Indicator: 6 - Prohibited Behavior in Schools

Why This Is Important

Schools are an important environment for young people, and the safety of that environment is of great concern to educators, young people and their families. Schools are also a reflection of their local community, and measures related to school safety can also be indications of how safe children are in their communities.

Where We Stand

For the 1998-1999, 1999-2000 and 2000-2001 school years, Local Education Agencies in Maine were asked by the Maine Safe and Drug-Free Schools Data Collection Project and its partners to report data concerning prohibited behavior among youth in Maine schools. An “incident of prohibited behavior” is a violation of a statute or regulation that occurs on school grounds, school property, or at a school-sponsored event, and is reported to a school official or law enforcement agency. Incidents may involve one or more victims and one or more offenders. Five hundred seventy (570) schools responded to the Project’s survey in 1998-1999, 674 did so in 1999-2000, and 644 in 2000-2001. Statistical differences reported among the school years may to some degree be due to the fact that (1) different schools responded each year and (2) not all Maine schools reported for any particular year.

The schools reported a total of 33,629 prohibited incidents in 1998-1999 (18.7 incidents per 100 students), 54,588 the following year (25.9 per 100 students) and 47,223 in 2000-2001 (23.7 per 100 students). However, since some students were engaged in more than one incident, the ratio of offending students was lower than this; in 1998- 1999 there were 8.7 offenders per 100 students, 9.6 in 1999-2000, and 9.8 in 2000-2001.

For the reporting schools, 1,146 incidents led to removal of one or more students from school in 1998-1999, compared with 1,501 such incidents in 1999-2000, and 1,743 in 2000-2001. In all three years the largest number of incidents involved personal offense violations, including assault and/or battery (61 in 1998-1999, 107 in 1999-2000, and 55 in 2000-2001), fighting/pushing (201, 180, and 311 respectively), threat/intimidation (158, 152, and 236), and harassment/other personal acts (130, 122 and 103).

Data Sources and Context

The data source is the Maine Safe and Drug- Free Schools and Communities Act Program Report on Incidence of Prohibited Behavior in Drug and Violence Prevention, 2000-2001, and preceding reports in that series. The Maine Safe and Drug-Free Schools Data Collection Project is a partnership between Maine’s Department of Behavioral and Developmental Services’ Office of Substance Abuse, the Maine Department of Education, and Research Triangle Institute. Local school administrative units are required to report these data in response to a federal educational data collection requirement. The reports can be found on-line at: http://www.maine.gov/dhhs/osa/sdfsca/information.html