Monitoring School Violence

(archived collaboratory)

Project Abstract

This year-and-a-half long project focused on creating a prototype for schools to "self monitor" school violence at the site level with flexible linkages to comparable regional and national data. The Kellogg portion of the violence monitoring project was embedded (yet quite separate) in a large-scale national/regional study conducted in Israel. The large-scale study was funded by the Israeli Ministry of Education and is the most comprehensive national/regional survey on school violence conducted in any country to date. This included collecting two waves of data on 16,000 students (an overall 95% response rate for all waves), their teachers, and their principals.

The GPY collaboratory was working with one large school (1,100 students in grades 7-13) when it was beginning a grassroots and school/community-centered violence intervention program (Shevach Moffet Jr. High and High School in Tel Aviv, Israel). School and community youth violence had become a concern for the student council, teachers union, and PTA of the school. In 2002, the school established a school violence steering committee comprised of students, parents, teachers, support staff, police, and administrators.

During the 2003-2004 academic year (at three set times) the school administratored sub-sections of the national/regional survey. Student and teacher data was scanned into a computer program to provide quick (within a few days or less), clear, and succinct feedback/data for the site-based steering committee of teachers, principals, student groups, and parents. The data highlighted specific areas that did or did not improve based on the previous baseline, and in comparison to regional and national trends. The main goal of the monitoring project was to feed back information in a way that is ethical, specific, timely and useful to students, teachers, parents and administrators at the site level.

With this information the school site could compare within itself on a regular basis by grade level, classroom, or by the whole school over time and on the national and regional level without expensive evaluations.. School principals and teachers, as a result, could adapt quickly and respond in a flexible way to violence issues specific to their schools (e.g. if the school has a particular problem with playground violence or sexual harassment, the committee could create interventions that focus specifically on those issues).

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University of Michigan Global Program on Youth, School of Social Work Building, Room 3743
1080 South University, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1106 ssw.global@umich.edu

W.K. Kellogg Foundation

© 2002 by The Regents of the University of Michigan