Recent Legislation Effecting School Security and Safety

For the past seven or eight years, the Commonwealth of Virginia has greatly improved the security and safety of its primary and secondary schools. One measure of this effort are the (at least) 77 school-related bills that have been enacted by the General Assembly and signed by the Governor since 1999. To review the content of these bills (organized by General Assembly year), please click here.

The Virginia Center for School Safety reflects the Commonwealth’s commitment to providing that environment for all children and staff in our schools. Through proactive legislation, training, partnerships, resources, data collection, and evaluation, Virginia continues to respond to the requests and needs of those that are providing the services that affect our children, our future.

Recent Efforts by VCSS and the Virginia Department of Education (DOE)

As noted, in recent years, there has been a concentrated effort to improve school security. The effort began in October 1998, when Governor Jim Gilmore, responding to school shootings in Mississippi, Arkansas and Oregon, reallocated federal funds to increase the presence of uniformed law enforcement officers, that is School Resource Officers (SROs), in Virginia middle and high schools. The 1999 General Assembly contributed state revenue to this endeavor and increased this revenue following the massacre at Columbine High School in April 2000. From that event forward, there has been a profusion of federal, state and local initiatives on school security.

Dr. John Schuiteman, DCJS Senior Research and Evaluation Specialist and former manager of VCSS’s ongoing evaluation of Virginia’s School Resource Officer program, recently summarized these initiatives in a publication titled “The Security of Virginia’s Public Schools” (see Vol. 81 No. 2 April 2005 of The Virginia News Letter, Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, University of Virginia). Dr. Schuiteman's narrative is organized according to the following four components of school security:

1. Site Hardening: The process of designing and equipping school buildings, athletic fields, parking lots and other school venues so they minimize the opportunity for criminal activity or violence. This component combines issues of physical and structural integrity (locks, doors, fences, gates) with the application of CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) principles. CPTED applications advance site hardening by controlling human movement (visitor access, student scheduling, traffic control) or making this movement more visible (lighting, line of sight design, monitoring, surveillance cameras).
   
   
2. Use of Security Personnel: Use of SROs (sworn, uniformed police officers or sheriff’s deputies) and School Security Officers (SSOs – non-sworn, mostly uniformed employees of local school divisions). SROs and SSOs work with school personnel, juvenile court officials and others to improve school security.
   
   
3. Violence Prevention Policies/Programming: These include student and staff codes of conduct, disciplinary systems, crisis management planning, staff and student training on bully prevention, conflict resolution, social and civic values, gang awareness, etc., and surveying students/staff on their exposure to illegal behaviors and their fear of being victimized, and
   
   
4. Intervention Policies/Programming: Programming that identifies students who are “at risk” of committing violence or criminal acts and which intervenes to prevent these students from continuing or escalating this behavior. Such programming involves truancy prevention, disciplinary proceedings, psychological testing and counseling, in-school detention, alternative schools and after school mentoring and recreation.

To read the entire text of the seven page article, click here (.pdf, 8 pages).