nstant; the form that such violence has taken has shifted. More than this, it has been recognized that violence has raised the stakes of life experience significantly. As Cirillo, et al. put it (1998): "Since education is a prerequisite for success, any disruption is damaging to the students' future." Tnus the urgency of understanding and intervening optimally to prevent or diminish violence is strong indeed.
In past years, past decades, school violence was associated in significant part with school vandalism or gang activity. Indeed, in the 1970s and much of the 1980s, violence in schools was associated with gang violence, which was routinely associated with turf wars between groups of asocial delinquents, often members of racial minorities and lower socioeconomic strata. The school was perceived as a venue in which antagonisms having little to do with school were being played out. In that regard, reporting on a shooting spree in a Los Angeles school in 1983, the Los_Angeles_Times quoted an official as saying the gang responsible for the vio
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