The 3 Rs to Dealing with Trauma in Schools -- Readiness, Response and Recovery

This two and a half hour video conference features experts from around the country who explore issues related to trauma, its impact on children, and implications for schools and school personnel. The conference was presented by the U.S. Department of Education Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program; The Harvard School of Public Health; Education Development Center, Inc.; and the Prevention Institute. The video conference can be viewed online.

Developing Good Crisis Plans

This paper was published in September 1997 as part of a continuing series of school safety and violence prevention issue papers from the Pennsylvania State School Safety Center, Center for Safe Schools.

National Association of School Psychologists

The mission of the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) is to promote educationally and psychologically healthy environments for all children and youth by implementing research-based, effective programs that prevent problems, enhance independence, and promote optimal learning. This is accomplished through state-of-the-art research and training, advocacy, ongoing program evaluation, and caring professional service. Numerous crisis response resources are available through NASP.

National Resource Center for Safe Schools

The National Resource Center for Safe Schools works with schools, communities, state and local education agencies, and other concerned individuals and agencies to create safe learning environments and prevent school violence.

UCLA Center for Mental Health in Schools

The UCLA Center for Mental Health in Schools produced a guide to crisis response entitled "Responding to Crisis in School." The document provides a set of guides and handouts to use in crisis planning and as aids for training staff to respond effectively. The guide contains materials to guide the organization and initial training of a school-based crisis team, as well as materials to use in ongoing training and as information handouts for staff, students, and parents.

Virginia Department of Education

The Virginia Department of Education developed a model school crisis plan, which was intended to be used as a tool by schools and school districts that are developing or refining crisis plans. It contains model policies, procedures, and forms that can be adopted or modified.

State of Missouri Department of Public Safety

This model plan provides communities with tools for developing a comprehensive crisis response plan. The plan emphasizes collaboration while explaining the importance of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.

Los Angeles County Office of Education Safe Schools Center

The Los Angeles County Office of Education's Safe Schools Center provides local leadership and support to this county's 81 school districts, comprised of over 1,700 schools. In particular, the Center helps ensure that all schools remain safe and secure.

State of California

The Crisis Response Box reflects best practices used throughout California and the nation in presenting and responding to school crises, such as school shootings.

Final Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative: Implications for the Prevention of School Attacks in the United States

The U.S. Secret Service completed a study of the behavior and thinking of young persons who committed acts of targeted violence in the nation's schools. The goal of the U.S. Secret Service's Safe School Initiative is to provide accurate and useful information to school administrators, educators, law enforcement professionals, and others who have protective and safety responsibilities in schools in order to help prevent incidents of targeted violence in school. In this report, investigators released findings from their analysis of the behavior and thinking of more than 30 school shooters.

Threat Assessment in Schools: A Guide to Managing Threatening Situations and to Creating Safe School Climates

Based on its findings from its study of school shooters, the U.S. Secret Service released a report that sets forth a process for identifying, assessing, and managing students who may pose a threat of targeted violence in schools. The guide is intended for use by school personnel, law enforcement officials, and others with protective responsibilities in the nation's schools. The guide includes suggestions for developing a threat assessment team within a school or school district, steps to take when a threat or other information of concern comes to light, consideration about whether to involve law enforcement personnel, issues of information sharing, and ideas for creating safe school climates.

The School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective

This monograph was developed from the concepts and principles developed by the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) in nearly 25 years of experience in threat assessment, ideas generated at a 1999 NCAVC symposium on school shootings, and an in-depth review of 18 school shooting cases.

Blueprints for Violence Prevention

In 1996, the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence (CSPV), with funding from the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (and later from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency), initiated a project to identify violence prevention programs that met a high scientific standard of program effectiveness. These outstanding programs are described in a series of "blueprints" that provide information regarding their theoretical rationales, core components, evaluation designs and results, and the practical experiences that programs encountered during implementation across multiple sites.

School Violence Prevention Initiative

This Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS) initiative is designed to improve mental health services for children with emotional and behavioral disorders who are at risk of violent behavior, and to focus on developing the integrated continuum of prevention, early intervention, and treatment. The CMHS initiative on school violence focuses on the collective involvement of families, communities, and schools to build resiliency to disruptive behavior disorders (for example, oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).

Hamilton Fish Prevention Program

The Hamilton Fish Institute, with assistance from Congress, was founded in 1997 to serve as a national resource to test the effectiveness of school violence prevention methods and to develop more effective strategies. The Institute's goal is to determine what works and what can be replicated to reduce violence in America's schools and their communities.

School Safety Resources

This site provides an extensive list of school safety publications, including the Annual Reports on School Safety and Indicators of School Crime and Safety, from the U.S. Department of Justice as well as from other federal agencies. It also provides links to to a sampling of additional agencies and organizations with resources on school safety

Best Practices of Youth Violence Prevention: A Sourcebook for Community Action

Best Practices, a publication from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC), is the first of its kind to look at the effectiveness of specific violence prevention practices in four key areas: parents and families; home visiting; social and conflict resolution skills; and mentoring. These programs are drawn from real-world experiences of professionals and advocates who have successfully worked to prevent violence among children and adolescents. The sourcebook also documents the science behind each best practice and offers a directory of additional resources.

Youth Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General

This report is the first Surgeon General's report on youth violence. The product of extensive collaboration, it reviews a large body of research on where, when, and how much youth violence occurs, what causes it, and which of today's many preventive strategies are effective.

Aggressors, Victims, and Bystanders

Aggressors, Victims and Bystanders is a 12-week curriculum that aims to change the roles that students play in potentially violent situations. Most students are not aggressors but rather bystanders to violence. Typically, most people either passively accept violence or overtly encourage it, as a result of habitual patterns of thought and behavior. The curriculum's goal is to change those patterns and to teach children to become "nonviolent problem-solvers." In that role, they can change the course of volatile situations at school.

Bullying Prevention Program

The Bullying Prevention Program is a universal intervention for the reduction and prevention of bully-victim problems. The main arena for the program is the school, and school staff has the primary responsibility for the introduction and implementation of the program. The program targets students in elementary, middle, and junior high schools. All students within a school participate in most aspects of the program. Additional individual interventions are targeted at students who are identified as bullies or victims of bullying.

Resolving Conflict Creatively Program

Educators for Social Responsibility created the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program, which is a comprehensive K-12 school-based program in conflict resolution. The primary goal of the curriculum is to ensure that young people develop the social and emotional skills needed to reduce violence and prejudice, form caring relationships, and build healthy lives.

Silence Hurts

Silence Hurts is a research-based informational campaign designed to supplement existing efforts to promote school safety. Strong messages, developed by teens for teens, are crafted to help break the "code of silence" to prevent school violence.

Beyond Blame

In response to the terrorist tragedy of September 11 and subsequent attacks against Arab Americans, Education Development, Inc., developed a free, 30-page curriculum for middle and high school students focused on issues of justice and mislaid blame. The curriculum features three lessons that are designed to stimulate student reflection, discussion and writing.

Educators for Social Responsibility

Educators for Social Responsibility have created more than 50 free lesson plans customized to help educators and students discuss and understand recent events, including war, peace, conflict, bullying, anthrax, airline safety, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, discrimination, hate crimes, and a range of divergent points of view.

Peace Corps Returned Volunteers

The Peace Corps sponsors a program in which returned volunteers go to schools and talk about their experiences of living in another country and culture. Volunteers share their experiences, insights, and stories of learning to live effectively and respectfully with those of another culture. The goal is to broaden perspectives and promote understanding, with a focus on getting kids to think about the world, themselves, and others in a way that promotes tolerance and understanding across cultures.

National Service-Learning Clearinghouse

The National Service-Learning Clearinghouse (NSLC) provides resources for those interested in establishing or enhancing service-learning projects. Service-learning combines service objectives with learning objectives, with the intent that the activity change the recipient and the provider of the service. NSLC provides tool kits, syllabi and curricula, funding sources, effective practices, and other resources.

Learning In Deed: Making a Difference Through Service-Learning

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation launched this national initiative in 1998 to engage more young people in service to others as part of their academic lives. Learning In Deed is comprised of four components: Policy and Practice Demonstration Projects, National Commission on Service-Learning, Learning In Deed K-12 Service-Learning Leadership Network, and Learning In Deed Research Network.

Fast Response Survey System

This survey collects and reports data on key education issues at the elementary and secondary level. It was designed to meet the data needs of USED analysts, planners, and decision-makers when information could not be quickly collected through traditional surveys from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Indicators of School Crime and Safety, 2000

This report, the third in a series of annual reports on school crime and safety from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics, presents the latest available data on school crime and student safety. It synthesizes information from a variety of independent data sources from federal departments and agencies, including the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) is a school-based study of the health-related behaviors of adolescents in grades 7-12. It was designed to explore the causes of these behaviors, with an emphasis on the influence of social context. Add Health postulates that families, friends, schools, and communities play roles in the lives of adolescents that may encourage healthy choices of activities or may lead to unhealthy, self-destructive behaviors.

Monitoring the Future

Funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, this is an ongoing study of the behaviors, attitudes, and values of American secondary school students, college students, and young adults. Each year, a total of some 50,000 eighth, tenth, and twelfth grade students are surveyed (twelfth graders since 1975, and eighth and tenth graders since 1991).

School-Associated Violent Death Study

This study, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in conjunction with the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice, seeks to estimate the rate, describe the epidemiology, and identify potential risk factors and common features of school-associated violent deaths in the United States.

Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS)

Developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in collaboration with federal, state, and private sector partners, this system provides information about the prevalence of risk behaviors among young people at the national, state, and local levels in order to more effectively target and improve health programs.