About 200 days a year, kids get up in the morning and head to school. They spend 6-8 hours at school, and then turn toward home, or to other activities. Schools themselves tend to be safe places. Stress, bullying, rough-housing, and some other social issues can erupt but are typically well-managed by school administrators and families.
The area immediately around schools is often considered safe. Some states have created ‘Community Protection Zones’ around schools, which prohibit certain categories of sex offenders from residing within a specific distance of schools. Other laws prohibit weapons on public property within a certain distance of schools and provide for harsher penalties for drug crimes near schools. Those laws serve as public statements that we want our children protected from predators and criminals, but they do little to dissuade predators and criminals from attempting to harm children.
Most kids travel safely between home and school, with visibility of kids and cars being a much bigger risk than predators. Despite that, the distance between home and school is the space where children are most likely to be assaulted by a non-family member, solicited, intimidated, bullied, or lured. (CCRC source)
To counter the risks that children often deal with on their daily trek to and from school, some effective tools are needed. These include a solid understanding of real threats and risks in your area, empowering safety education for kids, established Safe Walking Routes, and trained school administrators with the authority to exclude high-risk individuals from the area around schools.
During February, I’ll cover those four tools in depth. If your community has had successes or failures with regard to getting kids to school safely, share your experiences, too!
Look for –
- Risk and Threat: Figure them out and teach your kid empowering street smarts
- Safe Walking Routes: Safety and security in the school’s community
- Empowered Administrators: Excluding high-risk individuals to improve school security
Bethan Tuttle, CIPP, is mom to two and Executive Director of CommunityWatch, a non-profit that provides empowering crime-prevention education for kids, families, and communities. Learn more at CommunityWatch.us and follow @ComWatch on Twitter for empowering crime prevention updates.
Search your neighborhood crime map at CrimeReports.com
