Durham use to be a nice little town, I'll leave it to your imagination why they are needing to do this survey.


BY RAY GRONBERG : The Herald-Sun
gronberg@heraldsun.com
Dec 8, 2006 : 11:39 pm ET

Consultants working on a $60,000 gang study commissioned by the city and county governments say they want to survey all middle school students in the Durham school system to see how gangs are gaining influence among youth.

Planning for the survey remains tentative, and a key issue is gaining parental consent for students to participate, one of the consultants, Deborah Lamm Weisel, told the City Council this week.

The leaders of the study want to target middle schoolers because that's where they think young people gain their first significant exposure to gang members and decide they want to model themselves after members, Weisel said.

Middle school "is the first time a lot of kids come together from different areas," she told council members. "There's a lot more diversity; it's not just [kids] from your neighborhood. Your exposure and knowledge and attitudes toward gangs and other things are really amplified in that period.

"It's one of the most vulnerable periods of educational development, according to the research."

Weisel said she and her fellow consultant, Buddy Howell, have ruled out doing a survey in elementary schools "for a variety of reasons" she didn't elaborate on, and prefer to target the middle grades because they think they'll be "more likely to find kids in school."

City officials said nothing during Weisel's briefing Thursday to discourage the idea, and in fact made it clear they believe the study has to look at the schools if it's to produce useful results.

Councilman Howard Clement said he sees "symptoms of gang behavior" emerging in the elementary grades when he serves as a volunteer tutor each week in a public school.

Members also encouraged Weisel to make sure questions about gangs appear on a different survey local officials are planning that may, if they can find the money to pay for it, ask middle- and high school students about their exposure to and participation in risky behavior like substance abuse and sex.

Weisel and Howell have been working on their study since the council approved funding for it in August. They're trying to gauge the extent of Durham's gang problem and see how effective local programs are in countering it.

School system officials know the consultants want to do the middle school survey, and have asked them to spell out what it is they want to ask.

"No one's told us no, so far," Weisel said.

Also to be spelled out are the procedures for obtaining parental consent. It's "unclear whether we'll have to [obtain] active consent in advance," for example by sending notices and permission slips home with students, she said.

Durham Public Schools officials couldn't shed any light on the matter Friday. System spokesman Michael Yarbrough said the administrator who's been working on the matter was out of the office.

The possible consent requirement is enough to forestall the possibility of conducting a scientifically random survey that would target a fraction of the middle-school population. If too many parents withheld permission, it would spoil the results by undercutting the validity and reliability of the survey's findings.

The same concern is steering the consultants away from the possibility of a high school survey. In those grades, "the kids who are in gangs are probably not in school," Weisel said.