Durham schools are lab for $2.5 million violence prevention project

By Jennifer Chorpening
Reprinted from the Durham Herald-Sun 1-16-00

Duke University researchers will use their own back yard - the Durham Public Schools - as a lab for studying how to stop school violence in middle schools.

With a four-year, $ 2.5 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Sanford Institute's Center for Child and Family Policy will help to develop a violence prevention program to change school culture and target at-risk children for intervention programs.

Duke researchers believe they can identify troubled 11- and 12-year-olds for special intensive treatment, including increased parental involvement and classes in social skills. The idea is to make sure names like Brogden, Githens and Shepard never gain the national notoriety of a place like Columbine.

The study won't focus on mass killings, which can't be predicted, but on stopping the pervasive, day-to-day violent and aggressive behavior of some students who torment their classmates and make adolescence more intolerable than it needs to be.

Killings like the ones at Columbine are "gripping and awful," said David Rabiner, Duke researcher and child clinical psychologist with the center.

"It's easy to lose sight over the kinds of things that happen with substantially greater frequency and affect literally thousands of kids all across the country every single day," he said. "We're going to try to reduce physical aggression and the like, verbal aggression and intimidation and harassment of varying sorts, bullying."

Kenneth Dodge, the center's director, a child clinical psychologist and professor at the Sanford Institute, said the program will have two main thrusts.

The first will be to stop the "acceptability of violence," he said. "Society has too much acceptance of anti-social behavior," such as sexual harassment and fighting, he said. For this part, researchers will work with teachers on classroom lessons and increase the emphasis on peer mediation.

The second major component will be to work intensively with high-risk kids, Dodge said. They'll look to past behavioral and court records, to find children with aggressive and anti-social history, he said. Then the researchers will get parents involved, hold special tutoring sessions, teach better behavior and social skills, and monitor progress daily.

According to research from the CDC, in 1997, 15 percent of high school students nationwide were involved in one or more physical fights on school property, and 4 percent missed one or more days of school because they felt unsafe traveling to or from school. That same year, 58 students died in school-associated deaths. A school-associated death is one that occurs on school property, at a school-sponsored event, or on the way to or from a school-sponsored event.

Duke faculty will work with researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Illinois, and the University of Georgia, as well as local community agencies, to develop the program over the next six months for Durham and other locations, probably involving up to 40 middle schools. They hope to have the program in place for the next school year, Dodge said.

While all the middle schools in Durham have agreed to participate, researchers don't know yet which will be involved, he said.

Durham Public Schools officials are excited about working with Duke on this project, said spokesman Michael Yarbrough.

"We're convinced this is a win-win situation for all of us," he said. "Durham Public Schools is committed to the ongoing reduction and eventual eradication of violence in our schools."

Currently, each school has implemented its own safety plan, including teacher training, security and working with students on violence-prevention methods, Yarbrough said.

Because the study is taking place at so many schools, if the policies work, researchers believe they will have a program they can transfer anywhere. While many other people are studying school violence, the goal for this study is to create a comprehensive, integrated approach, Rabiner said.

Researchers want to stop school violence but at the same time don't want to just dismiss kids who show dangerous behavior patterns, as many schools may be doing now with zero-tolerance policies, Dodge said. Those policies, where any incident can be cause to expel or suspend, no matter what the circumstances, do at times go overboard, Dodge said.

Some national columnists, as well as activists like Jesse Jackson, have criticized zero-tolerance policies. In a recent column, Ellen Goodman from The Washington Post Writers Group, wrote, "We've developed an attitude - and not just in schools - where zero tolerance often translates into a quick and dirty way of kicking kids out. We're in a time of a general crackdown - a tough love without the love."

Goodman wrote how two Virginia fifth-graders were charged with felonies after allegedly putting soap in their teacher's water.

Dodge, who used to live in Nashville, Tenn., remembers an incident there a few years ago when a second-grade boy, in play, stuck a pencil in a girl's arm and was kicked out of school for a year.

"That's kind of absurd," Dodge said. "We need to change the culture - we're all for that - but we also need to be thoughtful as to what to do with these kids. Do we really think that after a year they'll be sorry and come back [to school the same]?"

The center's program will work to balance intolerance of violence while still reaching out to the kids who commit the violent acts, Dodge said.

"We need to think in a different way about violence," he said. Some child psychologists have done studies that statistically predict which children may be especially predisposed to violent acts even at very young ages, Dodge said.

"By the time they are 4 years old, they already display aggressive behavior problems," Dodge said. "We can do things to prevent these [violent] outcomes."