Monitoring school violence: Linking national-, district-, and school-level data over time

National monitoring of school violence is essential for needs assessments, policymaking, and evaluation at the national level. As informative and important as national monitoring is, the data generated at the national level is often not useful at the district or school site levels. There is therefore a need for a feasible method of monitoring school violence on the district and school level; furthermore, we need to find ways to effectively apply national-level information to schools and school districts. over time should be the foundation for the design, implementation, and evaluation of interventions in this area. In this article, we propose an expanded concept of monitoring that links comparable data on school violence at the grade, school site, district, and national levels. The paper presents our conceptual framework and methodology and illustrates its implementation in a district in Israel. We present examples of reports generated to monitor school violence for the district as a whole and for each of the school sites. Finally, we conclude that this is a feasible and useful model that social services could adopt to monitor practice in many other areas.