U.S. government hopes to quell school violence

Hundreds of government officials, school administrators and parents gathered on Tuesday in Chevy Chase, on the outskirts of the nation's capital, trying to find ways to end violence in schools across the country.

"In many ways, I'm sorry we're having this meeting," President George W. Bush said at the conference on school safety, which was organized by the White House after several tragic school shootings and threats of violence that locked down or closed schools in many states over the past two weeks.

"In other ways, I know how important it is that we're having this meeting," he said.

The meeting, attended by some 300 people, including experts and law enforcement officials, was to discuss how federal, state, and local governments could work together with schools, communities and families to make schools into safe places for students to learn.

The conference would highlight best practices for making schools safe; share lessons learned from prior incidents of school violence; and bring together resources and experts on how to make schools safer and help communities and families recover from school tragedies, a press release issued by the White House said.

Bush said the recent wave of school violence troubled a lot of people, and people wanted classrooms in the country "to be gentle places of learning - places where people not only learn the basics - basic skills necessary to become productive citizens, but learn to relate to one another."

Delbert Elliott, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence based in Boulder, Colorado, said the first line of prevention of school violence was to have "good intelligence," and that schools should encourage students to speak up when they hear classmates boasting of violent plans.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings called on schools to practice crisis response plans, and experts said schools could get safer when they took bullying seriously, practiced crisis plans, and talked to parents about what was happening with their kids.

A series of school violence were reported in schools across the country in the past two weeks. On Monday, a shooting incident occurred in Joplin, Missouri, in which a 13-year-old student fired his assault rifle into the ceiling at his middle school after confronting some of students and administrators, merely one week after a shooting rampage at a school in Pennsylvania left five girls dead.

Source: Xinhua