Guest Post: "Is Your Child Safe While at School?"

In 2011, the Center for Disease Control collected a wide range of data concerning violence and children within school. While these facts fall short of the horrific events that happened in 2012, the numbers are still cause for great concern. While we strive to implement plans and ideas that can keep our children safe, a large number of children experience the worst parts of life in what should be one of the safest places on the planet for them.

1. Fear - Almost six-percent of children surveyed grades 9 through 12 did not go to school preceding 30 days of the survey due to the fact they either felt unsafe at school or unsafe to travel to and from school. While you can attribute some of those numbers as the result of a sarcastic high school student, the percentage is quite high. Our children should view a school as one of the most safest places on Earth for a child. Instead, slightly more than 1 out of 20 fear it. For many schools, that is one child for every classroom that is afraid to be there.

2. Armed - Carrying weapons has become quite a trend since the 1900s. Of the same high school students above, 5.4-percent of them admitted to carrying a gun, knife, or club to school. Whether the reason behind carrying weapons is aggressive or defensive in nature is irrelevant. It would be shocking to many teachers to realize that at least one of their students is carrying a weapon in his or her classroom. However, this is also dependent of the area and the teacher might not be shocked from the outcome. The fact that the child feels he or she needs to carry a weapon at all should be the main focus of this point. The world shouldn't be this violent for a child regardless of their location.

3. Threats with Weapons - During the nationally represented sample of youth survey, 7.4-percent of high school aged children reported being threatened by weapons at least once in the 12 months preceding the survey. Unfortunately, this doesn't show if these threats were caused from retaliation of threats the child received him or herself as a defensive measure or if a particularly aggressive child is threatening many different students.

4. Fighting - Fighting amongst children isn't a new occurrence in school, and 12-percent of high school-aged children admitted to being in a fight in the last 12 months while on school property. What's interesting is the 32.8-percent of children grades 9 through 12 who have been in a fight whether it was at school or not as a whole. This means that close to one out of three fights a high school child experiences will be on school grounds. Given the speculation that some of these off-school fights could have originated in the classroom, it begs the attention of how can the staff allow the violence to progress so far?

There are many speculations to how this violence erupts so frequently for children in the teenaged high school group. While some attribute the aggressive nature to video games and television, others point fingers at social services as parents are afraid to discipline their children out of fear of being arrested or spending the next two years attending court proceedings for "abuse" and/or "neglect." Regardless of the reasoning, something needs to be done. Our children shouldn't be afraid of the institution that is supposed to promote knowledge and temperance.

Author Bio:

Stephanie has many years of experience as a nanny. She has always loved children and has continuously been involved in childcare activities. Currently she is one of the writers for houstonnanny.com. If you want to get in touch with her, you can email her at stephanie. Houstonnanny @ gmail. com.