Jan 29

Written by: Bret Rachlin
1/29/2010 1:35 PM

For many schools across the country, drugs are a big problem. However, often illegal drugs are less prevalent than the improper use of prescription drugs. In light of this, the Benton Police Department in Arkansas plans to conduct Operation Medicine Cabinet on Saturday, February 6th. The program encourages parents to dispose of old medicine properly and rewards parents with gift cards that drop off medicine at the police department and other locations next Saturday (Source: TodaysTHV.com, January 20, 2010, Operation Medicine Cabinet to combat prescription drug abuse in Arkansas).

According to the article, many teenagers in this Arkansas community have abused prescription drugs that come from their parents’ medicine cabinets, and some have even sold the drugs in school to their classmates. Obviously, this community recognizes that it has a prescription drug problem, but what about other communities across the country? From a school perspective, how do School Resource Officers (SROs) determine the facts about their crime problems, so they can focus on addressing the correct problems? In addition to understanding the right drug problems their schools have, do they have the right insight into other crime-related issues?

For this reason, SROs need to use tools that let them understand perceptions. An anonymous crime survey distributed to parents, students and staff is a great way to do this. Here are some benefits of conducting a survey:

- Understand what’s really going on: an anonymous survey allows students to share information about incidents safely without revealing their identities
- Learn of problems in the community before they make it to school: crimes and trends in the community will likely spill into the school
- Measure success: over time an annual crime survey provides feedback to schools about the effectiveness of its security initiatives

For more information about how you can leverage crime climate surveys to help you sort out fact from fiction, please read: Using Anonymous Crime Surveys to Reconcile Perception and Reality in Schools.

Do you currently ask parents, students, and other school community members about their opinions on crime to determine if your perception equals the reality of the situation? Do you plan to conduct a crime climate survey in your school district?

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