Introduction

Homicide is the second leading cause of death for 15 to 24 year olds and the fourth leading cause of death for 10 to 14 year olds (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2006). In 2003, 5,570 youth were murdered, an average of 15 youth each day (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2006). Youth violence is also related to non-fatal injuries among youth. In 2004, more than 750,000 youth ages 10 to 24 were treated in the emergency room for injuries due to violent events (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2006). The direct and indirect costs of youth violence related mortality and morbidity are estimated to cost the United States $158 billion each year (Children's Safety Network Economics & Data Analysis Resource Center, 2000).

School violence is a specific category of youth violence. School violence is any behavior that is intended to harm, physically or emotionally, persons in a school and their property. This includes threatening with or without a weapon, fighting, stealing and damaging property, bringing or using a weapon at school, gender violence, and bullying. School violence affects 73 out of every 1,000 students per year (DeVoe et al., 2005). Fortunately most of these acts of violence are not as tragic as the recent school shootings. Mass casualty incidences such as the shootings at Virginia Tech and Columbine are still rare in school settings. However, these events have served as a catalyst for research and policies around school violence, including the less severe forms of violence.

While death and disability are the most obvious consequences of school violence, another obvious and important consequence is the disruption to the learning environment that occurs when violence is pervasive. Violence in schools creates disorder and fear, which can interfere with teachers' ability to teach and students' ability to learn. (For examples of the consequences of school violence, see Table 1.)

Violence prevention programs are fairly common in schools; however, they exist in many different forms. This is partially due to the nature of some violence prevention programs, which aim to address multiple health behaviors, as well as the nature of the school system with its competing demands and limited resources. The goal of the U.S. Department of Education's Exemplary and Promising Safe, Disciplined, and Drug-Free Schools was to catalog those programs currently being implemented in schools, with an emphasis on those that had been evaluated and had been shown to be effective.

Research evaluating the effects of school violence prevention programs is limited (Wilson, Gottfresdon, & Najaka, 2001; Scheckner, Rollin, Kaiser-Ulrey, & Wagner, 2002). Two meta-analyses of school violence prevention programs showed that violence prevention programs have small impacts on aggressive behaviors, but the impact varies considerably across different studies (Wilson et al., 2001; Wilson, Lipsey, & Derzon, 2003). These effects have been shown for both individually based interventions, as well as environmentally based interventions (Wilson et al., 2001; Wilson et al., 2003).

As Brofenbrenner's Ecological Model suggests, child and adolescent development occurs as a complex interplay between the child or adolescent and the many environments with which they interact (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Therefore, it is imperative that intervention efforts aim to change both the individual and the context in which the individual acts. It is not clear to what extent school violence prevention programs are addressing both areas of intervention. The literature has begun to suggest a need for more research and interventions focused on the school environment (Baker, 1998; Astor & Meyer, 2001).

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the focus of school violence prevention programs. To do this I undertook a review of the U.S. Department of Education's Exemplary and Promising Safe, Disciplined, and Drug-Free Schools. The findings suggest that school violence prevention programs are primarily focused on changing the individual with little focus on changing the school environment.

Background

Theories explaining school violence can be conceptualized into three distinct domains: the individual, the school social environment, and the school physical environment (Guerra, Tolan, & Hammond, 1994; Astor, Meyer, & Behre, 1999).

Traditionally, school violence theories and prevention efforts have focused on the role of the individual and their ability to correctly perceive and react to the environment (Thornton, Craft, Dahlberg, Lynch, & Baer, 2002; Boxer, Goldstein, Musher-Eizenman, Cubow, & Heretick, 2005). They have focused on changing how an individual interprets a potentially violent situation and then what solutions are available to that individual (Huesmann, 1988; Crick & Dodge, 1994; Boxer et al., 2005). This has been referred to as changing an individual's cognitive script towards violence. In these theories the role of the environment is relevant, but only insofar as it impacts the likelihood that violence is considered as a solution (Bandura, 1977). However, a new focus on the importance of the school environment both for the success of individually focused interventions, as well as a mechanism to prevent school violence in its own right, is emerging (Astor et al., 1999; Thonton et al., 2002; Payne, Gottfredson, & Gottfredson, 2003).

Much is understood about the mechanism by which the school social environment contributes to the problem of violence. Schools with a high sense of community have greater collective efficacy and can establish norms against violence and then actively enforce these norms (Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997; Sabol, Coulton, & Dorbin, 2004). These schools also create a feeling of school connectedness for students, which encourages adherence to the norms of the school and improve students' academic and health outcomes (Payne et al., 2003; McNeely & Falci, 2004; Whitlock, 2006).

The school physical environment also contributes to the perception and reinforcement of these norms. Greater deterioration of the school environment has been shown to be related to higher levels of school violence, perhaps because it serves as an indication of a lack of social control (Newman & Franck, 1982; Taylor, Gottfredson, & Brower, 1984; Taylor & Harrell, 1996). Control also can be actively enforced through the amount of surveillance that is possible in an environment (Greenberg, Rohe, & Williams, 1982; Taylor et al., 1984; Astor et al., 1999).

Methods

Study Aims

It is not clear how much the existing research into the importance of the school environment has been incorporated into the design of school violence intervention practice. This paper reviews the programs cited in the U.S. Department of Education's Exemplary and Promising Safe, Disciplined, and Drug-Free Schools to assess their inclusion of both the school social environment and the school physical environment in school violence prevention efforts.

Sample

In 2001, the U.S. Department of Education published a report Exemplary and Promising Safe, Disciplined, and Drug Free Schools (Modzeleski, 2001). This was the result of a 1993 Congressional directive to the Office of Educational Research and Improvement that required the evaluation of all educational programs. The goal of this directive was to provide teachers, administrators, policymakers, and parents with information on the effectiveness of programs in order to improve their decision-making (Owens, 1993). To fulfill this directive, the Safe and Drug-Free Schools program and the Office of Educational Research and Improvement established the Safe, Disciplined, and Drug-Free Schools Expert Panel. This 15-member panel was composed of educators, researchers, evaluators, program developers, and representatives from local and state education agencies, businesses, institutions of higher education, and medical and legal communities.

The panel created 7 criteria by which to evaluate programs. These criteria included: 1) evidence of efficacy/effectiveness; 2) clear and appropriate goals; 3) use of clear rationale; 4) consideration of the population and program setting; 5) engagement of population; 6) integration into the school's educational mission; and 7) possibility of replication. (See Table 2 for explanations of these criteria.) Programs were reviewed based on these criteria and then deemed as promising or exemplary.

The Safe and Drug Free Schools Expert Panel publicized widely for the submission of programs. A total of 124 programs were reviewed through a two-tiered process. A panel of individuals with expertise in research and evaluation first evaluated the programs based only on Criterion 1. The programs that received high scores on Criterion 1 were reviewed on the remaining criteria by a different pool of reviewers with expertise in safe, disciplined, and drug-free schools. Based on both tiers of review, the Safe and Drug Free Schools Expert Panel made the final classification decision on each program. Unfortunately the report does not make clear the panel's criteria for classifying programs as exemplary or promising.

All programs included in the review are available for purchase by schools. Programs were developed by both academic and non-academic institutions.

Analysis

As the programs listed in this report address alcohol and drugs as well as violence, my first step was to identify those exemplary and promising programs that related to violence prevention. The index of programs at the beginning of the guide served as a natural starting point as it classifies programs by emphasis. I included in this review those programs that listed school violence as an emphasis. I then read each qualifying program's description to determine if the program was based primarily in the school environment and whether it emphasized change at either an individual or school level.

If a program met both of these qualifications, I conducted a literature search using the program's name in both the PubMed and PsycINFO databases. PubMed is a compilation of citations from MEDLINE and other life sciences journals for biomedical articles, while PsycINFO is a compilation of citations relating to the behavioral sciences and mental health. The evaluation articles I gathered through this process were then used to analyze the inclusion of the school environment in each program.

To determine the level of inclusion of the school social and physical environments within the violence prevention programs, I examined the goals of the program and the measures for program evaluation. The goals of the program form the guiding theory for all planning and content decisions and establish the desired program outcomes. The evaluation measures of a program give an indication of the desired changes.

I determined the categories for classification of the goals and evaluation measures a priori. Goals and evaluation measures were classified as either pertaining to the individual, the school social environment, or the school physical environment. This division is typical in the literature related to school violence and its interventions (Guerra et al., 1994; Astor et al., 1999).

Results

Sample

Of the 124 programs submitted for review by the Safe, Disciplined, and Drug-Free Schools Expert Panel, 9 programs were deemed exemplary and 33 programs were deemed promising. Of these 42 exemplary and promising programs, 33 programs were listed in the index as including violence. After reading the information included in the report about each program, 25 programs were considered eligible for review in this paper. The other 8 programs were not eligible for various reasons. Two programs, Life Skills Training and Preparing for a Drug-Free Year, were not included because their primary focus was on alcohol, tobacco, and other drug abuse prevention. Two other programs, Michigan Model for Comprehensive School Health Education and Teenage Health Teaching Modules, were not included as they were not just violence prevention programs but entire health education curriculums. Two programs, CASASTART and Aggression Replacement Therapy, were eliminated as they were not based in a school setting. The final two programs, The Strengthening of Families Program: For Parents and Youth 10-14 and Creating Lasting Family Connections, were eliminated for inclusion as they focused on the family environment. Unfortunately, evaluation information was not available in PubMed or PsycINFO for ­­­­13 of the 25 remaining programs. This left a total of 12 programs for evaluation. These 12 programs and the evaluation articles used for their evaluation are listed in Table 3. One of the 12 included programs was deemed exemplary, and the others were deemed promising.

Review of Program Goals

All programs included in this evaluation listed more than one goal. Of the 12 programs, 54 distinct goals were identified. Of these goals, 43 were classified as pertaining to the individual, 11 were classified as pertaining to the school social environment, and 0 were classified as pertaining to the school physical environment. Table 4 lists selected goals from the 12 programs and their classifications as individual, social environment, or physical environment goals. These goals were chosen for their clarity in representing typical goals for school violence prevention programs.

Review of Program Evaluation Measures

The evaluation measures of the 12 programs were assessed in a similar manner. All of the programs had more than one way of evaluating their program's effectiveness towards violence. Of the 159 evaluation measures, 141 measured change at the individual level, 18 measured change in the school's social environment, and 0 measured change in the school's physical environment. Table 5 lists some common ways of measuring program effectiveness. These program evaluation measures were chosen as they articulately represent some frequently used ways of evaluating school violence prevention programs.

Classification of Program Goals and Program Evaluation Measures

The goals of the programs easily fit into the a priori determined categories of individual change, school social environment change, or school physical environment change. With the exception of some very broad goals (e.g. making violence less present in the school environment), most of the goals were clearly attempting to change how individual student's interpret and respond to potentially violent situations or attempting to change the actual school social environment and/or the individual student's bonding with that environment.

The evaluation measures were more difficult to categorize as either pertaining to the individual or to the school social environment. This was because most measures of program effectiveness were still directed at individuals. While a goal may have been aiming to change the school social environment, the evaluation measure was of the individual level. For example, a common aim of school social environment change was to encourage students' bonding to the school. This was usually evaluated by examining students' level of school connectedness rather than by examining a school level change, such as the number of after-school activities offered. Only two studies, Peacebuilders and Positive Action, evaluated these school level variables. No goals or evaluation measures made mention of change directed at the school physical environment.

Discussion

As can be seen through this brief analysis of 12 of the programs included in the U.S. Department of Education's Exemplary and Promising Safe and Drug Free Schools, the school environment is not a primary focus for current violence prevention programs. While research has begun to show a causal and mediating role for the school environment in school violence, school violence prevention efforts are not yet adequately addressing this role.

An analysis of the goals of the 12 included programs does show a growing recognition of the importance of the school environment. Goals such as providing strategies to avoid reinforcing negative behavior, creating a positive environment conducive to teaching and learning, and creating positive adult and peer models, demonstrate the attempt to change the school social environment. The presence of these goals shows the influence of current research on the school social environment's impact on school violence.

Unfortunately, the program goals at the level of the school social environment are still being evaluated at an individual level. This level of understanding may reflect the influence of Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory, where the environment provides direct and observational learning experiences for the individual (Bandura, 1977). While this model allows for the individual's influence on the environment, the focus is still on the individual. In Brofenbrenner's Ecological Model the environment holds an equal focus as the individual, emphasizing the complexity of the relationship between the individual and the environment. Hopefully, with time and increased research, evaluative measures of the social and physical environment will reflect the equal emphasis placed on the environment and the individual in Brofenbrenner's Ecological Model.

The role of the school physical environment in violence prevention is not acknowledged in current school violence prevention programs. Currently, the role of the school physical environment is primarily addressed through security interventions that are used to monitor the physical space where violence occurs or to detect weapons carried by individuals. These efforts are focused on attempting to dissuade an individual from committing a violent act by increasing the risk of getting caught (Toby, 2002). The school physical environment has mainly been the domain of the justice system.

Limitations

Evaluation articles were not available on 13 of the 25 school violence prevention programs listed in the U.S. Department of Education's Exemplary and Promising Safe, Disciplined, and Drug-Free Schools. This is especially surprising as the most important criteria for inclusion in this guide was “evidence of efficacy/effectiveness based on a methodologically sound evaluation” (Modzeleski, 2001). Research evaluating the effects of school violence prevention programs has been found to be limited (Wilson et al., 2001; Scheckner et al., 2002). It may also be possible that many of the program evaluations examined by the panel were never published. This may due to the fact that some of the programs were run by non-academics (e.g. non-profit organizations). In addition, this literature review only searched two databases for programs, PubMed and PsycINFO. ERIC, the Education Resources Information Center, would have been another source for information about school violence prevention programs. While a limitation, it has been my experience that most programs cited in ERIC are also cited in either PubMed or PsycINFO.

While Exemplary and Promising Safe, Disciplined, and Drug-Free Schools represents the most current summation of school violence prevention programs, there is a strong possibility that other prevention efforts exist. These efforts may even focus on the school social and physical environment, which are weaknesses within the reviewed programs. This may be possible due to the solicitation process for programs to be included in the guide. Programs were required to submit applications for inclusion in the guide, requiring greater effort by program staff. Through a self-elimination process, it is possible that only those programs with the most to gain by inclusion chose to submit applications. Furthermore, all programs included in this guide were programs available for purchase. School violence prevention programs can be costly, with prices ranging from $15 to $3000 (Modzeleski, 2001). Programs aimed at the school social or physical environments conceivably may be less lucrative, as they do not require the purchase of materials for each student.

Strengths

This review represents one of the first analyses into the level of inclusion of the school environment in school violence prevention programs. The literature contains many articles anecdotally citing the impact of the school environment on school violence and calling for more research on the topic. Current literature on the school environment's impact on violence focuses on testing theories about the nature and magnitude of impact of the school environment. To move this research into practice, it is necessary to understand current best practices. This understanding will help dictate the shape of future school environment interventions.

Another strength of this study is the separation of the school environment into the school social environment and the school physical environment. While there is an obvious connection between the two environments, each environment offers possibilities for different interventions. This research shows that interventions have addressed the role of the school social environment in promoting violence to a greater extent than they have addressed the role of the school physical environment.

Recommendations

I believe enough evidence exists to start designing, implementing, evaluating, and disseminating school violence prevention programs aimed at the school environment. One difficulty in designing these prevention programs will be to allow enough flexibility for schools to adapt the program to their unique environments. Another difficulty will be to obtain district, principal, and teacher buy-in while attempting to implement these programs. Researchers will also face the difficulty of creating appropriate evaluation measures of these programs. While these and other difficulties exist, the potential for reward is too great not to try.

Conclusion

Current best practices in school violence prevention programming are still focused on creating change at the individual level. These programs aim to decrease violence by altering the attitudes, perceptions, and cognitive scripts of individuals attempting to commit violence. While there is evidence to support the effectiveness of this strategy, researchers should begin to focus new intervention efforts on the school social and physical environments. The school social and physical environments interact with the individual to create norms about violence and the opportunity to commit violent acts. Current strategies to address the school social and physical environment should be modified or paired with existing effective individual change programs in order to create more successful comprehensive violence prevention programs. With successful comprehensive violence prevention programs schools may once again be seen as safe havens, free of violence.

Tables

Table 1 - Consequences of School Violence

(Dauterive & Ingram, 1995; Fisher & Kettl, 2003; Greene, 2005; Ingersoll, 2001; Juvonen, Nishina, & Graham, 2000; Kochenderfer & Ladd, 1996; Wei & Williams, 2004)

Table 2 - Evaluation Criteria and Explanations

(Modzeleski, 2001)

Table 3 - Included Programs and Evaluation Articles

* Program deemed exemplary.

Table 4 - Select Program Goals and their Classifications

Table 5 - Select Evaluation Measures and their Classifications

About the Author:

Sarah Lindstrom is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Sarah's research interests center around the health issues of adolescents. Her dissertation research focuses on understanding the impact of the school environment on youth violence. In order to better understand this environment, this past year Sarah worked as a high school biology teacher in the Baltimore City Public School System.

Acknowledgements:

Special thanks go to Andrea Gielen for her direction while negotiating the graduate school maze.

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