School Violence in America

By Miguel Llanos

MSNBC

June 18, 1998 - The number of students who say they've taken a gun to school has dropped by 36 percent in five years, a survey released Thursday found. The survey's authors emphasized, however, that still leaves an estimated 1 million students - some as young as 10 - who claim to have carried a gun to school at least once during the 1997-98 school year.

AND "IT ONLY takes one student to create a national nightmare like Jonesboro, Ark., or Springfield, Ore.," said Tom Gleaton, who helped prepare the survey for the drug-prevention group PRIDE. He was referring to two of the recent school shootings that left several people dead and dozens wounded.

Gleaton told NBC's "Today" show Friday that his "real surprise is we haven't seen more shootings in schools," noting that Jonesboro students were below the national average when it came to reporting having taken guns to school, but the school still suffered the tragedy of attack.

The crux of the problem, Gleaton said, is the "volatile mixture of guns, bad attitudes and drugs."

The survey findings, he added, "suggest that for every classroom of 30 students, in every school building in America, on average one student has attended school with a gun in grades six through 12. In nearly half of the classrooms, a student with a gun has been present on six or more occasions."

Moreover, Gleaton said, two out of three of these armed students are regular drug users.

SURVEY FINDINGS

The 11th annual PRIDE survey, the largest of all polls on adolescent drug use and violence, questioned 154,350 students nationwide in grades six to 12. Highlights include:

• Guns - 3.8 percent of the students said they had taken a gun to school last year - and almost half went to school armed on six or more occasions. With nearly 26 million U.S. students in grades six to 12, 3.8 percent represents an estimated 973,000 students.
• Threats - Half of the gun-carrying students said they had threatened to harm a teacher; almost two-thirds said they had threatened to harm another student.
• Drugs - Among the gun-toters, two-thirds said they used illicit drugs (among them cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, marijuana, heroin, inhalants, downers and designer drugs) at least once a month.
• Ethnicity - Of the students who said they carried guns, 59 percent were white, 18 percent African American, 12 percent Hispanic, 3 percent Asian and 3 percent Native American. That compares with this breakdown for all students surveyed: 78 percent were white, 10 percent African American, 6 percent Hispanic, 3 percent Asian and 1 percent Native American.

PROFILE OF A GUN-TOTING STUDENT

Students who said they carried a gun were:

• Less likely to live with both parents (45%, compared with 62% of all students).
• More likely to be in trouble with the police (74% vs. 22%).
• More likely to join gangs (62% vs. 9%).
• Less likely to make good grades (37% vs. 68%).

FEWER GUNS, MORE VICTIMS?

Similar but smaller school surveys have reached similar conclusions as the PRIDE findings on guns. What such surveys don't explore is why shootings are becoming more

lethal even if fewer guns are in schools.

Ron Stephens, head of the National School Safety Center, testified before Congress last April that "although the incidence of crime and violence may have declined slightly, the severity of those incidents continues to escalate."

He attributes that escalation to an increase in firepower and to youth who are more volatile than in the past. "We're talking not about fist fights with a few bruises but body counts," he said, but about kids who are "more callous, less remorseful and have a lot of anger inside."

The center, which is funded by the Education and Justice departments, estimates that there were 39 school-related deaths this last school year, compared with 25 in 1996-97, 35 in 1995-96, 20 in 1994-95, 51 in 1993-94 and 55 in 1992-93.

DRUG TESTS AS A TOOL

How to defuse that "volatile mixture" of guns, drugs and bad attitudes is still a key question facing officials. Stephens told lawmakers that drug tests are a valuable tool for identifying early the potential for violence. He cited Indiana's Carmel High School, which requires a drug test when a student is suspended or expelled, as an example of where that's working.

Early results have shown that 40 percent of students tested because of fighting tested positive for illegal substances; 42 percent of students violating the tobacco policy also tested positive for illegal substances," Stephens testified. "The good news about Carmel High's testing program is that after the testing, 64 percent of all students who tested positive for an illegal substance received treatment."

Stephens said that "teachers are so frustrated about school safety that such issues are now becoming part of their collective bargaining agreements."

In the case of drugs, Stephens noted, some union contracts now require that a school district file criminal charges against anyone on school premises found to be under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol.

Return to Classroom Management.