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What Schools Can Do to Prevent Intimate Partner Violence
- Create a school-wide ethos that fosters positive discipline, academic success, and mental and emotional wellness.
- Create zero-tolerance policies for bullying and other forms of relational violence.
- Intervene early with the 10% to 15% of students at risk for severe academic or behavioral problems.
- Directly provide or arrange for immediate and intensive intervention for problem students in the form of coordinated, comprehensive, sustained, and family focused services.
- Improve awareness and communication so that children are knowledgeable about healthy relationship skills as well as the signs of relationship violence, and the importance of telling a responsible adult when they see troubling behavior in a classmate.
- Appoint multidisciplinary teams to design and implement comprehensive violence prevention and response plans. Work with community agencies to offer healthy relationship education to all students and supportive interventions for students experiencing relationship violence.
- Be active participants in community discussions and decisions on intimate partner violence prevention.
- Enlist law enforcement professionals in the development of a school safety plan that addresses school violence that includes special provisions for dating violence and bullying, weapons and drug search policies; visitor protocols; use of screened and trained parents as volunteers; positive incentives for good school citizenship; suspension and expulsion policies; and codes of student conduct that address relationship violence.
- Involve parents in school activities, including relationship violence prevention education, planning, and policy.
- Train all staff to understand the warning signs of relationship violence and appropriate responses and resources.
- Implement a school health program that features comprehensive health education; provide counseling and social services; ensure a safe physical and psychosocial environment; and promote family and community involvement.
- Integrate violence prevention into all curriculum level; teach conflict resolution and healthy relationship skills; encourage staff and youth to participate with community service activities, including collaborative community responses to violence.
- Make parenting classes that include healthy relationship education mandatory for all students. Refer teen parents for additional supportive services.
- Ensure that all students, including those who violate disciplinary codes, are either in regular or alternative classrooms rather than on the street.
Excerpted from the Commission for the Prevention of Youth Violence. Youth and Violence: Medicine, Nursing and Public Health: Connecting the Dots to Prevent Violence. Chicago, IL : American Medical Association; 200:28.
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