FEATURE PHOTO

Illinois students and educators discuss violence and the best ways to keep it out of U.S. schools during a student school safety symposium. (AP/WWP Seth Perlman)

School shootings in the United States have reaped banner headlines in recent years. That is appropriate. Death and injury to young people in an environment that should be a safe haven in which to learn and grow is particularly upsetting to Americans and to all people of goodwill.

But it is important to keep such incidents in perspective. In this respect, the newspaper headlines and our television screens may give us a distorted view. Because we cherish our children and because we want our schools and colleges to be the safest places in our society, incidents that occur there garner disproportionate coverage.

The truth is that school shootings are relatively rare in the United States and the risk of death or injury to an American student in school is relatively small. Moreover, recent studies have pointed to a decline in school violence -- a trend apparent in crime statistics for the nation as a whole; 90 percent of schools report no serious violent crime whatsoever.

Nevertheless, there is no room for complacency where the safety of young people is concerned and therefore a wide array of initiatives have been taken at both the local as well as national level to make the nation's schools the safest they can possibly be.

In the following pages, we will detail some of these efforts. They are by no means exhaustive. No authority in the United States -- and so far as we know anywhere else -- has the complete answer to youth violence either on or off campus. The important task is to craft improvements -- through trial and error -- that will maximize safety for every young person, recognizing in an imperfect world that risk cannot be completely eliminated from any sphere of life.