Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the heads of their respective agencies, Pat Forgione of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and Jan Chaiken of the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), for supporting this report. We also wish to thank members of the Department of Education/Department of Justice School Safety Report Working Group for guidance on content and constructive criticism on early drafts of the report.

From BJS, we wish to thank Patsy Klaus, Craig Perkins, and Cathy Maston of Victimization Statistics Branch for their work in preparing and verifying data from the NCVS.

From NCES, we wish to thank Mary Frase, Dan Kasprzyk, Edie McArthur, and Marilyn McMillen who served as reviewers. They each provided input that substantially improved the publication.

Outside of NCES and BJS, school crime experts who reviewed the report were Bruce Taylor of the General Accounting Office, Eileen Poe-Yamagata of the National Center for Juvenile Justice in Pittsburgh, and Joanne Wiggins of the Planning and Evaluation Service of the U. S. Department of Education. Their advice was gratefully accepted. We particularly appreciated their willingness to review the report under very strict time constraints.

Without the assistance of the following staff at MPR Associates this report could not have been produced: Barbara Kridl (overall production and proofreading), Andrea Livingston (editing), Leslie Retallick (figure design and text layout), Francesca Tussing (table layout), and Karyn Madden (proofreading). They provided invaluable editorial, graphic, and production assistance.

Finally, the authors would like to thank Amanda Miller of the Education Statistics Services Institute and Marilyn Marbrook, Chief, assisted by Yvonne Boston and Jayne Robinson, of Publication and Electronic Dissemination at BJS, for their assistance in preparing this document for publication and dissemination.