Safer Schools - Better Students

The narrator describes the program as various program activities and settings are portrayed. The program's components are incident reporting, team analysis and intervention planning, and interagency cooperation in intervention planning and implementation. The program is designed to involve students, parents, teachers, school administrators, police, and social service agencies in efforts to address school crime and discipline problems. Incident reporting involves formal recordkeeping for all incidents considered crimes or infractions of school rules. A card file includes such information as the nature of the incident, the time of its occurrence, and any action taken. Periodically, data from the incident file are analyzed by action teams composed of students, teachers, school administrators, and parents. Police and social service workers act as advisers to action teams. As the teams identify patterns of crime and misbehavior from the incident reports, plans are devised to prevent and counter recurrences of similar incidents. Police are consulted when criminal behavior is involved, and social service agencies cooperate with school authorities in providing appropriate programs and services for delinquent and problem students. The program appeals to school administrators because it involves minimal cost and no addition of new personnel. Ways in which pilot schools have dealt with theft from lockers and class cutting are described. Various participants comment on what the program has meant to their schools.