4 students remain critical in stabbings
No evidence has surfaced yet to show that a boy charged in a stabbing rampage at his high school was targeting any particular student, and efforts to establish a motive are stalled because the suspect isn’t talking and many victims remain hospitalized, police said Friday. Alex Hribal, 16, is accused of stabbing or slashing 21 students and a guard on Wednesday at the 1,200-student Franklin Regional High School east of Pittsburgh. Charges against him include four counts of attempted homicide and 21 counts of aggravated assault. Eight students remain hospitalized Friday, four in critical condition after one was downgraded, hospital officials said.
— Associated Press
Teaching students alternatives to violence and improving their access to mental-health services are among the best ideas officials say they have for preventing the kind of bloodshed that has struck a long list of schools, including Franklin Regional High School in Murrysville, Pa.
But they say progress on arresting school violence nationwide has been hamstrung by a lack of funding, deployment of school-safety programs that haven’t worked and a failure to properly train school staff and students.
“We’re 15 years after Columbine, and you’d have thought we would have solved that problem,” said John Matthews, executive director of the Texas-based Community Safety Institute, referring to the 1999 rampage at a Colorado high school in which seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold fatally shot 12 students and a teacher and injured about 20 others before committing suicide.
A new Vanderbilt University study suggests that teaching younger students conflict-resolution skills — to think before they act — could be more effective than other techniques for reducing violence.
The study included a review of 27 school-safety programs nationwide and discussion sessions with Nashville, Tenn., youths who were victims of violence. Researcher Manny Sethi, an orthopedic trauma surgeon and a Vanderbilt assistant professor of orthopedic surgery and rehabilitation, said it may be necessary to teach those problem-solving skills before the high school years.
“At that point, it’s very hard to kind of change behavior,” Sethi said.
While conflict-resolution skills may help, demand also is growing for improved mental-health services in and out of school.
“There’s a lot of hurting kids in our schools,” said Beverly Kingston, director of the Center for the Study of the Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado Boulder, said.
Like Sethi, Kingston said the earlier that kids are helped, the better. “We need to put in place social-emotional learning programs, starting in preschool,” she said.
After the mass stabbings at Franklin Regional, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett emphasized the need to focus on mental-health services. But mental-health professionals in Pennsylvania schools say funding cuts in recent years have prompted across-the-board reductions in school counselors, social workers and psychologists.
“The logical response to all of this is to recognize that schools are the first line of defense for mental-health supports for students and to recognize that we are at a shortage for support personnel,” said Julia Szarko, president of the Association of School Psychologists in Pennsylvania and a school psychologist in the Central Bucks (Pa.) School District.
Szarko, who has a doctorate in school psychology, said the School District of Philadelphia last year eliminated all of its school counselors to save enough money to maintain its academic program.
Steven Berkowitz, who co-chairs the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s Disaster and Trauma Committee, said politicians often follow school tragedies with speeches about dealing with mental-health issues — but don’t follow up with legislation or financial commitments.
“Politicians often aren’t specific about these plans because it sounds good, but they are not willing to pay for it,” said Berkowitz, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.
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