U. S. Department of Education

Every child has the power to succeed in school and in life and every parent, family member and caregiver can help. The question is: How can we help our children succeed? The answer comes from a combination of common sense and research about how children learn and about how to prepare them to learn. We know, for example, that children tend to do the same things as their parents do. What we say and do in our daily lives can help them to develop positive attitudes toward school and learning and to build confidence in themselves as learners. Showing our children that we both value education and use it in our daily lives provides them with powerful models and contributes greatly to their success in school. As our children's first and most important teacher, it's important that all parents build and keep strong ties to our children's schools. When parents and families are involved in their children's schools, the children do better and have better feelings about going to school. We help our children to succeed by working with teachers to make sure that they provide curricula and use teaching methods that are based on strong scientific evidence about what works best in helping students to learn. The purpose of this booklet is to make available to you information that you can use to help your child to succeed in school. The booklet includes> information about things that you can do at home to contribute to your child's school success;> activities that you can use to help your child acquire the skills to succeed in school;> answers to often-asked questions about how to work with teachers and schools; and> tips on how to help your child with test taking.

In his State of the Union, the President made it clear that the most important contest this country faces today is not between Democrats and Republicans, but with competitors around the world for the jobs and industries of our time. To win that contest and secure prosperity for all Americans, we must out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world. The Latino community is integral to that plan to win the future. There are 50.5 million Hispanics in the United States, composing 16 percent of the total population and a significant portion of the labor force. When you add the nearly 4 million residents of Puerto Rico, the total number of Latinos surpasses 54 million. Between 2000 and 2010, the Latino population increased by 15.2 million, accounting for more than half of the 27.3 million increase in the total population of the United States. In the coming decades, Latinos will continue to drive the growth of the labor force, as they will account for 60 percent of the Nation's population growth between 2005 and 2050. In this way, Latino success in education and in the labor market is of both immediate and long-term importance to America's economy. Latinos are a young population. There are 17.1 million Latinos ages 17 and younger in the U. S., more than 23 percent of this age group. In today's American public education system, Latinos are by far the largest minority group, numbering more than 12.4 million in the country's elementary, middle and high schools. Currently, nearly 22 percent, or slightly more than 1 in 5, of all pre-K-12 students enrolled in America's public schools is Latino. Yet, Latino students face persistent obstacles to educational attainment. Less than half of Latino children are enrolled in any early learning program. Only about half of all Latino students earn their high school diploma on time; those who do complete high school are only half as likely as their peers to be prepared for college. Just 13 percent of Latinos have a bachelor's degree, and only 4 percent have completed graduate or professional degree programs.

Federal Student Aid uses the data on your FAFSA to calculate an Expected Family Contribution (EFC). The EFC is an indicator of your family's financial strength to pay for education after high school. Your school will subtract your EFC from your total cost of attendance. The result is your financial need. The EFC is not the amount of money that your family must provide. Rather, you should think of the EFC as an index that the college will use to determine how much financial aid (grants, loans, or work-study) you would receive if you were to attend that school. Your application results are transmitted to the school(s) listed on your FAFSA, and the school(s) uses the EFC amount to determine the amount of financial aid that you are eligible to receive. Many states and schools also use the FAFSA data to award aid from their programs. Some states and schools also may require you to complete additional applications. Completing and submitting a FAFSA is free, whether you file electronically or on paper.

This study profiles violence in U. S. public high schools. It is based on analysis of data from a U. S. Department of Education survey of school principals that asked about the number and types of crimes they reported to police for the 1996-97 school year. The analysis shows that violence is clustered within a relatively small percentage of locations, with about 60 percent of the violence occurring in 4 percent of the schools. This is about four times higher than would be expected based on national rates of crime. High schools are grouped by the nature and level of crimes occurring in the school. Four patterns emerge from this grouping: 1) No Crime, 2) Isolated Crime, 3) Moderate Crime and 4) Violent Crime. High schools in each group are described in terms of their student population characteristics, community characteristics, and school violence prevention efforts. The results indicate that the characteristics (size, location, socio-economic make-up) of high-violence schools differ markedly from the other schools. High schools with the highest levels of violence tended to be located in urban areas and have a high percentage of minority students, compared to high schools that reported no crime to the police. They also tended to be located in areas with high social disadvantage and residential mobility. It should be noted, however, that a relatively large minority of the schools in the Violent Crime group were located in rural areas (36%), so that the image of school violence being solely restricted to central cities is not accurate. The types of violence prevention programs differed between crime groups. The schools that experience a high level of serious violence also reported high use of prevention measures and programs that were specifically aimed at controlling violence. Schools in the Violent Crime group appeared to put more emphasis on programs geared toward changing individual behavior, such as behavioral modification or other types of individual attention. This contrasted with high schools in the other three crime groups, which tended to place a higher priority on prevention instruction or counselors within the school.

Provides a description of Federal Student Aid programs and the application process. Readers will find information on federal student aid as a source for funding postsecondary education, and know where to go for more detailed information.

Our nation's schools should be safe havens for teaching and learning, free of crime and violence. Any instance of crime or violence at school not only affects the individuals involved, but also may disrupt the educational process and affect bystanders, the school itself, and the surrounding community. Establishing reliable indicators of the current state of school crime and safety across the nation and regularly updating and monitoring these indicators is important in ensuring the safety of our nation's students. This is the aim of "Indicators of School Crime and Safety." This report is the fifteenth in a series of annual publications produced jointly by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Institute of Education Sciences (IES), in the U. S. Department of Education, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) in the U. S. Department of Justice. This report presents the most recent data available on school crime and student safety. The indicators in this report are based on information drawn from a variety of data sources, including national surveys of students, teachers, and principals. Sources include results from the School-Associated Violent Deaths Study, sponsored by the U. S. Department of Education, the Depart¬ment of Justice, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the National Crime Victimization Survey and School Crime Supplement to the survey, sponsored by the BJS and NCES, respectively; the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and the Schools and Staffing Survey and School Survey on Crime and Safety, both sponsored by NCES. The most recent data collection for each indicator varied by survey, from 2007 to 2011. Each data source has an independent sample design, data collection method, and questionnaire design, or is the result of a universe data collection. All comparisons described in this report are statistically significant at the .05 level. This report covers topics such as victimization, teacher injury, bullying and cyber-bullying, school conditions, fights, weapons, availability and student use of drugs and alcohol, and student perceptions of personal safety at school. Indicators of crime and safety are compared across different population subgroups and over time. Data on crimes that occur away from school are offered as a point of comparison where available.

Littleton, CO; Springfield, OR; West Paducah, KY; Jonesboro, AR. These communities have become familiar to many Americans as among the locations of those schools where shootings have occurred nationwide in recent years. In the aftermath of these tragic events, educators, law enforcement officials, mental health professionals and parents have pressed for answers to two central questions: "Could we have known that these attacks were being planned?" and, if so, "What could we have done to prevent these attacks from occurring?" This publication, The Final Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative: Implications for the Prevention of School Attacks in the United States, is a recent product of an ongoing collaboration between the U. S. Secret Service and the U. S. Department of Education to begin to answer these questions. It is the culmination of an extensive examination of 37 incidents of targeted school violence that occurred in the United States from December 1974 through May 2000. The findings of the Safe School Initiative suggest that there are productive actions that educators, law enforcement officials, and others can pursue in response to the problem of targeted school violence. Specifically, Initiative findings suggest that these officials may wish to consider focusing their efforts to formulate strategies for preventing these attacks in two principal areas: - developing the capacity to pick up on and evaluate available or knowable information that might indicate that there is a risk of a targeted school attack; and, - employing the results of these risk evaluations or "threat assessments" in developing strategies to prevent potential school attacks from occurring. Support for these suggestions is found in 10 key findings of the Safe School Initiative study. These findings are as follows: - Incidents of targeted violence at school rarely were sudden, impulsive acts. - Prior to most incidents, other people knew about the attacker's idea and/or plan to attack. - Most attackers did not threaten their targets directly prior to advancing the attack. - There is no accurate or useful "profile" of students who engaged in targeted school violence. - Most attackers engaged in some behavior prior to the incident that caused others concern or indicated a need for help. - Most attackers had difficulty coping with significant losses or personal failures. Moreover, many had considered or attempted suicide. - Many attackers felt bullied, persecuted, or injured by others prior to the attack. - Most attackers had access to and had used weapons prior to the attack. - In many cases, other students were involved in some capacity. - Despite prompt law enforcement responses, most shooting incidents were stopped by means other than law enforcement intervention.