Schools Were Getting Much Safer Until 2010, Government Report Says
Posted: Updated:
 |
President Barack Obama signs a series of executive orders about the administration's new gun law proposals in January as children who wrote letters to the White House about gun violence, (L-R) Hinna Zeejah, Taejah Goode, Julia Stokes and Grant Fritz, look on in the Eisenhower Executive Office building, on January 16, 2012 in Washington, DC. One month after a massacre that left 20 school children and 6 adults dead in Newtown, Connecticut, the president unveiled a package of gun control proposals | Mark Wilson via Getty Images |
American public and private schools are generally much safer than they were 10 years ago, but school crime began a slight climb in 2010, according to a government report released Tuesday.
The rate of non-fatal incidents in which students felt victimized at school decreased to 35 per 1,000 students in 2010, from 181 per 1,000 students in 1992, according to the 2013 School Crime and Safety Report. The rate rose to 52 per 1,000 students in 2012, the report found. Any type of school crime, the report noted, increases the likelihood of dropouts, teacher turnover and student transfers.
"Over the long term, schools are getting safer," said Thomas Snyder, the report's project officer. "That doesn't mean there's not a lot of room for improvement."
The 208-page study is the 16th annual report by the U.S. Education Department and Bureau of Justice Statistics. It aggregates information from various surveys, tracking schools through 2012. Snyder said school crime data mirror overall crime trends.
"There's good news and reason for concern," said David Esquith, who directs the Education Department's Office of Safe and Healthy Students. "Schools are safer than ever. At the same time, there are data points in there that point to some alarming behaviors -- the data on forcible sex crimes on campuses, which are alarming and disturbing; the data on bullying indicates that we continue not to make a lot of progress in that area."
The report showed that most fatal crimes against students happen outside school buildings. During the 2010-2011 school year, 11 of 1,336 homicides that killed kids ages 5 to 18 took place in school. In 2010, three of the 1,456 suicides in that age group were in schools.
But in 2012, more students experienced other types of crimes in schools than they did Schools Were Getting Much Safer Until 2010, Government Report Says: