Education senior Nicole Nelles wants to be a teacher.

She’s already worked to prepare herself in classrooms at Lansing’s Grand River Elementary.

Nelles’ classmate, Kris Nelson, supervises nearly 40 special education students in the halls and classrooms of a suburban high school. Nelson is a continuing education student.

Gerry Wilton, another continuing education student, teaches math and science to prisoners between the ages of 16 and 45.

And it’s no surprise to social work graduate student Glenn Stutzky the trio of students are learning about violence in schools every day at every level - in his classroom and their own.

Stutzky, an instructor for Social Work 491, Violence in Schools, said it took the right amount of bloodshed in U.S. schools before people noticed violence was a problem.

His class and a course through the School of Criminal Justice, called Creating a Safe School Community, are being offered this summer to improve awareness about the problem and teach prevention tactics. Many of the students are education, social work and criminal justice majors.

“In schools, kids are kind of hidden away in a sense,” Stutzky said. “If harassment happened in the workplace, it would have violated laws. There would be criminal or civil recourse. These kids don’t have it. They end up taking matters into their own hands.”

Students in the classes learn about violence through videos, lectures and class discussion. Detailed discussion about personal experiences and recent school violence studies help to add a real-life element to the facts.

Criminal justice graduate student and instructor Kevin Gray said the subject matter is becoming more popular among students young and old.

“More education programs are covering violence and school safety,” he said. “It’s pretty topical and popular at the moment. If bullying is tolerated earlier, violence will be an outgrowth of that.”

And students agree the education through Violence in Schools is useful when they return to the classroom to teach.

“I would like to see all teachers and administrators sit through the class,” said Nelson, who has taught special education at Milford High School in Milford, Mich., for four years. “Kids are so cruel to each other. You think, well kids are kids. You don’t realize the impact it really has on some people.

“That’s what I’m hoping to find out - where it all starts and maybe where it will all end.”

Aside from prevention, Wilton, who has taught at the Michigan Reformatory in Ionia for six years, said school violence education helps him understand where his students are coming from.

Many of his students already have committed serious crimes in and out of school.

“I hope to gain some insight into my actual students,” he said. “I don’t have a concept sometimes of the lifestyle they’ve had to lead just to survive.”

But why is it so hard for adults to understand violence in schools?

Stutzky says it’s simple.

They aren’t listening.

“Most of the kids who are bullied and harassed, they go through their own personal hell in school,” he said. “They reroute how they can walk through the hallways, where they sit in the cafeteria. At the extreme, you have people who retaliate and commit homicide. On the other extreme - suicide.”

Most recently, a 12-year-old student from Lincoln Park, Mich., committed suicide in February following years of incessant teasing.

The number of suicides of 10- to 14-year-olds has tripled since 1995 in Michigan. Nationally, 300 10- to 14-year-olds commit suicide every year.

“There are more actual bodies put together from suicide than from a dozen Columbines,” Stutzky said. “Kids are so used to being ‘done to’ by adults. We don’t like to talk.”

But as she prepares to graduate next spring, Nelles isn’t afraid to enter her own classroom, especially with a course like Violence in Schools on her class schedule this semester.

“There’s a lot more that can be done,” she said. “Everything in there will help me be a better teacher. We’ve touched on a few tactics to recognize (violence) before it happens. I’m starting to learn a little more.

“I think about it every time that I read one of those terrible stories. I think about my own safety and the kids I’m working with. It’s not something that kids should have to worry about. It’s not something anybody should worry about.”

Jamie Gumbrecht can be reached at gumbrec1@msu.edu.