Introduction
School violence is a vexing, complicated problem that must be productively addressed to decrease destruction of schools and allow nonviolent, non-behaviorally disturbed children to learn. Whether in cities or towns, the violence is increasing. There is regression to "an eye for an eye" mentality, which agrees that violence is going to happen in schools. Americans want to punish violent behavior without understanding what is causing the violence or developing appropriate methods to address it early in children's lives.

The problem of school violence is not going to be resolved through the traditional approach. Rather, any effective effort to reduce violence should be comprehensive and intensive, involving both the parents and the community. Because current efforts seem ineffective to the task and many parents act out the entire spectrum of negativity, the goal should be to get the parents into the school to promote understanding and cooperation.

In recent years, parental tendency has been to blame schools and teachers for student difficulties. Of course, the problem lies on both sides of the issue, but placing the blame does little to solve the problem. The bottom line is to reduce the punishment mentality among schoolteachers and administrators, replacing it with understanding for the children's distress and finding ways to help and love the children.

Rene Spitz, a great psychiatrist from earlier this century said, "Children who are raised without love become adults filled with hate."1 True to this warning, we are seeing many adolescents filled with hatred, wanting to hurt and having no capacity for empathy or remorse. To turn the tide away from violence, we have to model a nonviolent and pro-child approach in the school system.

The earliest marker for children who will ultimately create difficulties and act in violent ways is truancy. The need to reduce the number of children out of school every day, with no excuse and often with the support of the family, is urgent.

Suspensions
Attention must be paid to the number of suspensions that a child has had over a number of years. It is imperative that we have an alerting system regarding suspensions so that when a child has had three suspensions, even if it's one a year for three years, the school district imposes some review of the child's overall behavior. Six suspensions should set off alarms, and ten suspensions should invoke an intensive review and evaluation of the child. The school districts would be wise to impose a suspension-alerting program that would allow the district officials, with the help of other agencies in the community, to address the needs of children who appear to be having serious difficulty.

Bullying
Every adult in the school has to be trained and willing to stop bullying by letting the bully know that "we don't do that here." Bullying results in concern about going to school because of the possibility of getting hurt, beat up and humiliated. This concern may be translated to anxiety disorders, depression or school absence. If we dismiss bullying by saying, "That's the way kids are," we exacerbate the problem. I recently visited an urban school that enrolls only high-achievers; this campus had quiet halls compared to others in similar neighborhoods where there is raucous hitting, hurting, running, pushing and bullying. The children in this host school were walking along, talking quietly to one another and moving easily from class to class. Such behavior can happen when every single adult from the principal to the janitor is involved in quickly addressing and stopping negative behavior between children.

Safe Corridors
Some successful schools have developed a safe corridor program to protect children on the way to school. Safety and confidence that the streets are a safe place for children, particularly on the way to and from school, is critical to fostering a mindset of learning. Furthermore, getting volunteers with easily identified colored jackets to stand in the streets could make children feel less concerned about the trip from home to school.

Volunteers who participate in safe corridor programs will find it to be a gratifying experience. In addition, they can engage local merchants to refuse to sell anything to children after 8:45 a.m., and they can develop safe havens in churches and other community buildings. Volunteer patrols could have walkie-talkies and, while they may have no official capacity, they could certainly call police when a fight erupts. Such a program that provides attentive, adult eyes kindly helping children through the streets and into the school building is relatively easy to establish, yet it is an important and uncomplicated solution to many problems.

One caveat is that volunteers have to come out twice every day, rain, shine, sleet or snow. This is one of the most difficult barriers to safe corridor programs, but with diligence and good communication, administrators can find people in the community who want to be an important part of preventing violence in and out of school.

After-school Programs
One of the most successful ways to reduce school violence is to develop programs for latchkey children with nothing to do after school but get into trouble. Good after-school activities can range from crafts to sports, community service, small jobs or tagging along after an adult to organized field trips and special treats. Gangs are part of the trouble that starts after school, for they are formed after school hours in streets and alleys, in children's homes and various unsupervised places, only to come into the schools later. Clearly, after-school programs are much less costly than all the unpleasant alternatives when children get into trouble.

Mentoring
Finding appropriate mentors for children is an effective way to train them into a safe path and help them understand complex issues of values, ethics and critical thinking. In Philadelphia, the Bar Association works with the School District and the District Attorney's Office to develop an Attorney Mentoring Program. This organization made a small but important beginning by going into middle schools for mentoring. Children desperately need adult models to help them curb tendencies of acting out their anger and hatred caused by emotional and physical hurt. It is possible that mentoring programs are so rare because the effort must continue over a period of years to be effective. Children only incur further losses when a mentor spends just a semester or even a year before disappearing from their lives. It's the children who are getting into trouble, getting suspended, cutting school and being rude and disruptive while in school who need to have someone to tame their negative passions and to help them adjust to the real world. These children must have the attention of committed adults who will be a sustained influence in their lives.

Curriculum
I'm often told that schools are not social services agencies but educational institutions, so the imposition of an additional burden on the schools is not the direction that the district wants to take. Nevertheless, in order to address the needs of children who are either potentially or actually in trouble we need to have the cooperation of the schools. Revising the curriculum to give opportunities for children to deal with extraordinary emotional problems that interfere with their ability to learn will help those troubled children and their classmates who are distracted by the acting out.

If offered by the school, parenting education could be the most important primary prevention for violence in our adolescents. This education might eliminate corporal punishment as well as physical and sexual abuse of children, resulting in healthier emotional and psychological treatment. Introducing parenting education to the children in kindergarten through twelfth grade will give importance to helping children understand proper values and the nature of human relations. Preparing the children for good marriages and working with others will improve their chances for lifelong success.

Another curricular change might be the introduction of community service as a course. Children can participate in the cleanup of streets and neighborhoods, learning values that can make their environment cleaner and safer. Moreover, these additions to basic curriculum will enhance the core of reading, writing and arithmetic. Children who absolutely cannot learn because they are at risk and under enormous stress will turn the corner and join in the greater communal effort toward a better society.

Threats
Threats against safety in schools need to be taken seriously. The tragedy in Columbine, Colorado has alerted the entire nation to the need to deal immediately with threats made by children to kill, blow up, hurt or damage. Currently the nation has been so sensitized to overt destruction by children that people demand only the route of punishment and humiliation without looking at the underlying causes of distress.

One of the most serious problems is the tendency for more and more children to bring weapons into the school, mostly resulting in long lines of children waiting to go through a metal detector to get into the school building. Though metal detectors do ensure a certain amount of safety, they also suggest the possibility of danger, so children may feel powerless and endangered. Erroneously, they think that carrying a weapon will help them if they encounter problems, leading to wrongful killing because the weapon that could empower a child is easily misused in an impulsive way.

Similarly, children who feel isolated and alone, who don't feel loved or have a reasonably good family, might join gangs. Gang members say that the gang is "their family." Even though gang members may perhaps achieve some sense of belonging and a feeling that they are in an environment that protects them, gangs, like carrying guns, are motivated by fear. Children who feel isolated, alone and alienated are the ones who will find comfort and community in the gang. In Makes Me Wanna Holler2, Nathan McCall vividly describes how powerful he felt the first time he carried a gun on the street. The frightening description of his personal relief from anxiety should be a lesson to us with regard to guns.

Identifying the At-Risk Child
It should be clear that the earlier we know which child is having problems, the sooner we can stop that child from getting into trouble. Obviously though, identifying the child is only the first step toward actually doing something to arrest the tendency that is in the child. The job for the school is to identify the disruptive child who is behaving in a bizarre fashion, who is withdrawn and isolated and who is not learning or participating. All of these are signs that trouble is brewing. It is important to pay attention and to have a system in place that will allow children and families to get help quickly, consistently and comprehensively.

In Philadelphia I have instituted a series of monthly meetings with school personnel to not only identify the children but to develop a prescription to help the child. Our goal is to ensure that teachers and principals in elementary schools know as early as first or second grade which children are going to end up in trouble, which children are troubled and which children are having difficulty learning. Though helpful, the usual solutions of special classes for the learning disabled and emotionally disturbed may be inadequate to the complexity of the task.

Currently, the responsibility for identifying the at-risk child rests on the principal and the teacher. Perhaps the counselor and the nurse may be brought into it, but these staff members may feel powerless to act. After trying to reach the parents, who often are unavailable and trying to find ways to cope within their own resources, counselors are likely to feel hopeless and without tools to solve the problem. Yet, it is not only their problem to solve. It is a problem of the entire, and unsuspecting, community. All of the appropriate agencies should come together in the best interests of all children and use whatever methods are necessary to bring order to a threatened child's life. Extremes such as removing the child from the home or putting the child into residential care for long periods of time may appear radical but could be life saving. It is clear that we must identify the at-risk children and bring some communal strength to bear in trying to help them.

Interagency Communication
Communication among interested parties is often blocked by the false bureaucratic protection of confidentiality. When people work in agencies that are designed to help children, confidentiality should not block them from talking to one another to find a communal solution to the child's problem. Once the child has been identified, we need to break down barriers of confidentiality and open up our computer systems to one another to allow the child's history to be revealed in order to find ways to redirect the child in the best way. The inability of one group to talk to another leaves the child with no protection whatsoever. It is critically important that we rethink the idea that holding things in confidence or getting rid of records or giving the child "another chance" is going to be helpful in the long run. We as a community need to act as a community in a cooperative and collaborative way.

Conclusion Children need to grow up feeling safe, secure, loved and wanted, and they need to understand the value of education and of being cooperative citizens. We know that among the millions of school children in America there are thousands that are in trouble, and we also know that these children can be helped if we devise ways to implement the programs described above. The myth that you have to "tame" or "control" a child early in life in order to ensure that he or she won't act badly in adolescence and adulthood is one of the most dangerous and deleterious concepts in America.

We must reduce corporal punishment. Children who are beaten for reasons that their caregivers consider justifiable and appropriate learn very early to hate the very people that they are supposed to love. They also have no idea what to do with their rage and anger, frequently striking at people who are weaker and younger. Developing coping strategies on every level to bring peace, tranquility and order to the schools and communities is a task that needs to be everybody's job. We also have to find ways to break down the barriers among various agencies, all of whom want to help and are paid and designed to fix some of the problems. We need to eliminate the idea that the police are the enemy and find ways to incorporate law officers into all interagency efforts to reduce violence. The community must rise up and find ways to bring collaborative methods to bear to help children in need.

References
1. Spitz, R. The First Year of Life. International Universities, New York, (1965). 2. McCall, Nathan. Makes Me Wanna Holler. New York: Vintage Books, (1995).

Dr. Paul J. Fink a prominent psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and speaker, is currently senior consultant to the Charter Behavioral Health Corporation and a Professor of Psychiatry at Temple University School of Medicine.
He founded the Einstein Center for the Study of Violence at Albert Einstein Medical Center. Dr. Fink may be contacted by e-mail at Pjayfink@aol.com or 610/664-5007.

© 2000 Targeted Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

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