Written on: March 14, 2018
By preventing violence within schools, we can #Project Compassion
Here’s How To Prevent The Next School Shooting, Experts Say
March 7, 2018. Johnson/NPR
After Parkland, there have been many calls to make schools a “harder target” — for example, by arming teachers. But there’s a decent amount of research out there on what actually makes schools safer, and most of it doesn’t point to more guns.
On the Friday after the deadly shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, Matthew Mayer, a professor at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education, got an email during a faculty meeting.
The email was from Shane Jimerson, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Both specialize in the study of school violence.
That email led to nearly two weeks of long days, Mayer says, for some of the leading experts in the field. On conference calls and in Google docs they shaped a concise, eight-point “Call for Action To Prevent Gun Violence In The United States of America.”
About 200 universities, national education and mental health groups, school districts, and more than 2,300 individual experts have signed on to support this document in the weeks since.
Their topline message: Don’t harden schools. Make them softer, by improving social and emotional health. Read the full article here.