These issues may be identified in a variety of ways including:
- talking with students and observing their interaction
- discussions with school counselors and teachers who are
close to students
- contacting leaders of community agencies, organizations,
and churches
- reviewing the number and distribution of school discipline
cases
- reviewing results of community or school based surveys of community problems
To read more about each real life issue and for related links click on the title.
- Substance
Abuse
Studies indicate that children most often begin to use drugs at about age 12 or 13. Researchers have observed young teens moving from substances such as tobacco, alcohol, and inhalants to other drug use often beginning with marijuana (NIDA, 1997). For most children, transitional stages are the highest risk periods. Because risk factors appear at every transitional stage from infancy through young adulthood, prevention efforts need to be present at every developmental stage.
- Violence
Over the last decade, violent offenses among adolescents, including murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault continue at high levels in the United States. Young children face many challenges as they attempt to develop a pro-social nonviolent approach to life. Not only may they suffer from a lack of closeness to adults, but also from over exposure to graphic violence in the news, entertainment media, in their homes and communities. Although violent behavior peaks at 16 or 17, such behavior begins during the early elementary grades (Reuters, 2002). Early intervention can help curtail youth violence.
- Bullying
Among the problems confronting students in schools today is bullying. Bullying may be physical, verbal, emotional, or sexual in nature. Among children it is commonly defined as intentional, repeated acts, words or other abusive behavior, such as name-calling, threatening, and/ or shunning committed by one or more children against another. Bullying may often lead to greater prolonged violent behavior. Recent studies show that as many as 75% of children have been victims of bullying during their school careers (The 2000 National Crime Prevention Survey, 2001). People who were bullied as children are more likely to suffer from depression and low self esteem, well into adulthood, and the bullies themselves are more likely to engage in criminal behavior later in life (NICHD, 2001). Ideally, efforts to prevent bullying should begin as early as pre-kindergarten and continue throughout a child’s formal education.
- Social
Ostracism
Social problems such as peer rejection and ostracism are issues present in schools. Communities where there is very heavy focus on achievement, competitive success, and status are likely to promote high levels of youth competition, cliques and social ostracism. Social Ostracism is isolating, rejecting, socially excluding, banishing, or ignoring a targeted individual. In schools, social cliques may often engage in this form of ostracism or emotional bullying in order to divide a student from their group just to express the slightest displeasure with the student. Understanding and recognizing the actions children take to exclude their peers, as well as, the adult actions they mirror is an important step toward preventing emotional bullying and the psychological and emotional harm it can cause children (Reaching Today’s Youth, 1999).
- HIV/AIDS
Many American adolescents are engaging in behaviors that may put them at risk of acquiring HIV infection and other sexually transmitted infections. Over the past decade, the number of AIDS cases reported each year among U.S. adolescents (13-19 years of age) has increased substantially (CDC, 1998). HIV-related death has the greatest impact on young and middle-aged adults, particularly racial and ethnic minorities. Many of these young people were infected in their teens or early twenties. Experts agree that prevention through education is the best way to fight the transmission of HIV, which causes AIDS, and these prevention efforts must begin before young people initiate sexual activity (Eric Digests, 1996).
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