ST PAUL, Minn. — The St. Paul Public School District has announced that five high schools will receive added safety support from St. Paul police following a fatal stabbing at Harding High School last week, and mounting concerns about other recent violence in and near its schools.
But the concerns about safety in schools is hardly limited to St. Paul. According to a recent survey of students, in the last six years, fewer and fewer kids are reporting feeling basic levels of safety in schools.
Every three years for the last 30 years, the Minnesota Student Survey has asked how safe students feel at home, in their neighborhood, traveling to and from school, and at school.
"Physical safety and having your basic needs met is the bottom, the baseline, and you cannot achieve higher levels of human functioning if those basic needs aren't met," said Sharrilyn Helgertz, senior research scientist with the Minnesota Department of Health.
That underlying feeling of safety is such a building block, Helgertz says, that it's important to understand what is leading to fewer and fewer students reporting feeling safe in school during the past six years.
For example, in 2019, 92% of Minnesota eighth graders reported feeling safe in school. By 2022, it dropped to 87%. She says similar declines were reported across grade levels, despite other safety questions remaining largely unchanged.
"Something happened between 2016 and 2019, in schools, that started to drive that downward and it's just continuing to decline," Helgertz said. "The question is, what happened? This is the best data that we have — or the best information that we have — about what's going on with the internal life of all these kids across the entire state."
But getting that data has grown more difficult recently. Participation in the survey dropped slightly in 2019 and hit record low in 2022, with 70% of school districts participating. One of the districts that did not take part was St. Paul Public Schools.
Kent Erdahl: "How much does a school district of that size in our metro area — which is really at the center of safety concerns right now — not participating in the survey make it more difficult to understand what's going on?"
Helgertz: "Oh, it's huge Kent. We were so heartbroken when we learned that St. Paul school districts wouldn't be participating. They just couldn't make it work. I know that they value the survey because they have participated in the past, but every now and then some of these big school districts just can't do it in that particular year. And there's a cost to that. We can't, until the next administration, which is in 2025, measure something that's important to this district and is important to the people that care about these students to get a grip on where they're at and where they're headed."
Though it's too late for the survey, in the wake of the recent violence in St. Paul, she says it's critical for the adults to remember that it's never too late to listen.
"Talk to the kids," Helgertz said. "Work it out with them so that any solution is a reflection of what they want and what would help them to feel safe."
Watch more Breaking The News:
Watch all of the latest stories from Breaking The News in our YouTube playlist: