Schools

9 Most Violent School Districts in New Jersey

While school districts in cities such as Newark and Camden led the way in total number of incidents, there were many districts that had a higher ratio of incidents of violence

The New Jersey Department of Education on Thursday released its annual Violence, Vandalism and Substance Abuse in the Schools Report for 2012-2013.

The report documents self-reported incidents of violence in each district. Overall, the total number of incidents (violence, bullying, etc.) in New Jersey schools plummeted by 19 percent from the previous year, led by a 36 percent drop in the number of bullying incidents reported.

Overall violence in New Jersey schools was down 4 percent year-over-year.

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While school districts in cities such as Newark and Camden led the way in total number of incidents, there were many districts that had a higher ratio of incidents of violence. Camden, for instance, reported 163 incidents of violence — in a district of 12,608 students.

But Lakewood, in Ocean County, reported 145 incidents of violence in a district with more than 7,000 fewer students. So we decided to take a look at the report in the context of how many students attend school in each of the districts, and construct a list of the districts with the highest ratio of incidents of violence per student.

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A few caveats: We only included districts with more than 500 students that also have a high school. We also omitted charter schools and special services districts. And remember, this data is self-reported by the districts, and does not differentiate based on the severity of the incident. Oh, and why nine? We placed the cutoff for inclusion at a ratio of .020.

And for comparison, there were 7,895 incidents of violence among New Jersey’s 1,369,554 students, a ratio of .005.


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