Organization

This report, the third in a series of annual reports on school crime and safety from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics, presents the latest available data on school crime and student safety. The report repeats many indicators from the 1999 report but also provides updated data on fatal and nonfatal student victimization, nonfatal teacher victimization, students’ perceptions of safety and the presence of gangs, and students’ avoidance of places at school. In addition, it provides new data on students’ reports of being the target of derogatory hate-related language and seeing hate-related graffiti at school.

The report is organized as a series of indicators, with each indicator presenting data on a different aspect of school crime and safety. It starts with the most serious violence. There are five sections to the report: Violent Deaths at School; Nonfatal Student Victimization--Student Reports; Violence and Crime at School--Public School Principal/Disciplinarian Reports; Nonfatal Teacher Victimization at School--Teacher Reports; and School Environment. Each section contains a set of indicators that, taken together, describe a distinct aspect of school crime and safety.

Rather than relying on data from a large omnibus survey of school crime and safety, this report uses a variety of independent data sources from federal departments and agencies including the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Each data source has an independent sample design, data collection method, and questionnaire design, all of which may be influenced by the unique perspective of the primary funding agency. By combining multiple and independent sources of data, it is hoped that this report will present a more complete portrait of school crime and safety than would be possible with any single source of information.

However, because the report relies on so many different data sets, the age groups, the time periods, and the types of respondents analyzed can vary from indicator to indicator. Readers should keep this in mind as they compare data from different indicators. Furthermore, while every effort has been made to keep key definitions consistent across indicators, different surveys sometimes use different definitions, such as those for specific crimes and “atschool"². Therefore, caution should be used in making comparisons between results from different data sets. Descriptions of these data sets are located in appendix B of this report.

² Readers should consult the glossary of terms in appendix C for the specific definitions used in each survey.

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