| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 21, 2001 |
FOR INFORMATION: |
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Springfield – Who knows better than students what other students are thinking, feeling, and often, planning? No one. Including the adults who run the schools, according to the State Board of Education’s Student Advisory Council (SAC.) As part of its annual report to the State Board, the SAC last week presented an audit on school violence designed to help school administrators garner student input on school violence, which can then be used to help shape schools’ safety plans. The group of high school students from around Illinois was created 25 years ago to give the State Board advice on pertinent education issues from a student’s perspective. About 30 juniors and seniors comprised this year’s SAC. The State Board endorsed the audit and agreed to send it to every public and private Illinois school. The SAC also asked the State Board to provide training, funding and technical assistance to help local districts implement the audit and any safety initiatives that it may generate. “I strongly encourage schools to take advantage of this great opportunity to see what their students think can and should be done about school violence,” said State Superintendent Glenn W. McGee. In nearly all of the school shootings that have occurred in the past 10 years, the shooter had told someone (usually other students) about the plan to do the shootings. Yet, students often don’t share such information. “As much as we don’t want to see our friends get hurt, we also don’t want to see them go to jail,” said Josh Thackston, a senior at Eldorado High School. “The audit is a good way for schools to help students understand, recognize and assume more responsibility for their own safety at school,” McGee said. “By engaging them this way, we hope to change the school culture and improve the school's learning environment,” he said. The audit contains five surveys. Each can be administered to students individually or together with any or all of the others. Students wrote each survey in in clear, uncomplicated language designed to produce unambiguous answers. Ideally, students will administer the surveys to other students and school administrators will use the information to foster and support further dialogue and planning, Thackston said. Not every student is likely to be as interested or willing to share his or her opinions as those on the SAC, who tend to be student leaders, Thackston admitted. But the audit’s success doesn’t require total involvement, he added. “Everybody and their brother doesn’t have to be behind this. There will be five, 10, 15 people who will talk about this, be serious about it and take it to the administration,” Thackston said. Students will take the audit seriously if they see adults taking it seriously, added Eva Byerley, a junior at Lemont’s Mt. Assisi Academy. “As long as the administration is behind it and makes it clear that it’s important and they want the information,” students will participate, she said. “I mean, it’s our lives that we’re talking about,” Byerley said. Student Advisory Council to the State Board of Education 2000-01 Membership List Information (as of 11/01/00)
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