Forum Guide to Crime, Violence, and Discipline Incident Data

One goal of the Forum is to improve the quality of education data gathered for use by policymakers and program decisionmakers. An approach to furthering this goal has been to pool the collective experiences of Forum members to produce “best practice” guides in areas of high interest to those who collect, maintain, and use data about elementary and secondary education. The accurate, consistent, and timely collection and reporting of crime, violence, and discipline data by schools, districts, and state education agencies is one of those high-interest areas.

This guide reflects the judgment of experienced data managers; while there is no mandate to follow these principles, the authors hope that the contents will prove a useful reference to others in their work.