By Adam Pagnucco.
Part One introduced the topic of whether MCPS students and staff feel safe at school. This issue was measured with two different questions. Students were asked to agree or disagree with this statement: “Overall, I feel safe at school.” Allowable answers were strongly agree, agree, disagree and strongly disagree. Staff were asked, “How safe do you feel in your school?” Allowable answers were extremely, quite, somewhat or not at all.
In elementary schools, a large majority of both students and staff felt safe. The remainder of this series will focus on middle schools and high schools, where the percentages of students and staff feeling unsafe were significantly higher.
The charts below break down student responses by race. Note that not all students reported their race in the survey.
For both school groups, unsafe feelings were significantly higher for Black and Latino students than for White and Asian students. It’s particularly noteworthy that more than a third of Black middle school students do not feel safe at school.
The charts below break down staff responses by race. Note that not all employees reported their race in the survey.
There is no clear racial pattern here as there is among students. However, it’s clear that there are large minorities of staff in all racial groups who do not feel safe at school. In particular, more than 40% of Black high school employee respondents do not feel safe at school.
We will start looking at individual schools in Part Three.