Inquiring Minds Want to Know

Insight on the News, Nov 1, 1999 by Aimee Howd

"Traditionally, youth violence has been addressed by justice or sociological domains and not as a concern for the public-health system. In recent years a proven, effective public-health approach has become an increasingly important resource in the effort to prevent youth violence" argues author M.A. Hamburg in Violence in American Schools: A New Perspective. He recommends tracking risk factors and doing epidemiological studies for youth violence as for any other public-health concern.

Certainly many children need to be noticed and helped. Recent studies say that 9 to 13 percent of children ages 0-19 (and as many as one in five teenagers) have emotional or behavioral problems that interfere with their academic and social adjustment. Roughly one-third of teen-age deaths in the U.S. are a result of homicide or suicide.

With images of school violence from Paducah, Ky., to Littleton, Colo., seared into the public's memory during the last two years, popular opinion and federal dollars have been mobilized to support mental-health researchers who believe they can use schools to diagnose and treat mental illness to keep other children's psychological troubles from boiling over into tragedy.

"I think this is a real window of opportunity. I think the focus on school violence has opened a lot of people's eyes to the fact that there's a lot of things going on that we aren't doing a lot about," says Mike Nelson, a researcher at the University of Kentucky who works with OSEP.

Nelson served on a task force that recommended systematic screening for all Kentucky schools in 1991. When the recommendations were passed into law by the Kentucky Legislature, screening was rendered optional because local schools found the mass screening burdensome. Nelson says he doesn't know of a single school that has implemented a screening program as recommended but believes public policy is moving in that direction. "I think that there is critical mass developing -- especially with the support of the federal government."

RELATED ARTICLE: The School as Parent

When Sandra Delancey discovered what had been troubling her 8-year-old son, Kyle, since he entered third grade at his suburban Pittsburgh school in September 1995, she was outraged.

The boy's school had agreed to allow William Pelham, a behavioral researcher, and the University of Pittsburgh's Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic access to their 5- to 10-year-old students for an experimental research project. Called the Pittsburgh School-Wide Intervention Model, or PSWIM, it was funded in part by the National Institute of Mental Health. Although designed for children with serious behavior disorders, PSWIM was adopted schoolwide and every student was required to participate. "Neither [the researchers nor the school] thought they needed to get parents' permission -- or else they didn't care," Delancey says.

It wasn't until November, when a mother discovered a "Disruptive Behavior Disorder" analysis form, that Delancey -- and other parents, mystified by the signs of stress their usually typical children were exhibiting -- became aware of the behavior modification, psychological testing and sociometric analyses to which researchers were subjecting their kids. The telltale form asked teachers to report the frequency of a student's behavior from fidgeting and humming to stealing, starting fires and forcing others into sex. Other elements of the process included giving students a page of photos of classmates and instructing them to put an "X" next to the three they disliked the most.