aggressive intervention on everything from bullying to bombs.

In Massachusetts, for instance, officials at Marshfield High School were able to discover and avert what appeared to be a Columbine-style style plot on the part of two students to attack their school this fall.

And in Boston, Fairbanks, Alaska, and Los Angeles, a nonprofit called Peace Games runs classes that combine civics, community service, and lessons on combatting hate-filled dialogue.

Maywood, for its part, has seen 20 homicides this year, and gangs are widespread in the town of 27,000. This fall, a young man was shot and killed in the parking lot of the local Proviso East High School while waiting to pick his brother up from school. Two other Proviso East students were killed in the past school year, and one student was stopped from bringing a loaded gun to school. As a result, the district is trying to reach students at younger and younger ages, starting programs on character development and anger management back in elementary school. "Here, violence is just petty things, like play fighting and name calling, but that's where it starts," says assistant principal Gwendolyn Wade after a school assembly held to address gang issues. [Editor's note: The original version mischaracterized the scope of Ms. Wade's comments.]

Administrators around the country seem to agree - and not just in crime-infested areas. The 1999 Columbine massacre, and the spate of school shootings from Springfield, Ore., to Jonesboro, Ark., served as a wakeup call to many districts. Schools installed metal detectors and honed crisis response plans, but many have also increased preventive work, targeting bullying and drawing the community into the conversation.

Experts increasingly agree that those "soft" approaches are key to reducing violence, and focus on violence may be one reason for the drop in school-related crime: Between 1992 and 2002, violent crime in schools fell 50 percent, from 48 victimizations per 1,000 students in 1992 to 24 per 1,000 in 2002, according to the joint report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics. It's a striking decline - one that mirrors a national drop in crime overall. But some experts fear complacency bred by success, and call the numbers misleading.

"Nobody wants to be alarmist, but the federal government statistics grossly underestimate the extent of school violence, public perception tends to overestimate it, and the reality is somewhere in between," says Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland-based consulting firm that helps schools with safety issues.

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