Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Monday, April 24th, 2023

A Study Finds California School Violence Has Decreased Over the Last 18 Years. Better Support Services Could Be Part of the Reason

Author:     Divya Prakash and Manny Valladares
Source:     Southern California Public Radio
Publication Date:     Apr 19, 2023 | 3:06 PM
 Link: A Study Finds California School Violence Has Decreased Over the Last 18 Years. Better Support Services Could Be Part of the Reason
Stephan:  

Here is some excellent news from Blue state California. Although American schools are all too often the target of violence by outsiders, California schools themselves have become much safer with less violence, less bullying, and less racism. This has nothing to do with the Republican idea of arming teachers, or having police with AR-15s patrolling the halls. It has to do with fostering wellbeing. Red states wake up and see what works.

High school students participate in after-school tutoring.
Credit: Allison Shelley / The Verbatim Agency / EDUImages

As reports of mass shootings dominate the headlines, it might be hard to imagine that there has been a decline in weapons possession and violence in California schools — but that’s what a longitudinal study published in the World Journal of Pediatrics found.

  • a 56% reduction in physical fights
  • a 70% reduction in reports of carrying a gun onto school grounds, and a 68% reduction in bringing other weapons, such as a knife, to school
  • a 59% reduction in being threatened by a weapon on school grounds
  • and larger declines in victimization reported by Black and Latino students compared to white students

A dramatic change

Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social welfare at UCLA and a co-author of the study, joined LAist’s public affairs talk show AirTalk to dig into the numbers and possible causes of this trend. He and his team studied 18 years of data from the California Healthy Kids Survey, which asks students about their school environments, feeling of connectedness, and risk […]

Read the Full Article

2 Comments

  1. Fritz Elmendorf on Monday, April 24, 2023 at 6:32 am

    A surprising bit of good news when all the headlines are about school shootings.

  2. Albus Eddie on Tuesday, April 25, 2023 at 5:42 am

    As a society we have been hard wiring a culture of distrust which was accelerated by the US Patriot Act. This data shows the effects of changing our priorities, stopping the non-virtuous cycle of distrust and replacing it with hard wired trust focused structurally healthy alternatives.