Prevention urged as key in school safety

Kevlar-covered textbooks and bulletproof backpacks aren't a remedy for violence in schools, one of the nation's leading experts on the subject told educators and police gathered Tuesday at Seattle University.

While those were ideas pitched by a former Oklahoma school superintendent candidate and a Boston startup company, respectively, University of Virginia professor Dewey Cornell instead advocates early prevention as the solution for a problem magnified by several recent local and national violent incidents.

Cornell, the director of the Virginia Youth Violence Project, spoke Tuesday with counselors from Seattle high schools, universities and community colleges along with police officers from the Seattle Police Department and local campus security teams.

Prevention, Cornell said, isn't achieved by arming teachers or students, like some University of Washington students recently contended in a weeklong demonstration to try to lobby the university to allow guns on campus.

Even the host of universities who have implemented text-message alert systems and other emergency communication devices don't have it quite right, Cornell said.

"Prevention is not something that starts when there's a gunman at the door," he said.

After a streak of much-publicized shootings on college campuses around the country, a number of universities -- including the UW, SU and a few other local schools -- have created risk-assessment teams to evaluate reportedly troubled students' danger to themselves and to others.

If a faculty member reports that a student is acting out in class or showing signs of distress, the committee evaluates the situation and determines the risk factor -- especially if there has been any kind of threat.

The idea is that all reports of disturbing behavior will go one place -- eliminating potentially deadly miscommunications.

Several Virginia Tech professors reported that Seung-Hui Cho, the student who killed more than 30 people at that campus last year, needed to undergo mental evaluation. Though he was briefly treated at a counseling center, a post-shooting investigation revealed the professors' reports weren't compiled in the same office.

Risk-assessment teams are the beginning of a system Cornell thinks will make schools safer places -- though he pointed out Wednesday that homicide rates have sunk drastically on school grounds during the past decade.

Juvenile arrests for homicide have decreased dramatically over the past several decades, according to FBI data. In 1993, 3,284 young people were included in that category. In 2006, there were only 956 arrests.

Homicides at U.S. schools also peaked during the first part of the 1990s. In the school year that concluded in 1993, there were 42 homicides on school or college property while classes were in session, according to the National School Safety Center.

There were 11 homicides at schools during the daytime in the 2006-07 year.

But though Cornell advocated that educators and police should know the warning signs of a potentially dangerous student, he discouraged making blanket generalizations, such as that a dangerous student might be socially anxious or shy.

"When you get a student who is angry and upset and distressed, it's very easy to imagine maybe he's going to be another Cho," Cornell said.