TeachME Professional Development

1. In order to facilitate a significant and lasting reduction in youth gang activity, practitioners like teachers, police officers, community service providers and health care workers, as well as those who make decisions about how limited resources are allocated, need to be involved.

2. Experts point to the many attractions of gang membership, including providing a support system, relationships, protection, and status, and for some, it offers an opportunity to take a stand against society.

3. Although gang membership has traditionally been viewed from a public safety perspective, experts believe that public health professionals need to be involved in adopting an approach that involves each of the following steps EXCEPT:

4. One way that law enforcement professionals can enhance gang prevention strategies is to use the Scanning, Analyzing, Responding, Assessing (SARA) model, which calls for scanning other agency policies, analyzing problems through the most relevant source of information rather than through several sources, responding to gang problems, and assessing the effectiveness of the response.

5. Joining a gang should be understood as part of a life course that begins when a child is born, and children as young as three years old begin to experience risk factors that include poor parental monitoring, deficits in social information-processing skills, antisocial beliefs, and negative relationships with family members and peers.

6. Effective parenting and strong family functioning, with warm affective bonds, __________________, and consistent discipline, protect against a variety of antisocial and problem behaviors, such as involvement with delinquent peers and subsequent likelihood of gang membership and violence.

7. A recent nationwide study of secondary schools determined that approximately 50% of principals surveyed from schools with gang problems (defined as more than 15 percent of students reporting they belonged to a gang) said their school had a problem and were anxious to be involved in a prevention program

8. In order to effectively involve communities in prevention strategies, it is recommended that the existing strengths of the community be enhanced, along with focusing on a need for multifaceted prevention efforts that are grounded in:

9. Since girls in gangs are far more likely than their non-gang peers to have been sexually assaulted, generally by a family member, they are also more likely to join gangs as a way to seek safety and security that they cannot find in a troubled or abusive home.

10. Race and ethnicity continue to play a major role in gang membership, but many experts believe that it is still critical to focus on the common underlying risk factors such as poverty, challenges for immigrants, discrimination and social isolation in order to make an impact.

11. The roles of race and ethnicity in gang involvement continue to be complicated, and each of the following is an accurate statement about these factors EXCEPT:

12. Although many policymakers and practitioners understand that evaluation is critical to proving the success or failure of a program, most do not fully understand the role that evaluation plays in actually designing and implementing a successful gang-prevention program.