Through an atmosphere of fairness to safer schools

Abstract

In the post-Columbine era, schools worldwide have come to view school safety through a school security lens. After the recent school shooting in Serbia, we seem to be inclined to repeat the same pattern here, even though it has been shown that formal control in schools (e.g., surveillance measures) is not effective in reducing misconduct, or at least not as effective as a positive school climate might be (Fisher et al., 2019; King & Bracy, 2019; Tanner-Smith et al., 2018). Authoritative discipline theory suggests (Gregory & Cornell, 2009) that schools that set high expectations for behavior (e.g., fairness of school rules) and promote warm support (e.g., good teacher-student relationships) increase school safety and reduce the likelihood of students violating school rules (Bear et al., 2014). Findings indicate that a positive school climate is closely related to greater school safety (Cornell, 2021; Kutsyuruba et al., 2015) and less school victimization, including bullying (Gutvajn et al., 2021) and cyberbullying (Yang et al., 2021). The fairness of school rules is usually considered to be an indicator of informal social control, effective in maintaining school safety (Fisher et al., 2019).