Promoting safe schools through policy: results of a survey of Canadian school boards

Abstract

The past decade has seen an increasing concern for the problem of school violence. As a result, school administrators have focused their attention on the development of effective policies and programmes to promote safer schools. While addressing the same mandate of reducing the prevalence and incidence of school violence, however, there may be vast differences in the comprehensiveness of school‐based policies in terms of the range of unacceptable behaviours with which the policies deal and the array of suggested consequences that may be imposed. This study reports the findings of a survey of 126 urban school boards in Canada on the development of violence prevention policies. The results indicate that there is a tremendous amount of activity to understand and come to terms with the issue of school violence and to identify and implement effective solutions. However, there is considerable room for improvement, particularly around the development of a community focus to address the issue of school violence.