Education Profs. Dewey G. Cornell and Peter L. Sheras recently released a study on how youth violence can be prevented through means other than zero tolerance in order to foster a safer environment in school settings.
The professors' preliminary results were developed into a publication titled "Guidelines for Responding to Student Threat of Violence," which was field-tested at 35 schools in Charlottesville and Albemarle County during the 2001-2002 school year. Follow-up interviews and data collection proved the guidelines' effectiveness in preventing school violence, Cornell said.
"Only three students were expelled, which is very low compared to zero tolerance," Cornell said.
The use of zero tolerance does not allow the forgiveness of unrealistic threats while identifying too many children as potentially violent, Cornell said.
"Schools resort to zero tolerance to simply expel students because they feel threatened and have no way of discriminating a serious threat from one that is not serious," Cornell said.
A distinction must be made between children who simply are making threats from ones who actually are intimidating other students and teachers, Sheras said.
Cornell said he assisted FBI agents in a conference on school shootings in 1999. The FBI agents recommended a threat-access approach instead of profiling students into categories based on a set of characteristics that determine whether they are dangerous.
"We decided that we were in a good position to develop their recommendations into some formal guidelines that could be tested in schools," Cornell said.
Although zero tolerance theoretically is a good idea, it has been carried out to an extreme, Cornell said. Cases of expulsion have included a young child bringing a one-inch GI Joe gun to school or a child saying "bang bang" while pointing a chicken finger at the teacher, Sheras said.
Workshops and additional studies related to the Youth Violence Project currently are in progress throughout Virginia.
"I hope that we will be able to train every school system in the country to use this threat assessment model," Sheras said.
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