crimes against teens occur on or near schools. .
- Nearly 3 million index crimes occur on or around American school campuses which is 16,000 crimes per school day or about 1 every 6 seconds when schools are in.
session (Stephens, 1).
Despite the prevalence of youth violence, many believe that it can be slowed down. The public outcry to understand this problem and its causes has swept across the nation's school districts and communities, especially around the more urban areas. Identifying what can be done to better safeguard our schools and to more easily select and integrate these policies and practices is a major focus of this paper. In the next area of this essay, I present a broad range of policies currently being used in schools across the country to contain, prevent, and hopefully reverse the violence in high schools. .
In this first section, I discuss several key approaches schools and districts are using to respond to emergencies, including search-and-seizure measures, dress codes, and other policies that regulate and discipline student behavior. These measures have been widely used by schools over recent years. This is most likely due to the fact that these rules can be implemented within a relatively short timeframe, and can quickly restore a sense of safety, discipline and order. .
The first area to look at is that of student conduct codes. These are basic rules governed by a particular school that are designed to rid the weapons, drugs, gang activity, hate crimes, and violent behaviors from their campus. One problem with this idea is that people like teachers and city council members create and bring about these new codes for schools. For this strategy to be more effective, I believe that they should be catering more towards the younger, student's needs. Perhaps the idea of inviting a certain number of students themselves to collaborate with these older individuals to participate in writing more efficient, current, and knowledgeable policies for which a school abides by.
