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Reducing violence in U.S. schools
Dispute Resolution Journal, Nov 1998 by Denenberg, Tia Schneider, Denenberg, Richard V, Braverman, Mark
In Springfield, Oregon, in May, a 15-year-old armed with a semiautomatic rifle begins firing in a crowded high school cafeteria, leaving two students dead and 22 others wounded.' In Arkansas, the police charges that a 13year-old joined with an 11-year-old friend to kill five persons at the Westfield Middle School in Jonesboro in March. In Kentucky, Michael Carneal pleads guilty to killing three classmates and wounding five others at a prayer meeting in Heath High School in West Paducah late last year. At the time of the murders he was 14.
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School life once resembled gentle scenes from "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," but in recent years bloody episodes like these have been acted out in secondary and middle schools throughout the country. Schools have become an arena for violent conflict, even in tranquil rural regions and well-to-do suburbs.
This unprecedented eruption of mayhem demonstrates an urgent need for school districts to emulate private and public sector workplaces by adopting a comprehensive violence reduction strategy, marrying the insights of conflict resolution and crisis management. The strategy should embrace both prevention and intervention. Prevention focuses on relieving the stress, hostility, and tension that can precede violence, and on ensuring detection of danger signals. Intervention entails responding promptly and effectively to threats and danger risks.
The strategy relies heavily on dispute resolution skills. Mediation, facilitation, and conciliation can ensure collaborative problem-solving by the violenceprevention team and mobilize the necessary school and community resources. Dispute resolvers, moreover, are needed to help design and operate a variety of mechanisms for reducing tension and conflict on a day-to-day basis.
Violence Prone v. Violence Prepared Schools
Shootings, assaults, harassment, and bullying at school can be viewed as a manifestation of a worldwide eruption in workplace violence. Owing in part to the relatively free access to guns, the U.S. is often thought of as a particularly violent country, yet the Geneva-based International Labor Organization has concluded that violent incidents "occurring at workplaces around the globe suggest that this issue is truly one that transcends the boundaries of a particular country, work setting, or occupational group."2 The ILO urged that "the full range of causes that generate violence should be analyzed and a variety of intervention strategies adopted. The response to workplace violence is too frequently limited, episodic, and ill-defined."'
Schools, like workplaces, may be divided into the crisis-prone and the crisisprepared.4 The crisis-prone organization denies the possibility of crises, such as outbreaks of violence, and does nothing to prevent or prepare for them, thereby increasing the chance of severe disruption and harm. It reacts to events, rather than reading the warning signs that might allow tragedy to be averted or mitigated. Such an organization is typically mired in adversarial standoff, thwarting genuine internal communication and problem-solving.
The crisis-prepared organization, in contrast, systematically collects and analyzes early signs of distress, and it cultivates stakeholders' sense of mutual interest in responding effectively to incipient strains. Far from denying the possibility of crises, the organization determines in advance how to deal with them. Rather than hunting for a few supposed "bad apples" in the barrel, it checks the barrel itself for defects.
Violence is a human response to stress. Even "normal" people can react violently when stress becomes unbearable. Symptoms and signals of individual and organizational breakdown typically precede every threat or act of violence. A potential for violence is created when an organization does not read the signals or interrupt the downward spiral. A good prevention program seeks to identify and relieve the sources of stress in the workplace and put in place mechanisms to deal with threats.
School violence is an especially complex phenomenon, fueled by a rich mixture of stakeholders. They include employees (teachers, administrators, and non-teaching staff) and the consumers of educational services (students and parents). Each category of stakeholder is subject to its own variety of stress. The pressures of adolescence and the demand for academic performance affect students. Job demands and labor-management tension affect teachers, particularly when they are locked into hyper-adversarial relationships with school authorities and feel scapegoated in public discourse for student underachievement. Parsimonious taxpayers may be denying resources to administrators who must cope with high immigration levels, demands for bilingual education, and a plethora of government mandates.
And in an era of rapid technological change, parents may feel burdened by the responsibility to ensure that their children are equipped with an education that prepares them for an uncertain future. Exponents of the gang lifestyle, moreover, may be lurking just beyond the schoolyard fence. In addition, the intense struggles central to the "culture wars" of recent decades-over AIDS, illegal drug use, homosexuality, religious freedom, and free speech rights-have to a large extent taken place in the school setting.
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