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Scholars Issue Call for Evidence-Based Action to Prevent School Violence

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A nationwide coalition of scholars who have conducted decades of research into school safety has issued an eight-point plan for immediate government action to reduce gun violence. The coalition, including Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social welfare and education at UCLA, called for a comprehensive public health approach to gun violence that is informed by scientific evidence. The recommendations come days after a shooting rampage at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, left 19 children and two teachers dead. “The recent mass shootings across the country are another painful reminder of failed efforts to stop the kind of gun violence that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School nearly 10 years ago,” according to a statement by the coalition known as the Interdisciplinary Group on Preventing School and Community Violence. The researchers called for a new mindset that prioritizes prevention over reaction. “A focus on simply preparing for shootings is insufficient,” they said. “Prevention entails more than security measures and begins long before a gunman comes to school.” Several of the recommendations focus on limiting access to firearms, including a ban on assault-style weapons and comprehensive background checks for gun buyers. The coalition also calls for a national program to train culturally proficient crisis intervention and threat assessment teams at the school and community level, as well as a requirement that schools assess their learning environments to ensure that they are physically and emotionally safe. “It is time for federal and state authorities to take immediate action to enact these proposals,” the coalition said. “We contend that well-executed laws can reduce gun violence while protecting all constitutional rights.”

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Astor on Ending the Scourge of School Shootings

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Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor spoke with media outlets around the world to bring context and insight to coverage of the tragic shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, which left 19 children and two teachers dead. NPR, Grid News, Global News in Canada and SBS in Australia posted extended interviews with Astor, who said Americans must reframe their approach to the scourge of mass shootings targeting children. While he is optimistic that an “aha realization” will eventually lead to stronger national gun control legislation, Astor called for more action at the local level, including paying close attention to what the students themselves are saying. “They’re the rumbling before the earthquake,” he told SBS. “They know what’s happening in their schools and their communities.” Astor also cautioned against media coverage that inadvertently glorifies acts of violence. Even publishing lists of the deadliest shootings could inspire copycats to compete for fame, he told the Los Angeles Times. Astor, who holds a joint appointment with UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies, also spoke with media outlets including the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, La Presse in Montreal and Channel NewsAsia in Singapore.

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Astor on Aggression Targeting School Staff

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Several media outlets reached out to Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor to provide context to a new report by the American Psychological Association (APA) on the alarming levels of harassment and threats experienced by school staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. Astor, a member of the APA task force that conducted the research, spoke to NPR’s Morning Edition, CBS Los Angeles, K-12 Dive and The 74 about the “pressure-cooker” atmosphere in the nation’s schools. “Schools were and still are a battleground,” he said. “COVID is symbolic of all these larger cultural layers that filter into every classroom, every school in the country.” Astor also appeared at a March 17 congressional briefing on the study, and noted that school staffs are “just underfunded, understaffed and do not have enough help organizationally to create a positive, healthy environment.” The report, which received national attention from NBC News and EdWeek, among other outlets, recommended comprehensive research-based solutions to improve the campus environment for both students and staff.

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School Personnel Report Threats, Harassment During Pandemic

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Professor Ron Avi Astor and a team from UCLA Luskin Social Welfare contributed to research on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on teachers and other school staff as part of a task force launched by the American Psychological Association. In a report released today, the task force found that approximately one-third of teachers surveyed said they had experienced at least one incident of verbal harassment or threat of violence from students during the pandemic. Almost 50% of the teachers expressed a plan or desire to quit or transfer jobs, according to the report, based on a nationwide survey of 14,966 teachers, administrators, school psychologists, social workers and other pre-K through 12th grade school staff. “This was one of the first studies we know of that looked at how both COVID-19 and issues of school safety impacted all school personnel,” said Astor, who holds a joint appointment with the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. “School staff such as bus drivers, janitors, secretaries, yard aides, crossing guards and cafeteria workers are often left out of these large national studies. Their voices are so important and commonly ignored.” The APA task force will present its findings at a congressional briefing today at 2 p.m. EDT,  joined by several national co-sponsoring organizations. The UCLA team that contributed to the findings included Hector Palencia of the Social Welfare field education faculty and doctoral students Laura Liévano-Karim, Natalie Fensterstock, Chaoyue Wu, Kate Watson and Sawyer Hogenkamp. Gordon Capp of CSU Fullerton was also part of the UCLA team. — Joanie Harmon

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Astor on ‘Tsunami of Mental Health Needs’ in Schools

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A Reuters article on signs that the stresses of the COVID-19 pandemic are worsening gun violence in American schools included insights from Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor. Since the 2021-22 school year began, campuses have been the site of 141 shootings, more than at any point in the previous decade, gun safety advocates say. Astor said several factors, including the pandemic, overall community violence and breakdowns in family structures, have created a “tsunami of mental health needs” in schools. In many places, burnout, staffing shortages and illness have left teachers and administrators ill-equipped to deal with the challenges. “Kids are walking into a system that has been massively weakened,” Astor said. “We’re going to see a variety of different forms of gun violence and violence in general. We’re in a situation where things are going to get worse.”

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Astor on Schools’ Role in Protecting Students, Preventing Violence

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Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor spoke to the Los Angeles Times about pandemic-related factors behind reports of tension, misbehavior and violence on school campuses. Students who returned to in-person learning after a long period of isolation may have also experienced food and housing insecurity, mental health issues and other stressors, Astor noted, so schools should be well-positioned to support students on many levels. “Historically, schools have also played the role of creating a better society and a better world,” he said. “This is the right time to retreat back to that.” A K-12 Dive article on who bears responsibility for preventing violence on campus also cited Astor. He recommended that everybody — including teachers, staff, administrators, peers, parents and law enforcement — be trained to spot and properly respond to students who display red flags, including an obsession with firearms; signs of depression and suicidal ideation; having a plan to hurt themselves or others; and troubling social media posts.

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Astor on Parents’ Role in Preventing School Shootings

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A Christian Science Monitor article on parent accountability in school shootings cited Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor, an authority on the prevention of school violence. Astor recommended that parents be educated in how to recognize warning signs that mass shooters often show — such as visiting a website that glorifies past school shooters, an obsession with firearms or suicidal tendencies — as well as where they can turn for help if they have concerns. In 2018, Astor and other scholars published a holistic public health plan to prevent gun violence at schools. The plan includes building healthier school communities and families through things like bullying prevention and threat assessments. “What I like about that approach is it doesn’t get us stuck in this Second Amendment rights issue that everybody seems to gravitate to almost automatically, of ‘there’s nothing you can do’ or ‘eliminate all guns,’” Astor said. “There’s a lot you can do in between.”

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A New Approach to Preventing Weapons-Related Violence at California Schools Study gauges the prevalence of weapons on campuses and provides a comprehensive look at factors that put schools at risk

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By Mary Braswell

At some schools in California, nearly 1 in 5 students say they have either carried a weapon or been injured or threatened with one, according to a new study co-authored by UCLA Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor that examines the presence of weapons in the state’s public middle and high schools and recommends focusing on campus-level conditions that could serve as warning signs for violence.

“Although tragic incidents of shootings in schools are rare and directly affect only a small number of students, tens of thousands of students report bringing weapons to school, and many more see other students in their school carrying weapons,” said Astor, who holds joint appointments at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and UCLA School of Education and Information Studies.

The study, co-authored with Rami Benbenishty of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was published recently in the Journal of School Violence.

Based on surveys of nearly 890,000 California students in grades 7, 9 and 11, the research focuses on all types of weapons — not only guns — and assesses how factors such as the level of crime in a school’s surrounding neighborhood, students’ feelings of belongingness or victimization at school, their relationships with teachers and staff, and their perceptions about whether disciplinary practices are fair can heighten or lower the potential for weapons-carrying and violence.

This holistic or school-wide approach represents a significant departure from previous school-violence studies, which have typically sought to identify risk factors around individual students who might pose a threat, Astor noted.

“A major limitation of current ‘shooter’ studies is that they tend to maintain a narrow focus on individual perpetrators,” the authors write. “Although it is very difficult to detect students who perpetrate school shootings, it is possible to identify schools that have many students who are involved with weapons.”

The number of students who reported seeing weapons on campus is very low at many schools, according to the study, which included a representative sample of students from every county in the state who completed the California Healthy Kids Survey between 2013 and 2015.

However, in 3.3% of schools, more than 15% of students reported carrying a weapon, and in 5.8% of schools, at least 15% of students said they had been injured by a weapon or threatened with one. It is at these schools in particular, Astor and Benbenishty say, that an approach focused on improving campuswide conditions can bear the most fruit.

“It is imperative to develop a monitoring system to identify such schools and channel resources to this vulnerable group of students, educators and parents,” said Astor, who teaches a UCLA undergraduate course on ways to improve school safety. “We must create opportunities to hear their voices and explore local solutions that make their schools safer.”

Fostering a warm, supportive school environment is key to reducing the presence of weapons and creating a truly safe campus, according to the authors, whose previous research has demonstrated that prioritizing a culture of care, funneling more resources to vulnerable schools and elevating the voices of students, teachers and students leads to a drop in the number of weapons at schools.

“Students who trust that teachers support them and have a sense of safety in school may be less inclined to bring weapons to school,” the authors write.

In this new study, Astor and Benbenishty also focus on the unintended negative consequences of past efforts to deter individual shooters by “hardening” schools with metal detectors, security cameras and armed staff, as well as “active shooter” drills and harsh mandatory punishments that research shows often demonstrated bias against students of color.

These measures, they noted, frequently created fortress-like campuses that greatly diminished students’ well-being, heightened the fear of violence on school grounds and sent more of the nation’s children into the school-to-prison pipeline.

“Schools,” the authors conclude, “could develop a variety of caring and supportive approaches to reduce weapons-related behaviors … that do not include law enforcement methods and do not increase the school-to-prison pipeline.”

Astor on Protecting Children as They Return to Classroom

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Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor spoke to K-12 Dive about concerns surrounding the safety and well-being of students as they return to the classroom following a year of living through COVID-19. In addition to pandemic-related stressors, students have witnessed enormous racial and political upheaval, creating “a swirl of different variables that make me really worried,” Astor said. “Kids are coming in with suitcases of really horrible experiences.” Bracing for an increase in threats of violence and self-harm, many school administrators have prioritized physical and mental health rather than nosediving into academic recovery. Astor called on principals to create a welcoming place for students and a supportive environment for teachers. “At least for this year, the next year and the year after, our school is not only about academic achievement,” he said. “We are going to go out of our way to [build] social-emotional friendships, so that our school becomes the ideal of what we hope society to be.” 

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Astor on Role of Racism in Unsafe Learning Environments

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Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor co-authored a Journal of School Health commentary on the importance of factoring in structural racism when developing strategies to prevent school violence. “Microaggressions and bullying associated with skin color can result in a pathway of increased alienation from and decreased engagement in school, both of which can increase the probability of harm to self and others,” wrote Astor and co-author Marc A. Zimmerman of the University of Michigan. Unconscious biases may surface among staff making threat assessments as well as among teachers who send implicit messages that reduce academic motivation among Black, Latino, Native and immigrant students. Economically disadvantaged campuses typically have fewer resources for social and emotional learning, relying instead on target-hardening strategies such as metal detectors and school safety officers — a signal that schools are not a welcoming place. “It is time we pay particular attention to the role racism plays in creating unsafe learning environments for our children,” the authors wrote.

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