Tips for preventing school violence - The City of Asheville

- School involvement – Take an active role in your children’s schools. Talk with teachers and staff. Join or work with parent-teacher-student organizations. Volunteer in classrooms, library, or other activities before and after school.

- Be a role model – Be a positive role model. Settle your own conflicts peaceably and without violence. Manage your anger without violence and destructive behavior.

- Communicate – Listen and talk with your children regularly to discover what they think about various topics. Make this a daily habit.

- Teach – Teach your children and help them learn how to examine and find solutions to problems. If they know how to approach and resolve issues, they will be less likely to become angry, frustrated, or violent. Use teachable moments to help children use and apply solutions that are alternatives to anger and violence.

- Discourage – Name-calling and teasing, and other behaviors that may escalate into physical altercations or worse.

- Know – Be aware of your children’s friends, whereabouts, and activities. It’s a parent’s right and responsibility.

- Support – Make it clear to your children that you support school policies and rules that are in effect to create a safe school environment. Discuss with your children policies and rules they disagree with, feel are unnecessary, or tell you are not enforced. Discuss ways of working with the school, other students, and parents on making new policies or rules, making established policies and rules work better, or changing or doing away with ineffective policies or rules.

- Join – Up with other parents through neighborhood associations, church, civic groups, youth activity groups, etc. Talk about violence problems, concerns about youth in your community, sources or programs that deal with strengthening and sharpening parenting skills, and similar issues.

- Develop – Positive alternative to violence, activities for youth in your community, i.e., sports activities or community service involvement.

- Weapons – Don’t bring guns or any other weapon to school. Refuse to carry or hide a weapon for someone else. Never keep silent about others who bring weapons to school.

- Report – Report any crime immediately to school officials or the police. Report suspicious behavior or talk by other students to a teacher, counselor, other school official or police officer.

- Communicate – Listen and talk with your parents regularly to let them know what you are thinking about concerning various topics, including violence. Make this a daily habit.

- Peer counselor – Become a peer counselor, working with classmates who need support and help with problems.

- Mentor – Help a younger student. As a role model and friend, you can make it easier for a younger person to adjust to school and ask for help.
- New students – Welcome new students and help them feel at home in your school. Introduce them to other students. Each week, try to get to know at least one student unfamiliar to you.

- School crime watch – Get with your School Resource Officer and/or school officials and help create a crime watch. Consider developing a way for students to report concerns anonymously.