The effectiveness of the 1998 School Safety Act on middle Tennessee public schools' violence prevention programs
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to determine whether the School Safety Act enacted in 1998, initiated violence reduction programs, has been effective in reducing the incidents of public school violence in the three districts investigated in this study. To accomplish this, related literature was reviewed in order to obtain information essential to establishing a conceptual framework for school violence prevention programs used in the following districts: Metropolitan Public Schools of Nashville/Davidson County, Rutherford County, and Williamson County School District. The investigator directed his research in three distinct areas and they are personal violence, fighting among students, and firearms. The researcher hypothesized that when comparing the three areas that there will be no statistically significant difference, at the .05 levels or better, between public school student violence rates during the 1997–1998 and 1998–1999 school years when data is treated with the chi-square technique. This study was significant in that it provided policy makers with valuable information about the effects of violence reduction efforts that were implemented as a result of the School Safety Act of 1998. Additional data was collected and analyzed in order to compare and determine if a disproportion number of black student's compared to white students were suspended, or expulsed during school years 1997 through 1999 in the three districts investigated. Therefore, this study was limited to the three school districts listed. The demographic of this target population was different somewhat from other regions across the state. Any extra population of study results to other non-similar areas or, circumstances should be done, with great care.
Subject Area
Educational administration|Criminology|Public administration|School counseling
Recommended Citation
Curtis James Kinnard,
"The effectiveness of the 1998 School Safety Act on middle Tennessee public schools' violence prevention programs"
(2000).
ETD Collection for Tennessee State University.
Paper AAI3007612.
https://digitalscholarship.tnstate.edu/dissertations/AAI3007612