Excessive violence in schools

[Szdfan]

Again, what are the concrete steps the school should have taken to prevent this from happening?

[Ken]

School security and school bus security is nothing new.

Of course it isn’t. At issue here is the Miami-Dade Public School administration explicitly told the parents involved they aren’t going to be secure and to go to another school.

This claim is not supported by any of your links nor by any of the reporting I have seen on this incident

You’ve ranted and raved before how “racist” Southerners set up private schools. But in this case, the public schools are explicitly telling families of the “wrong” race they need to go to another school. And no, this isn’t an isolated incident - this kind of violence has significantly increase in the past few years.

Again, another claim that is not supported. Youth violence has actually declined dramatically in the past 20 years.

I can provide plenty more anecdotes. This pattern repeats itself all over the country.

Anecdotes are not a pattern. In a country this large one can find anecdotes to support any claim you want to make. For example, I can find anecdotes that Holdemans are sex abusers. This is from two weeks ago: https://www.kxly.com/news/local-news/no ... 3e864.html

I might ask what are we going to do about the rash of sex abuse in the Holdeman church? Maybe we should follow Trump's advice and "shut the whole place down until we can figure out what is going on"

See how that works? You can make anecdotes say any thing you want.

Is violence on school buses and in schools a growing problem in Dade County? I have no idea and neither do you. All we have to go on at this point is one cell phone video and a couple anonymous anecdotes from people who claim to be parents at that particular school but who choose not to identify themselves. Schools are actually required to keep records of these sorts of things so the question of whether violence is increasing in Dade County schools is actually an answerable question.

If you want to actually have an intelligent discussion about the treats to children in this country we can do that. But if we do that we will quickly discover that all the things I cited above are orders of magnitude more threatening to the health, wellbeing, and lives of children than peer violence on school buses. Of that I'm confident. Many if not most school buses in this country now have video cameras on them. How many incidences of violence happen every year nationwide. Do you know?

We actually do study such things in great detail. Not school buses per se, but violence in schools. The most recent national report came out July 2022 and the US Department of Education does a national report every year. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2022/2022029.pdf

What did they find? First of all, despite your attempts at race mongering, minority schools are not meaningfully more violent than white schools. Violence occurs fairly evenly in all types of schools, black and white and urban and rural.



In fact, if you dive deep into the data (and there are dozens of tables) what you find is that patterns of school violence are spread across the entire country. And you even find some interesting patterns. Such as the fact both 95% white schools and over 50% minority schools have higher rates of violence than schools that are between 5% and 50% minority. You also find that both city schools and rural schools have more violence than suburban and town schools. We also find that the midwest has the highest rates of school violence and the northeast the lowest, with the west and south kind of in the middle.



So there you have it. Now we can start to have an intelligent discussion about school violence if that is what you want to have. It largely leads back to poverty not race or setting.

In fact, the only persistent trend that emerges across all the data is that schools in poorer areas tend to have higher rates of violence than schools in wealthier areas. Which is not surprising at all. It isn't race, it isn't the size of the school, it isn't the diversity of the school, it isn't the region of the country, and it isn't the setting (urban or rural). It is poverty.

Oh, and with regard to the overall trends in youth violence? This is the most recent data that I could find from the August 2022 DOJ Report on youth violence. https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/publications/tren ... rrests.pdf So if you want to get the big picture trends in youth violence, this is where you need to look. What do they show? That youth violence has been steadily declining since peaking in the mid 1990s across all categories. And violence AGAINST youth has also been declining in all categories EXCEPT for a recent uptick in murders which is attributable to increasing access to firearms. In other words, all categories of violence committed by youth and committed against youth have been steadily falling for nearly 30 years EXCEPT for gun deaths.

Bottom line? The two biggest identifiable trends in youth violence are poverty and guns. And if you want to start talking about actual solutions to youth violence, that is where you need to start.






There you have it. Are you interested in having an intelligent discussion on youth violence based on actual information? Or do you just want to talk about one random cell phone video being spread around Twitter?

[Grace]

Again, what are the concrete steps the school should have taken to prevent this from happening?

The bus driver and the Aid should have intervened. First by stopping the bus and asking all the students to exit the bus. Call the police to intervene with the unruly student. Attempt to restrain the violent student. Make sure everything is videoed.

[Grace]

There you have it. Are you interested in having an intelligent discussion on youth violence based on actual information? Or do you just want to talk about one random cell phone video being spread around Twitter?

LOL, And blaming the Governor for a bullying incident, that was from one random cell phone video, is intelligent discussion ??

[Szdfan]

Again, what are the concrete steps the school should have taken to prevent this from happening?

The bus driver and the Aid should have intervened. First by stopping the bus and asking all the students to exit the bus. Call the police to intervene with the unruly student. Attempt to restrain the violent student. Make sure everything is videoed.

So those are reasonable steps in the moment. I don't know what the driver's training required him to do. I don't know whether there was an aid or cameras on the bus. These are all things that need to be examined and policies enacted. I'm in agreement with you about that.

The argument, however, is that the school failed to prevent this from happening because they didn't address the parents' concerns when they complained about their daughter being bullied over the past three weeks prior to this incident. What should the school have done over the past three weeks to prevent this from happening in the first place?

[Ken]

There you have it. Are you interested in having an intelligent discussion on youth violence based on actual information? Or do you just want to talk about one random cell phone video being spread around Twitter?

LOL, And blaming the Governor for a bullying incident, that was from one random cell phone video, is intelligent discussion ??

I am not blaming DeSantis for a bullying incident.

I am responding to Josh who asks "what should we do about this" by pointing out that DeSantis is actually the governor of Florida and he claims to be the education governor and has been intervening directly in the public schools in Florida on a vast variety of areas. What has DeSantis done in the area of public education policy in Florida in the past two years?

• He has intervened and overruled the local decisions of school boards and school administrators with respect to COVID measures and attacked students for wearing masks
• He has tried to censor teachers and and threaten them with arrest for discussing race or gender in the classroom in ways that he disapproves of
• He has threatened school librarians with the same.
• He is pushing expansion of charter schools and a new school voucher program in Florida
• He has intervened numerous times in local school boards to remove school board members he disapproves of and replace them with his own appointees
• And most recently he wants to collect the private menstrual information of every female student athlete in Florida. I'm not making this up: https://www.thecut.com/2023/02/florida- ... eriod.html

So yes, since DeSantis has made himself the leader of public education in Florida, it is entirely appropriate to ask what he is doing about school violence. HE is in charge, not you or me. I live in the far opposite corner of the country.

[Sudsy]

But to a child who is being abused… we do not tell them or their parents, “well, what you need is the perpetrator to receive the gospel”. Dealing with that is the government’s job. In this case the government refused to do anything, until the issue was brought to light by the TV news.

When I think back of my youth days getting beat up was very common and to some degree an accepted norm where I went to school. It was not of media interest. We learned to avoid those who were looking for a fight and there were always those who just wanted to beat up on others for some reason. Sometimes because mom and dad beat on each other. I remember being told to just avoid certain kids that want to do violent things. This was not always possible but most times it was.

I think the affect of TV violence and most board and video games is a cause behind some of this. I don't believe a child can watch and play these games involving violence and it not have some evil affect on them.

I was beaten up a few times at school. The only reason why we are talking about this case is because someone with a cell phone was able to record this and post it on social media. I'm not convinced that schools as a whole are more violent than in the past, but instead that we are more aware when something happens. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

FWIW, this first paragraph is not one I wrote.

[ken_sylvania]

Anecdotes are not a pattern. In a country this large one can find anecdotes to support any claim you want to make. For example, I can find anecdotes that Holdemans are sex abusers. This is from two weeks ago: https://www.kxly.com/news/local-news/no ... 3e864.html

2016 is two weeks ago, eh? That's some fast judgement I guess, because the case has been dismissed with prejudice already.

[Ken]

Anecdotes are not a pattern. In a country this large one can find anecdotes to support any claim you want to make. For example, I can find anecdotes that Holdemans are sex abusers. This is from two weeks ago: https://www.kxly.com/news/local-news/no ... 3e864.html

2016 is two weeks ago, eh? That's some fast judgement I guess, because the case has been dismissed with prejudice already.

The story says it was updated on January 13, 2023 which was 2 weeks ago. My point, of course, is not that there is a rash of sexual abuse in the Holdeman church. But rather that one anecdote of this sort does not necessarily signal any sort of wider trend, any more than one cell phone video of a school bus in Florida signals any wider trend.

If you want to make decisions based on anecdotes then you can reach any conclusion that you want to because in a country this large you are likely to be able to find an anecdote to support any position you want to take. I could, for example, claim that vending machines are deadly to children because you can actually find anecdotes children being killed by vending machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_vending_machine

In point of fact, we no more know whether violence on school buses in Florida is a growing problem any more than we know whether sex abuse in the Holdeman church is a problem. Maybe both of them are, maybe neither of them are. Without more information we just don't know. And random anecdotes are uninformative.

I did present some actual national data on school and youth violence upstream. What were the takeaways? The school violence actually happens everywhere across all races, all types of schools, and all school settings (urban and rural). That youth violence has actually been declining for the past 25 years, And that the two most identifiable trends are that school violence seems to be associated with poverty, and that an increase in gun availability and gun deadliness seems to be associated with an increase in school shootings and firearm deaths of children.

[Josh]

Ken,

She told the outlet that school administrators are overwhelmed by spiraling violence inside and around the school — and their response was to advise her to enroll her three children elsewhere.

The heartbroken mom noted her two older kids have also been bullied during their brief time at the school — and counselors and administrators have done nothing to address her complaints.

Not sure what else you think the parents should have done.

Generally speaking, 9 year old girls should be able to go to school without being beaten and punched in the head by a much larger 14 year old male. This girl needed medical attention after the physical abuse & assault.

The parents reached out to responsible parties at the school, who told them “go to another school”.

I think public schools should be available and open to all children, regardless of their race, physical size, or background. But younger children should not be beaten by larger, older males. This is a serious problem, and is not just happening in Miami. This is just an example.