School violence has been in the news frequently this past month, thanks to the beating death of honors student Derrion Albert by other teenagers and the shooting death of Trevor Varinecz by a school resource officer whom Varinecz reportedly stabbed several times.

Parents, students, teachers, school boards, elected officials, and the public are asking what's causing these kinds of violence and positing solutions to the problem.

Over the years, I've heard academics, parents, students, and the authorities provide a very wide range of reasons why students target one another or why adults target students. Dunblane was chalked up in part to pedophila by a former Scout leader; the West Nickel Mines (Amish) School shooting to molestation and pedophila; the Derrian Albert beating to a deadly neighborhood rivalry; the the Columbine high school massacre to (among other things) bullying, cliques, antidepressant use by teens, and video games; and the Heath High School (Paducah, Kentucky) attack on the shooter's mental illness. These are the most sensational and publicized incidents of school violence over the years; for a fuller list, check out this very disturbing Wikipedia page.  Of course, there are thousands more cases, ranging from fistfights to stabbings to rape and God knows what else, that occur under the radar of the national, and frequently also the local, media. I'd also posit that some of the blame can be placed on a Darwinian competition for scarce resources in impoverished school districts, parental and student poverty, suburban ennui in more affluent schools, and a persistent American history of cross-cultural distrust and misunderstanding.

Bloggers and journalists have written about the most recent incidents, particularly the Albert beating, dissecting possible causes of the violence and proposing ways to move beyond it.

Naomi Zikmund-Fisher, who blogs at Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback, is a school principal and a crisis consultant for schools and community organizations. Reflecting on the Varinecz stabbing and shooting, she writes,

A good Critical Incident Stress Management Team knows what to expect from an officer involved shooting. They know what to expect when an officer is injured. They know the patterns when a child dies, and those from violence in a school. They even know that sometimes two types of incidents combine into one event.

All that having been said, I don't think there is a team in the country that feels truly prepared for what happened at Carolina Forest High School today. There is no page in the textbook for the injury of an officer at a school in an incident resulting in an officer involved shooting of a child. As a school CISM Team Leader myself, I look at this incident and have to take a few moments just to swear under my breath before I can even consider where I would start.

This is just one more reminder that emergency preparedness isn't just about practicing for every awful event you can imagine. It's also about developing a tool kit of skills and the creativity and flexibility to use them in new ways, when those things that you can't possibly imagine in a million years happen on your watch.

At The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jonathan Zimmerman provides an historical perspective, emphasizing that strife isn't new to the schoolhouse--but guns are. Zimmerman's brief exposé goes all the way back to an 1841 story by Walt Whitman.

Jonathan Simon at Prawfsblog suggests schools need to do more to "govern crime" instead of "governing through crime." He cites Susan Saulny's New York Times piece examining how Chicago school officials are now determining which students are most likely to be victims of school violence. In short: Chicago students are more likely to be victims of violence if they are black, male, are academically off-track, and lack a stable home environment. Student victims of violence in Chicago schools miss an average of 42% of school days.

Mary at Freedom Eden wonders how recent violence will affect students' learning in a Milwaukee high school.

Barbara Twine-Thomas, who writes at Febone 1960, reflects on how youth violence has become "an American way of life." Her post chronicles several recent, and profoundly disturbing, incidents of violence by and against young people, including ones where a toddler and a teen were doused with flammable liquids and set on fire. Twine-Thomas calls on all of us to get involved in addressing the epidemic of youth violence.

Lisa H. at Chicago Moms blog reports on the unsettling (lack of) reaction of her fellow Starbucks customers to two 12-year-old boys' boasting that they were such victims of injustice (one had been given a white instead of a black iPhone) that they could kill everyone in the café.

In a Truth-Out op-ed, Henry A. Giroux suggests that

a set of larger forces in American society [...] are increasingly defining kids through a youth crime complex that touches almost every aspect of their lives - extending from the streets they walk on to the schools and community centers in which they spend most of their time.

He continues:

School violence cannot be disconnected from the larger violence that filters through American society, nor can it be addressed by demonizing or beating kids or, increasingly, militarizing their schools. Nor can it be addressed by simply pumping money into cash-strapped schools simply to promote standardized testing. The underlying economic, social and political causes of violence are largely tied to a society in which young people, especially poor, minority youth, simply do not matter any longer and are considered disposable. Removed from the discourse of social investment, if not the social contract itself, they are destined to be unemployed, having been warehoused in schools often lacking the most basic resources, and subject to a culture of violence from which they can rarely escape and almost never transform on their own.

Definitely click through to Giroux's op-ed, a real battle-cry for social, and not just school, reform.

Over at the Republican Reporter, Bob Schulz suggests the solution to school violence is school choice. However, in light of Giroux's more in-depth editorial, such a solution seems facile.

I imagine many of you have stories of school violence from your own days in junior high or high school. More notable for me were the days where violence was expected but nothing out of the ordinary occured. For example, I myself was at Long Beach Poly High School (Snoop Dogg's alma mater) during the Los Angeles riots. The school eventually closed for a day or two due to the riots, but on the first day, police officers who usually patrolled the campus on foot were instead driving their police car, windows rolled up, around the campus sidewalks. As far as I know, the only person hurt by campus violence during the riots was a diminutive vice principal who decided to throw herself into an altercation between two very large Pacific Islander young men.

That said, I was in charge of the obituary page in my senior year high school yearbook. My memory is that we lost fewer students than usual that year--maybe four or five that I could uncover, and not all due to violence--but in a high school of nearly 4,000 students with a high turnover rate, it's alarmingly difficult to keep track of such statistics.

What are your thoughts and experiences? What solutions do you propose?

Leslie Madsen-Brooks develops learning experiences for K-12, university, and museum clients. She blogs at The Clutter Museum, Museum Blogging, and is the founder of Eager Mondays, a consultancy providing unconventional professional development.