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Astor on Reimagining School Safety

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Ron Avi Astor, professor of social welfare, co-authored an article on reimagining school safety for the American Federation of Teachers. Adapted from a chapter in the book “Our Children Can’t Wait: The Urgency of Reimagining Education Policy in America,” the article focuses on the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic and recent forms of racial activism within the K-12 education spectrum. Astor and co-author Heather Reynolds promote creating sustainable systems and infrastructure to combat inequities within higher education. Through implementing mental health and student outreach resources, schools can address ongoing issues with victimization across campuses. For change to happen, there must be “a shift of funding and support from policing, punishment and surveillance to long-term investments in holistic prevention and empowerment of schools and communities,” the authors write.

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‘No Child Should Be Killed by Going to School’

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Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor spoke to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat after a 16-year-old student was stabbed to death during a classroom fight at a Sonoma County high school. While the nation has seen an increase in mass shootings on campuses, school violence more broadly has declined by more than 50% over the past two decades, Astor said. But he added, “Our norms are that this shouldn’t happen at all. No child should be killed by going to school.” Research on school violence often focuses on firearms, not knives and stabbings, he said. “It’s a concern because almost every child has access to a knife.” Tracking and analyzing data is key to understanding what interventions and policies work, said Astor, whose research has shown that providing schools with resources including school psychologists, restorative justice programs and more extracurricular opportunities for students has helped reduce day-to-day violence on campuses across California.

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Turner on Alternatives to School Police

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David C. Turner III, assistant professor of social welfare, spoke to the San Fernando Valley Sun about the Police Free LAUSD Coalition, which calls for redirecting funds away from school police and toward expanded mental health and academic counseling programs. Turner is co-author of a report released by the coalition that includes a five-point plan to invest in the holistic well-being of all students. “We wanted to make sure that we were able to uplift the community’s voice and also uplift some alternatives to policing that people can adopt today,” Turner said. The new report reflects the LAUSD community’s wants and needs, including the position that policing in schools prevents people from feeling safe and puts the community in danger, he said. Reallocation of funds to support students of different races is a priority, as well as community development, holistic academic achievement and the well-being of students.

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Astor on Strategies for Deterring Gun Violence

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Ron Avi Astor, professor of social welfare, spoke to the Seattle Times about the rise in gun violence across the country and the recent fatal school shooting in Seattle. “In almost every category of school safety, things have gotten better, except for the school shootings,” Astor said. Astor and a group of experts created an eight-point plan to reduce gun violence that recommended that schools steer away from hefty and unnecessary spending and instead focus on community building and climate and culture evaluation. “Twenty-five years ago it was in the millions, and now it’s in the billions and billions and billions of dollars,” Astor said, referring to local and federal spending on K-12 school safety and security. He said it is essential that schools implement strategies rooted in a clear vision for reducing gun violence, one that promotes school safety without hardening schools, increasing budgets and harming students.

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Astor on Accountability of Children Who Commit Violence

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The Associated Press spoke with Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor for a story about the possibility of parole for the shooter who killed three classmates at a high school in Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997. Michael Carneal, 14 at the time of the shooting, became eligible for parole after serving 25 years in prison. His case has illuminated the debate about the age at which children should be held strictly accountable for their actions, Astor said, noting that the lack of consensus has led to a patchwork of laws across the country. Astor recently provided context to school safety issues including strategies to deter bullying and acts of violence, as reported in the San Jose Spotlight and the podcast Schoolutions. He is also part of an American Psychological Association task force that measured the impact of the COVID-19 era on teachers and other school staff, many of whom reported frequent threats and harassment and a desire to leave their jobs.

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Listen to the Schoolutions podcast

 

UCLA, Hebrew University Receive $1.3 Million in Grants for Collaboration to Deter School Violence Top scholars, educators and practitioners will join forces to foster safe and welcoming schools

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Updated September 2023

Grants from The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation and an anonymous donor will support a new partnership between UCLA and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem focused on developing school violence prevention strategies that ensure that campuses are safe and welcoming places for children worldwide.

The UCLA-HU Collaboration for Safe Schools is a $1.3 million, two-year pilot program connecting university students, scholars and practitioners globally and across disciplines to share research and insights related to the complex underlying causes of school violence.

Through exchange programs and conferences held on each campus, the partnership will bring top U.S. and Israeli scholars together with K-12 educators, administrators and social workers; policymakers and experts in law and criminology; and graduate and undergraduate students focused on fields related to social education.

The first conference, to be held at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, will focus on how to ensure safety at schools in areas that are experiencing extreme strife at the political and social levels. Both the U.S. and Israel are experiencing such debates and tensions, with a significant impact on students. Recruitment of partnering research teams at Hebrew University and UCLA will begin in the fall of 2023.

The Collaboration for Safe Schools will also invite participants to share knowledge on gun violence, bullying and cyberbullying, youth suicide and substance abuse, as well as forms of hate including antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism, and bias against LGBTQ and immigrant communities. The alliance will lead to a deeper understanding of culturally appropriate ways to create thriving school environments. It will also stress the importance of a school curriculum that prizes not just academic success but social and emotional maturity, and makes room for integration of the arts into a holistic education that builds safe, healthy communities.

The program will operate under the leadership of two internationally recognized experts in school safety: Ron Avi Astor of UCLA and Mona Khoury-Kassabri of Hebrew University. Astor is the Marjorie Crump Endowed Professor of Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, with a joint appointment in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. Khoury-Kassabri, Hebrew University’s vice president of strategy and diversity, is the Frances and George Katz Family Chair at the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare.

“In our current unprecedented and unsettling times, such collaborations are more important than ever,” says Astor, who has worked with thousands of schools to reduce victimization of students in a career spanning three decades.

Khoury-Kassabri, an authority on community-level social justice policies and interventions that prevent juvenile delinquency, says, “This partnership will promote the worldwide reduction in hate between groups using education, exchanges and scientific data, both in the U.S. and Israel.”

The pilot program is envisioned as a prelude to what will become the UCLA-Hebrew University Center for Safe Schools, operated jointly by the two universities. The center will leverage the wide-ranging research, academic, training and field expertise of the two campuses and serve as a multidisciplinary hub supporting school safety efforts worldwide.

Read the January 2023 Luskin Forum story about Astor’s work

Astor Comments on CNN About Young Child With Bullet-Proof Backpack

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UCLA Luskin Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor commented in a CNN video (starting at 2 min. 38 sec.) about an Oklahoma mom who bought her young son a bullet-proof backpack and taught him how to use it. The viral video showing her son how to use it garnered numerous reactions from parents and experts. “I don’t blame the parents; parents are right to be afraid. But, what we do about [violence], or where we go from here needs to be looked at very carefully,” Astor said. He advises that research shows prevention is favored over increased security measures at schools and suggests that parents consult websites for organizations such as the National Association of School Psychologists. “Having especially very young children walking around thinking that they may be shot at any given moment could create a lot of anxiety, a lot of depression, a lot of fear that’s unneeded and maybe not justified because there’s other ways to become safe,” Astor said.

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Astor on Good and Bad Trends in School Safety

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Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor spoke to media covering the release of a federal report showing that the 2020-21 school year had the highest number of school shooting casualties in the past two decades. Astor told the Washington Post that he welcomed the report’s broad definition of school shootings, which includes instances when guns were fired or brandished on school property, or when a bullet struck school grounds for any reason. The presence of a gun can be traumatic to anyone on campus, not just those hurt or targeted, he said. The report also identified a positive trend: decreased rates of nonfatal criminal victimization, such as theft, and less bullying and harassment. “People have been working really hard to reduce the bullying, the name-calling, the kicking, harassment kinds of issues, and we’ve been pretty effective as a country at reducing them,” Astor told K-12 Dive.

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Read the K-12 Dive article

 

Astor Cautions Against ‘Making Schools Into Little Prisons’

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Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor spoke about competing approaches to curbing gun violence in an extended interview on the Slate podcast “What Next.” Astor cautioned against plans that would “make schools into little prisons” with metal detectors, steel doors, armed teachers and other strategies to “harden” campuses, which can deepen students’ anxiety, according to research. He called for vigilance to detect a constellation of risk factors displayed by potential school shooters, including suicidal thoughts, a hunger for attention and an extreme obsession with firearms, prior shooters and conspiracy theories that focus on harming others. Several other media outlets have also called on Astor to share his expertise on the most effective strategies to create a safe campus environment; current legislation to curb gun violence; and an eight-point call to action put forth by a nationwide coalition of scholars. They include Time, ABC News, the New York Times, EdWeek and K-12 Dive.

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Astor on Dangers of False Alarm Violent Threats

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Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor was featured in a New York Times article about the disturbing increase in school shooting threats across the country. Social media has made it increasingly easy to craft violent threats that clog up one of the few avenues law enforcement has to police them. These hoax threats have increased in prevalence following deadly mass shootings, including the killing of 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas. New York City has fielded an average of two school shooting threats per day this year, and an average of six per day in the week following the May 24 Uvalde shooting. Law enforcement officials are concerned that the increase in hoax threats will make it more difficult to identify real threats. “If the system becomes overwhelmed by false alarms, some could slip through,” Astor said. “It takes away a big tool.”

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