At Atlanta’s Carver High School, 10 percent of the seniors tried it. At Cambridge High in North Fulton, it was 5 percent. But at the DeKalb School of the Arts, none of last year’s graduating class reported a recent attempt to commit suicide.
The results from the latest Georgia Student Health Survey offer a peek into high school and middle school, assuming the respondents told the truth.
That could be a stretch given that the survey is mandatory, it’s 121 questions long — and that it targeted teens and preteens. Still, it’s part of the state’s agreement with the federal government for measuring school performance, and officials assume they are getting facts worthy of public reporting. And in some cases, such as with questions 79 through 86, which ask about self-harm and thoughts about suicide, those facts are troubling. Statewide, 9 percent of seniors reported harming themselves on purpose, 3 percent of them on more than five occasions over the prior year.
The survey was developed by the Georgia departments of Education and Public Health, with help from Georgia State University. Anyone can download the annual results from the past decade on the education department's website. (Search for the survey at "www.gadoe.org.")
The reports are broken out by school and reported by grade level. (For brevity, the results reported here are only for seniors. Elementary school students are also surveyed, but get only 15 questions.) Because they are text documents, they aren’t easy to use for comparing large numbers of schools. But parents and other interested fact-finders can pull the document for their school and compare the numbers against those from as many schools as their time and patience allow. They can also download the overall results for their school district and the state to get a baseline.
For instance, 6.5 percent of seniors statewide said they tried to kill themselves at least once over the prior year, making Carver and the DeKalb School of the Arts outliers at either end, and Cambridge closer to the average.
Many questions try to get at school quality.
At the only high school in Decatur, a tiny, pricey city bordering Atlanta, nearly 18 percent of seniors said they "strongly disagree" that they "like school." That was only a few points above the state average, but it was high compared with other metro Atlanta schools that got top rankings from U.S. News & World Report. At Cambridge High, fewer than 12 percent of seniors hated school. At the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology, it was under 10 percent.
Did students feel teachers treated them with respect? (Thankfully, the answer was typically “yes.”) Did they feel safe? Were their textbooks shabby?
At the DeKalb School of the Arts, a whopping 55 percent of seniors strongly disagreed that their books were up to date and in good condition. With its focus on performing arts, the school may not rely much on texts, but it also had an issue with impressions about safety: a comparatively large proportion, nearly 15 percent, strongly disagreed that they felt safe on campus.
The are plenty of other subjects covered, including drug and alcohol use, drinking and driving, parental permissiveness, weapons on campus, bullying, fighting, video gaming, discrimination and more.
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