Last fall, Montgomery County Public Schools signed a memorandum of understanding with the county’s police department, basically agreeing to report serious crimes committed on school grounds. Such an agreement would not have been necessary if MCPS were doing this all along. However, like many other school districts across the country, it was not.
This spring, the Montgomery Board of Education finally ordered an annual school safety report to be compiled for the public. “There’s not a single school system in the region that comes close to doing this,” MCPS spokesman Brian Edwards told The Examiner in March. In other words, if Edwards is to be believed, public school officials throughout the region are misleading the public by downplaying the problem. But simply issuing a public relations piece once a year doesn’t begin to provide teachers, parents and students with the kind of up-to-date information that could literally save lives and prevent injuries.
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The “Juvenile Offenders and Victims: 2006 National Report” notes that half of all violent crimes against students occur either on school grounds or en-route. But these are only the incidents that were self-reported, since there is no mandatory crime tracking law for K-12 as there is for college campuses. If Montgomery County is any indication, the real numbers are much higher than school officials let on.
A Reason Foundation study found that 75 percent of large school districts fail to provide parents with accurate information about school crime. This was corroborated by a 2004 survey of school-based police officers: 86 percent said school crimes were underreported, with 78 percent admitting they had personally taken a weapon away from a student. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education assured the public that school crime was on the decline.
A provision in the No Child Left Behind law allows students at “persistently dangerous” schools to transfer, which is why many school administrators keep mum — even about stabbings or beatings requiring hospitalization. The irony is that a principal who reports such incidents to the police may be unfairly viewed as having a bigger problem with violence than a principal who covers everything up — even though the former’s school may actually be safer than the latter’s. The solution: clear, uniform reporting standards and sanctions for those who don’t comply.
Parents have the right to know the unvarnished truth about what’s going on at the place their children spend most of the day. They should demand that all schools from kindergarten to college be required to immediately report all violent incidents on their Web sites, and refer any involving criminal behavior to the proper law enforcement authorities. The routine lack of transparency that characterizes public school systems like Montgomery County and elsewhere throughout the Washingtonregion must end, starting with the crimes being swept under the rug.
