Greater Gang Awareness Helps Create Safer Schools

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Information about efforts to address gang activity including community resources.

Children and teens join gangs for many reasons – peer pressure, boredom, gaining a sense of belonging – and unfortunately for some children, the lure of a gang is too great to resist. We know that gang activity is increasing in Wake County. That increase is impacting our entire community including our schools. As a result, the Wake County Public School System has increased its efforts to help stop the spread of gangs in our county by improving school policies and procedures and working closely with local law enforcement and community groups, as well as intervening at the social services level.

WCPSS is very proactive in identifying and suppressing gang related student behavior. As a result, the number of gang incidents reported systemwide last year increased by 26 percent over the last three years from 548 incidents in 2005-06 to 692 in 2007-08.

While it may appear counter-intuitive, an increase in gang-related behavior reporting actually translates into safer schools. The number of reported incidents of school crime and violence has decreased by 24 percent since 2005, according the NC Department of Public Instruction’s Annual Report on School Crime and Violence.

WPCSS Senior Director of Security Russ Smith attributes the overall increase in the number of gang-related incidents to several factors – first being the fact that there has been an increase in gang activity in our community over the past few years. However, he said much of the increase in the schools’ gang incident reporting can be attributed to the greater level of awareness of our school staffs.

“Some of our schools may have higher numbers because there is more gang representation at those schools, but some of the higher numbers are a result of better training of the staff to recognize gang signs and report incidences of representing,” he said. “Our staffs have been trained to recognize and stop incidences before they escalate into larger problems. As a result, our number of incidences reported may be higher, but our schools are actually safer.

Smith said approximately 81 percent of the reported gang incidents were for “representing” which includes behavior such as flashing gang signs, drawing gang symbols on notebooks, putting gang symbols on book bags, using gang terminology and wearing gang-affiliated clothing or jewelry or for other incidents not involving violent behavior. Consequently, judging a school by the number of reported gang-related incidents is not an accurate measure of a school environment.

Smith encourages parents to visit their child’s school if they want to learn more rather than just relying on published incident reports. “Go talk to the principal about these issues and any concerns that you may have. Visit the school. Talk to the school resource officer,” Smith said.

The Wake County Board of Education adopted Policy 6424 on gang and gang related activities in 2005. The policy is clear in stating opposition to gangs and the need for administrators to work closely with law enforcement to suppress gangs. The policy further states that “No student shall commit any act that furthers gangs or gang-related activities.”

To help enforce this policy, WCPSS developed several training programs for the staff in our schools. The first is a Basic Gang Awareness Training that reviews our policy on gangs and covers basic gang identification and gang signs. There is also a more comprehensive, two-day Advanced Gang Awareness Training which covers all three components of addressing gang activity -- suppression, intervention, and prevention.

Ensuring that our students have a safe environment in which to learn is one of the main goals of the Wake County Public School System. Along with gang prevention training, our school system has a myriad of safety measures in place to ensure the well being of our students and staff including specified check in procedures for visitors, access control devices, security cameras and school resource officers in all our middle and high schools, security officers in our high schools and an emergency operations plan that covers everything from acts of violence at a school to a chemical spill in the community.

For more information, contact the Wake County Public School System’s Security Office at (919) 850-1641. You can also learn more about efforts to address gang activity, including community resources