by Asia. S. Ivey, Ph.D., Mia Karisa Dawson, Ph.D., & Shani Buggs, MPH, Ph.D.

Abstract

Overt forms of interpersonal, physical, and gun violence have dominated mainstream narratives regarding violence in schools. However, covert and hegemonic forms of violence propagated daily throughout K-12 urban public schools often persist unnoticed and thus unchallenged. The perceived equalizing nature of public education often labels schools as safe, race-neutral landscapes capable of buffering students from outside harm. However, schools are porous community organizations where many students’ experiences reflect the hyper-surveillance and insecurity they navigate daily in their neighborhoods. Contemporary K-12 urban public schools with large populations of Black and brown students and where educators’ agency is limited often perpetuate structural violence by utilizing Eurocentric curricula. Eurocentric curricula are epistemically racist as they lack humanizing reflections of Black and brown people and their legacies while centering histories of people of European descent. Structural violence in these schools is also inflicted through zero-tolerance policies that systematically exclude Black and brown students from their educational experience. This piece argues that schools can simultaneously address structural harms and cultivate safer, more just learning and living communities by adopting values of community-based violence intervention and prevention (CVIP), a holistic public health approach that attempts to transform the social and structural conditions underlying violence. Schools that employ CVIP’s socio-structural approach to violence intervention and prevention have the potential to uproot harmful practices and policies grounded in structural racism and white supremacy, which contribute to poorer academic achievement and have negative implications for student and community safety, health, and well-being. Where many urban public schools rely on conformity, punishment, and exclusion, CVIP strategies offer a transformative alternative. By prioritizing interventions tailored to meet individual needs, incorporating restorative justice practices, and fostering liberatory community-building, CVIP strategies promote a holistic approach to violence reduction. Integrating these strategies into K-12 urban public schools can significantly reduce and prevent violence, while cultivating healthier and safer learning environments where students can thrive.

Introduction

When discussing the rate of violence in schools and communities across the United States, interpersonal forms of violence, such as gang violence, bullying, or gun violence, are traditionally the primary focal points (Kaufman et al., 1998; Rennison, 1999). However, violence permeates institutions and organizations like schools in much more clandestine ways. Federal, district, and school-level policies and practices can reproduce harm regardless of the actors’ intentions within the organizations, which is considered a structural form of violence (Weigert, 2010). Seemingly mundane curricular and disciplinary requirements can be infused with ideologies that reproduce racism and inequity regardless of an educator’s individual beliefs. Structural harm pervades K-12 urban public schools through the facilitation of Eurocentric curricula. Such curricula perpetuate epistemic racism, which is the endorsement of racially biased perspectives that reflect a social system of knowledge and value that privileges whiteness and systematically ‘others’ all those that remain (Scheurich & Young, 1997).

Schools also exert structural violence by enforcing zero-tolerance policies rooted in ideals of Black inferiority and behavioral racism (Kendi, 2023), which systematically exclude Black and brown students from their educational experience. Structural violence is particularly prevalent in urban public schools where Black and brown students (inclusive of Black, Indigenous, Latinx/Chicanx, and Asian peoples) are disproportionately present (Verdugo, 2002), and educators’ agency is especially limited (Dover, 2022). Although this work illuminates how structural violence operates in urban public schools, in particular, charter schools, as well as rural and suburban schools abandoned due to white flight, also contextually propagate structural harm at various levels of schooling (Wilson, 2019). Charter schools are commonly highly structured, punitive organizations centered on character development for Black and brown students (Marsh, 2018), whereas abandoned schools located in divested communities suffer from limited funding, resources, and qualified educators (Jacob, 2007). The ubiquity of K-12 public education, however, coupled with the porous nature of schools within communities, suggests that schools are in the prime position to respond to the short and long-term impacts of structural violence. Urban public schools can begin addressing their structural harms by adopting community-based initiatives while redressing community well-being.

Community-based violence interventionists (CVIs) provide a framework to understand how organizations like schools can mitigate violence. Community-based violence intervention and prevention (CVIP) is an evolving, multimodal field with widespread institutional implications in health care, education, and the criminal legal system. CVI professionals engage with local and national organizational networks to reduce community violence, defined as public, extralegal, and non-intimate partner violence (National Center for Children Exposed to Violence, 2010; Sieger et al., 2004). CVIP responds to violence in ways that challenge the traditional methods that public schools utilize. Where many schools rely on conformity, punishment, and exclusion, CVI depends on uniquely developed interventions that aim to meet each individual’s needs, including restorative healing and inclusive community-building practices.

Before nationwide school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, gun violence in schools was occurring at unprecedented rates (Thebault & Rindler, 2021). While virtual learning resulted in a brief cessation of mass-casualty shootings on school campuses, gun violence in other spaces surged nationwide. The increase in gun violence, amidst mass protests in the spring and summer of 2020 following the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, prompted interest by policymakers in the funding and implementation of community-led violence intervention and prevention programs. While varied in tactics and service offerings, standard CVIP programs share common practices that identify and engage individuals at the highest risk of violence involvement to provide social and familial support, mentorship, and connection to community resources and services. These services can address the needs of those involved in violence, such as financial and housing insecurity, legal aid, degree attainment, therapeutic and healing services, and more (Buggs et al., 2022). Although schools are well-positioned to be community centers, their priorities are often dictated by the funding needs of their districts and organizations. Given how standardized testing is coupled with school funding, their focus is often centralized on ensuring academic achievement (Tow, 2006) rather than holistic wellness. Outreach-based violence intervention specifically employs mentors who can credibly relate to the structural barriers students experience. Outreach-based workers employ unique skills and life experiences to build healthy relationships, guide comprehensive development, intervene in conflict, and prevent potential future violence (Buggs, 2022).

In 2021, our research team interviewed fifteen CVIP professionals specializing in outreach-based interventions to gain insights into the complex nuances, challenges, and expert-proposed strategies of effectively instituting these interventions to reduce violence while ensuring program personnel and participants’ optimal health and well-being. The advice and recommendations from the CVIP experts we interviewed resulted in a comprehensive report to guide field professionals to develop and enhance outreach-based CVIP programs nationwide (Buggs et al., 2022). Additionally, their insights illuminated a potentially undersaturated and underdeveloped area of CVIP: the schools attended by children living in communities with high rates of violence.

Although schools are a central component of community dynamics, they are rarely the primary intervention sites in the field of outreach-based CVIP. Outreach-based programs face challenges due to limitations schools have for visitors with legal records, for example, which can exclude most outreach workers with lived experience. These limitations are often, ironically, framed as protective measures: as schools perpetuate harm in its various forms, they simultaneously limit the ability of community members and their efforts to reach the children most in need of their services. Consequently, the organizations in critical need of the comprehensive services outreach-based CVIP programs have to offer are rarely eligible for programmatic integration.

Beyond incorporating outreach workers into schools, we argue there are other ways to foster the values derived from outreach-based CVIP strategies, including teacher training, policy reform, and critical pedagogy. Traditionally, U.S. K-12 urban public school policies and practices are rooted in racism and white supremacy, and as a result, disproportionately harm and disenfranchise Black and brown students. For example, the zero-tolerance policies that disproportionately alienate and exclude Black and brown students from their education are over-utilized in non-violent incidents because their behaviors and mannerisms are perceived as deviant. CVIP approaches oppose these ideologies by cultivating spaces and relationships that prioritize care, reparation, empathy, and wellness. Adopting the principles of CVIP and instilling their practices into daily school life can reduce conflict during school hours and prevent violence from overflowing into the community while simultaneously providing the support and resources to ensure that the holistic tools and strategies learned also reverberate beyond the school walls

School violence is a complex, multidimensional issue characterized by deviant and aggressive behaviors that impede personal growth and disrupt classroom culture. Among researchers, policymakers, and school personnel, there has been minimal consensus regarding what school violence encompasses, making redress challenging. Educators’ perspectives about school violence critically shape their understanding of their role in intervening in and preventing it. Understanding school violence requires distinguishing between external sources of violence, such as gang or domestic conflicts that enter school campuses, and the internal school dynamics that can either mitigate or exacerbate these conflicts. This distinction highlights the role of schools as both sites of physical and interpersonal violence and as organizational systems that influence the development and resolution of conflicts. Attentive and intentional educators are key in identifying and addressing the social and structural contexts that contribute to the breakdown of relationships within schools (Furlong & Morrison, 2000). Further, the systems perspective situates schools as porous organizations with the power to surpass existing reactive frameworks for community violence intervention and prevention. It also encapsulates the myriad ways students experience violence in school beyond interpersonal experiences and neighborhood conflict.

In this paper, we demonstrate that schools are porous community organizations with the power to internally mitigate incidents of structural violence while positively impacting the rate of community violence by cultivating healthier and safer communities for learning and living. To begin, we establish the role of schools in reproducing epistemic racism through Eurocentric curricula that do not honor the lived, human experiences of Black and brown students. We then discuss structural harm at the policy level, often perpetrated by school resources officers whose over-presence can be attributed to racialized disciplinary policy that systemically excludes Black and brown students from their educational experience. Finally, we discuss critical strategies learned from interviews from our 2022 CVIP report, arguing that comprehensive, community-engaged approaches can address and potentially ameliorate the root causes of structural violence in urban public schools. By focusing on a multi-modal intervention strategy coupled with public health frameworks, outreach-based CVIP links individuals and families to tangible resources, including housing, mental health services, and mentorship, while cultivating spaces rooted in safety, health, and wellness.

Structural violence in urban schools

Structural violence is a multidimensional system of ideologies, laws, and policies that co-construct and uphold the institutions and organizations that govern society. This complex infrastructure creates and reinforces inequities across race, gender, sexuality, and ability, deeply affecting how people experience their social and economic environments (Bell, 2019). Structural violence differs from interpersonal violence in that individual actors – though often present and act as catalysts – are not required to perpetuate and maintain systems of inequity. Structural violence and its outcomes are more covert than interpersonal violence and operate at all levels of society to harm and disenfranchise Black and brown people (Edling, 2015). For example, regardless of their backgrounds or beliefs, individual doctors can reinforce racist practices that yield unfavorable outcomes in medicine, as many of our healthcare baselines and references are derived from research on white subjects. Because the autonomy of public school teachers is habitually limited (Dover, 2022), they are often required to abide by school practices and policies regarding curricula and discipline that they were not involved in developing, thus encouraging well-intentioned educators to reproduce harms that are symbolically dehumanizing and physically exclusionary.

Epistemic racism in Eurocentric curriculum

Contemporary K-12 urban public schools reproduce epistemic racism through a Eurocentric curriculum that propagates bias, reinforces stereotypes, and writes people of the global majority out of history. Epistemologies are culturally specific ‘ways of knowing’ that dictate how we understand our world and what kinds of knowledge are credible (Grix, 2002). Epistemic racism is perpetuated in schools when the curriculum centers on specific bodies of knowledge while disregarding others as illegitimate. For example, a Eurocentric curriculum is a curricular narrative that centralizes people of European descent’s political and social perspectives and their cultural forms while marginalizing and misrepresenting those of the people of the global majority (Bell, 2019; Sizemore, 1990). Therefore, educators who passively facilitate Eurocentric curriculum engage in the reproduction of epistemic racism, regardless of their personal beliefs or intentions.

Educators who are overhauling their curricula to center the experience and humanity of global majority students are examining the divisions of knowledge that distinguish European epistemology, and that obscure a universe of alternatives. Doing so does not involve simply discarding Eurocentric texts. Instead, educators are responsible for guiding students through a critical analysis of the implicit biases and misrepresentations reproduced through the Eurocentric default content and integrating diverse materials that align with their students’ lived experiences

(Chang, 2020). Educators who help their students critically engage with social problems through curricular content provide pathways and language for students to challenge dominant epistemologies that (1) relegate people of the global majority to inconsequential minority status, (2) minimize the legacies of people of the global majority to one-dimensional histories of oppression and (3) revise legacies of oppression using language that subverts the responsibility of the oppressor (Colombo, 2020; Dozono, 2020). The misrecognition students of the global majority experience as a result of the curriculum can make it difficult for students to identify their place in their school community and society at large (Dozono, 2020). When students struggle to find their identity or to feel a sense of belonging, it can lead to behaviors and attitudes that may be considered misaligned with the policies intended to maintain social control and order.

Zero-tolerance policy and SROs

Structural violence is reinforced through zero-tolerance policies, which are rooted in ideologies of Black inferiority and behavioral racism (Kendi, 2023) and systematically target and exclude Black and brown students (Kemper, 1993). Zero tolerance refers to the policy-based response to violence in schools. Schools that adopt zero-tolerance policies are considered intolerant of school violence and thus severely punish students who exhibit violent behaviors (Kodelja, 2019). Without acknowledging or taking responsibility for the institution’s role in perpetuating violence, these policies pose individual students as dysfunctional or deviant. Although zero-tolerance policies responded to a national increase in violence, individual organizations decide which policies to adopt and how they will be enforced – with minimal oversight – so their application can look different from school to school.

Zero-tolerance policies are generally intended to severely punish fighting, drugs, weapons on campus, and gang activity, with long-term suspensions and expulsion. In practice, students are often suspended for noncompliant acts such as “talking back” or refusing to turn over their cell phones. Zero-tolerance policies are not applied equitably because who and what is considered violent is contextual and rooted in racialized power dynamics. The same racist ideologies that undergird criminalization in mainstream society have also been adopted to justify disciplinary interventions in schools. This is more explicitly demonstrated by how solutions developed for violence in schools parallel those derived for violence in the United States (Currie, 1995). Introducing metal detectors and school resource officers to reduce violence, the exclusionary impact of zero-tolerance policies, and the proliferation of racial stereotypes position our schools to be institutions of social control rather than safe, humane environments that nurture and cultivate democratic individuals.

Gun violence in schools has risen significantly since 2015, prompting national debates over gun access, mental health resources, and school safety measures. The most notable change over the last 30 years due to gun violence in schools, however, has been the significant growth of the school security infrastructure (Cox & Rich, 2018). The surge in school resource officers (SROs) has expanded the school-to-prison nexus – which establishes the fundamental and symbiotic relationship between schooling and the criminal legal system (Goldman, 2022) – and has reinforced harmful and punitive ideologies rooted in racism and criminality. As zero-tolerance policies have significantly increased school resource officers (SROs) and law enforcement presence on school grounds, there has been a drastic increase in violent interactions over minor, often non-violent infractions between school authority figures and the students they are employed to protect, especially Black girls (Crenshaw, 2015).

Zero-tolerance environments, as described by Black girls exposed to punitive educational landscapes, are chaotic and prioritize discipline at the expense of educational achievement. The heightened presence of security personnel and the installation of metal detectors in some schools have led to a significant decline in comfort and attendance, with some girls feeling actively discouraged from attending school at all (Crenshaw, 2015). Violent interactions between students and school resource officers or law enforcement have also become an increasing problem (Morris, 2016). Viral videos have shown shocking encounters, like that of 16-year-old Shakara being tossed from her desk by an SRO after a teacher grew frustrated with Shakara for taking “too long” to put her phone away. An incident that at most required a conversation between student and teacher after class resulted in Shakara being in an arm cast and facing misdemeanor charges, up to a $1,000 fine, and 90 days in jail (Jarvie, 2015). The involvement of carceral entities exacerbates non-violent issues that can be addressed by improving classroom management through smaller classroom environments and student-teacher relationships. Furthermore, school personnel are integral in young Black and brown boys coming to terms with their punitive environments and ubiquitous labels of criminality (Rios 2011). Once these students recognize they have been labeled “delinquent,” their opportunity and desire to establish meaningful school connections drastically diminishes (Morris, 2016, p. 2).

Community Violence Intervention and Prevention

Although mass-casualty gun violence in schools was relatively rare in the U.S. until the 21st century, the issue of school violence has long been of significant concern. Early interventionists – physicians, psychologists, and educators – concluded schools were the most logical site to reach the most at-risk youth; however, their approaches have yet to yield sustainable results that do not continue to reinforce harsh punishment. Early programming adopted individual-level behavioral modification models to increase students’ skill sets and improve mental health. These models included conflict resolution, mentoring (McPartland & Nettless, 1991), and counseling programs (Oakes, 1987), as well as adaptations to the curriculum (Daux, 1990). Furthermore, mental health infrastructure, gun access, and parental supervision have been prioritized as policy resolutions, yet none address the fact that Black and brown youth have significantly less access to alternative non-violent opportunities. Although these interventions experience siloed success, the overwhelming reactive responses to school violence have decreased community cohesion and strengthened the school-to-prison nexus.

Based on interviews with fifteen leaders in the field of CVI, the 2022 report Implementing Outreach-Based Community Violence Intervention Programs: Operational Needs and Policy Recommendations identified violence in schools as an area that could benefit from CVI values and practices. CVIP’s core values help humanize, guide, and further integrate high-risk individuals into a safer community. Students of the global majority who have to navigate structural violence in schools could benefit from interventions that holistically address the impact of violence once it occurs and prevent future violent incidents from occurring. Traditional outreach-based CVI programs are challenging to implement in schools; therefore, more tailored programming would need to be developed. However, outreach-based CVI programs provide a robust framework for schools to build upon and mold for their individual community needs (Buggs et al., 2022). Contemporary K-12 urban public schools could benefit from the following outreach-based CVI program strategies:

• Holistic approaches: The numerous domains related to school violence, including educational attainment, social and community support, familial intervention, and personal development, are often addressed in isolation. Yet, the dialectical nature of individual growth and community healing underscores the necessity for a more holistic approach (Meyer & Chetty, 2017). All forms of violence (epistemic and physical, structural and interpersonal) are public health issues and thus lend themselves to public health strategies. Public health models outline holistic interventions by identifying primary, secondary, and tertiary plans of action (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022). Schools can enact policy, organizational, and community-level change by adopting a Whole School, Whole Child, Whole Community (WSCC) perspective (Rajan et al., 2022). The WSCC model acknowledges the significant relationship between schools and the communities in which they reside, as well as the inherent links between health and education (Lewallen et al., 2015).
• Community engagement: Community engagement is vital to impact the social cultures and conditions contributing to youth violence (Gorman-Smith et al., 2004; Peterson & Newman, 2000; Sampson et al., 2002). Outreach-based CVI programs rely on specialized intervention strategies that are co-constructed and maintained alongside numerous community partners, including public health, law enforcement (conditionally), education, employment, and housing (Buggs et al., 2022; Morrel-Samuels et al., 2016). To build and sustain these partnerships, trust (Griffith et al., 2008; Kim-Ju et al., 2008), transparency (Green et al., 2001), communication (Plowfield et al., 2005), and commitment (Green et al., 2001; Plowfield et al., 2005) are essential (Morrel-Samuels et al., 2016). Building trust requires an investment of time and a commitment to building relationships with community partners. Transparency involves providing clear roles for the partnership, resource expectations, and future plans, as well as a commitment to sharing resources and promoting sustainability. Communication should be frequent, consistent, and in a form that aligns with the social norms and values of the community. Lastly, there should be a commitment to build capacity and sustainability to ensure ongoing impact beyond active programming. This can be achieved by training community members and educators in CVIP strategies and evaluation methods, allowing for continuous influence and identifying opportunities for growth (Morrel-Samuels et al., 2016).
• Relationship building: Outreach-based programming relies on a mentorship model, in which one-on-one relationship building between an outreach worker and program participant is crucial for ensuring successful wrap-around services. Outreach workers are often tasked with developing and maintaining these relationships with youth who are identified at the highest risk of engaging in violence (Buggs et al., 2022). Because school limitations may exclude outreach workers from entering, educators must build these relationships with their students. Cultivating strong student-teacher relationships by intentionally and regularly engaging with students and their families will ensure educators have a deeper understanding of their students’ lived experiences and can help them to develop resources that align with their students’ identities, allowing them to redress the epistemic racism that is reproduced through the curriculum. Furthermore, when these relationships are developed, not only are students more invested in meeting teacher expectations, but teachers also have a better understanding of the circumstances that may underlie the behaviors deemed misaligned with school disciplinary policy and thus practice more discretion in its application.
• Trauma-informed and restorative care: Youth exposed to violence, whether inside or outside of school, requires care and intervention that considers the bio-psychological impact of trauma (Harden et al., 2015). Rather than reactively suspending or expelling a student for their behavior, trauma-informed care would encourage school personnel to identify potential triggers and develop an ongoing plan of action to keep the student in school. Successfully implementing trauma-informed care requires intentional relationship building (Thomas et al., 2019) and incorporating restorative practices, such as restorative justice. Restorative justice is a plan of action implemented if a conflict arises. When coupled with transformative principles, “…community, structural, economic and social levels of attention” are centered in addition to “…personal and direct consideration[s] for parties to crimes and conflicts” (Harris, 2007, p. 1). Like trauma-informed care, restorative justice prevents the implementation of zero-tolerance policies by relying on established relationships within the school community. Rather than removing students from the learning environment, they are provided with a safe, neutral, and supportive environment to work through their conflict through approaches including community service, peer conferences, conflict mediation, and restitution (Payne & Welch, 2015).

Conclusion

In conclusion, we argue that K-12 urban public schools are uniquely positioned to challenge and alter the pervasive structural violence that impacts Black and brown students. Schools can actively dismantle systemic barriers by integrating community violence intervention and prevention strategies into daily school operations. Doing so requires a shift from reactive to proactive measures that equally prioritize holistic development and academic achievement. For example, replacing Eurocentric curricula with inclusive educational frameworks and moving away from punitive zero-tolerance policies towards restorative practices can positively impact schools that aim to break the cycle of violence and oppression in public education. Such transformative actions will catalyze schools to become community centers of learning and growth where Black and brown students feel valued, understood, and supported.

Further, educators become critical agents of change by integrating CVIP values into a school’s organizational culture. They have the opportunity to actively engage in the redefinition of school dynamics to foster a more supportive and nurturing learning environment. This transition involves training teachers to be more aware of their biases and identify structural limitations in contemporary educational models and classroom management practices. It also requires a commitment to ongoing community engagement and the development and sustainability of partnerships that extend to families, local leaders, and organizations collectively working towards safer schools and communities.

The comprehensive approach for addressing structural violence in urban public schools provided by CVIP values addresses the immediate needs of students and lays the foundation for long-term community reparation. Schools that embrace this paradigm shift will demonstrate the significant impact of education when it is aligned with principles that support comprehensive approaches, building meaningful relationships, and trauma-informed, restorative care. Consequently, K-12 urban public schools that adopt CVIP strategies can transform the lives of their students and contribute to the healing and thriving of communities, creating a legacy of positive change that can inspire other organizations and institutions to follow suit.

Notes on Contributors

Asia S. Ivey is a sociologist with an interdisciplinary research agenda that centers on community violence intervention and prevention, educational equity, and racialized organizational policy. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Davis, and holds a B.A. in Psychology from Spelman College. Asia currently serves as a Research Data Analyst for UC Davis Health’s Violence Prevention Research Program.

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