Arthur Kellerman says this is no time to give up on ridding our schools of violence.

by Sherry Baker n 1994, the Georgia Council for School Performance adopted eight national education goals contained in the Federal Goals 2000: Educate America Act. The seventh goal described a violence-free future for educat ion: "By the year 2000, every school in America will be free of drugs and violence and will offer a disciplined environment conducive to learning ... no child or youth should be fearful on the way to school, be afraid while there, or have to cope with pre ssures to make unhealthy choices." Five years later, with the year 2000 just around the corner, that goal seemed tragically illusive. In April l999, two teens at Columbine High School gunned down 13 of their fellow students in Littleton, Colorado. Less than a month later, a 15-year-old opened fire at Heritage High School in Conyers, Georgia, injuring six students. Magazine covers documenting grieving families and bloodied victims of school violence have become far too familiar. And in public perception violence and public schools have become intrinsically linked. "We should not accept the fact that violence in schools is a new reality in modern America," says Arthur Kellermann, director of the Center for Injury Control at the Rollins School of Public Health. "This is not the time to give up. Achieving the possi ble is key to public health." Kellermann has spent his career learning how to prevent tragic injuries such as those in Littleton and Conyers. In addition to his public health work, he is chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Emory School of Medicine. He also is a well -known national spokesman and advocate for violence and injury prevention. Despite what Kellermann calls "knee jerk" reactions from those wanting an immediate way to stop school violence, he has learned from his research that there is no quick fix. "All kinds of strategies, from metal detectors to conflict resolution seminars , are already in place in different schools," he says. "But which ones are effective? And could some strategies that sound good actually be creating additional problems for schools?" He also emphasizes that programs to prevent juvenile violence won't work without a sustained commitment to evaluation research.

"We can't think of school violence as a separate entity. Schools are a reflection of the community." --Dawna S. Fuqua-Whitley

oping to find answers to some of these questions, the Georgia Council for School Performance asked the Center for Injury Control to evaluate the expenditure of $21 million of Georgia Lottery for Education gr ant funds provided in 1994 to make high schools and middle schools safer. The vast amount, $20 million, was used to purchase high-tech devices; the rest was spent on anti-drug and anti-violence seminars, literature, and videos. An Emory team led by Knox H. Todd, an associate professor at the Center for Injury Control, visited 15 schools throughout Georgia, collecting data and talking to students, teachers, and administrators to gather first-hand information on what seemed to be working - and not working - to prevent violence. Although the report was completed in 1996, Todd says the findings are particularly pertinent today as the national spotlight focuses on school violence. The investigators found little evidence that conflict resolution and self-esteem seminars provide any lasting results. Despite the enormous appeal of technology as a tangible way to detect weapons, strategies such as surveillance cameras and metal dete ctors also had little impact on school violence. "In many cases parents found it frightening to think their kids went to a school that needed this kind of surveillance," Kellermann says. "In fact the technology could exacerbate the problem, causing flight to private schools." "That is not the solution. When people who send their kids to private schools say, 'You don't see any kids going on shooting sprees in private school,' my answer is 'Be careful what you boast about.' Private schools have been lucky so far."

n focus groups with students, administrators, and teachers who were assured of confidentiality, the researchers asked questions -- and listened. Students recounted experiences with bullies, how weapons could be silently lifted from their parents' gun cabinets, and their tricks for outsmarting surveillance cameras. Others offered a more positive vision. They described how guns and violence were not tolerated by their peer group -- how anyone who brought a wea pon into their school would be reported. "Our school is safe because we, the kids, choose to make it safe," one said. "Some students were offended we were there," says Todd. "Many viewed their schools as the safest place to be, and statistics support them. They are much safer in a school than coming or going to school in their neighborhoods, or often, even in their ho mes." Uniformly, students and teachers told the researchers that when a gun or the potential for a violent act was uncovered, the discovery came not through technology but rather through communication between students and teachers. "We did not find one firea rm in the state that was detected primarily through a metal detector," Todd says. "The effective prevention was communication in an atmosphere that let students know it was their duty to report potential safety threats to their community." Another strategy for preventing violence that appeared to work was "zero tolerance" when drugs and weapons were found on campus. "When there are strict rules, and when kids understand that when you break the rules, there's a swift consequence -- no ifs , ands, or buts -- it does work," Todd says.

aradoxically, cracking down on weapons and violence can make a school appear to be less safe than it actually is. Kellermann explains that the Council for School Performance has promoted school safety indica tors -- statistics including how many students are found with weapons in a particular school, how many students have been suspended over violent incidents, and how many incidents of vandalism of more than $50 have taken place. But in their research, the Emory team concluded that the number of reported incidents failed to add up to a school's true safety profile. "Principals who took charge and did the right thing by being aggressive and cracking down on discipline problems w ere penalized," Kellermann says. "Every time a child was suspended or a kid was caught with a gun and that incident was documented, it made the indicators for that school look worse. On the other hand, a few teachers told us confidentially that they had f ound a gun but put it in their desk and didn't tell anyone, to protect the kid. Sweeping incidents under the rug makes a school appear safer, when it isn't." These findings led the team to recommend school safety indicators based on victimization surveys rather than enforcement activities. These surveys ask students to regularly report fights they witness and whether they believe students are carrying weapo ns inside their school.

No matter where kids live, they can easily get guns, says Dawna Fuqua-Whitley, who identifies this ready availability of weapons as a causal factor of school violence.

n public health, we try to look at the entire picture. We can't think of school violence as a separate entity. Schools are a reflection of the community," says Dawna S. Fuqua-Whitley, a senior research asso ciate at the Center for Injury Control. For example, when she examined 30 years of Fulton County homicide statistics, she discovered a huge jump around 1986 in the number of homicide victims who were 15 to 19 years old -- the same time that crack cocaine became a popular street drug. "We have to examine a variety of causal factors," she says. "And one is that we are awash in weaponry in this country. Kids will tell you and law enforcement will tell you -- it is easy to get guns whether you live in a poverty-stricken neighborhood or the suburbs." Kellermann notes that juveniles are attracted to firearms to protect themselves, or even as a fashion statement. "But how do they get them? Kids don't own gun factories. They don't have a warehouse. They don't own federal firearms licenses. They can't go into a store and buy a handgun. Yet they have access to a lot of guns," he says. "There has to be a supply, and we need to find out how to stop that." Efforts are being made to reduce intentional supplying of guns to juveniles through better regulation of gun dealers and enforcement of laws already on the books. But a likely source for guns is the juvenile's own home, according to Kellermann. As one school security officer in DeKalb County told Kellermann, 90% of the guns confiscated in his schools came from the homes of the students' parents or legal guardians. "You take care of your 90%," the officer told the local PTA, "and we'll take care of the other 10%." Kellermann is optimistic that attitudes toward firearm safety and storage are changing. He and a team of researchers at several universities have looked at national polling data on new options for regulating firearms. The New England Journal of M edicine published their research in September 1998. "The tables show huge, wide margins of public support for items like the manufacture of safer, 'smart' guns," Kellermann says. "And 83% of the respondents placed a high priority on the arrest of illegal gun traffickers," says Kellermann. "That is very encouraging." Kellermann is also optimistic about an ongoing alliance between researchers at the School of Public Health and local law enforcement. "We have an initiative dubbed 'Cops and Docs' that is attempting to shift the focus of law enforcement from answering 911 calls and stringing tape around a crime scene to targeting the chain of events that lead to youth shootings," he says. "We are working with 22 emergency departments and 33 law enforcement agencies in Atlanta to identify and map every shooting that occ urs in the metro area. This gives police a bird's eye view of where the hot spots of gun violence are, the time of day or night they occur, their location, and which ones predominately involve juveniles or adults. We are helping law enforcement to find pa tterns and trends so they can target neighborhoods rather than react to individual offenders."

In 15 schools that he studied, Knox Todd found that strong leadership - rather than metal detectors and other technology - was the biggest deterrent to violence.

fter the Columbine tragedy a reporter asked Kellermann: "What would you do if you had $50 million to spend on school safety in Georgia?" "I would spend it on training the principals and teachers on how to build community, how to build a collective sense of security," Kellermann answered. "I would teach them the management and leadership skills they need to form an alliance with their st udents and to establish and maintain appropriate rules, expectations, and order." His rationale? The one unifying element the Center for Injury Control team discovered in the safe schools they visited was strong leadership from the principals in addition to a strong commitment and support from the teachers. "The students picked up on that. They knew the principal was boss. Teenagers respect fair, consistent authority," says Kellermann. "Whether the school is a rural school, a fancy suburban school, or an inner city school, leadership is the most critical qua lity. And I think leadership is a skill that can be taught, just as I teach medical students in the emergency department how to handle pressure and make good medical decisions." Clearly, the predictions earlier in the decade that school violence would be eliminated by the year 2000 will fall short. Although Kellermann doesn't think that violence will be totally eliminated, "I think there will come a time when we look at school shootings with the same kind of historical curiosity that we now view the airplane hijackings in the 1970s," he says. "I hope we'll look back and say, 'It's 2010, and there hasn't been a school shooting in seven or eight years.' " How will we reach that point? Kellermann admits he doesn't know. "We simply don't have all the answers yet. But it's time to stop whining and pointing our fingers at each other in a circle of blame -- with family members pointing at the media, the medi a blaming society, society blaming the police, the police saying it is the fault of families." "If each group would stop blaming each other and say 'I can't fix that but I can help by doing this,' then you no longer have a circle of blame. You have the problem surrounded and everybody coming at it from the perspective of doing what they can to make it better. As simple as it sounds, it has the potential to be very powerful." Sherry Baker is a freelance writer in Atlanta.