Established in 1993 as one of the nation's first state school safety centers, the North Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention - Center for the Prevention of School Violence serves as a resource center and "think tank" for efforts that promote safer schools and foster positive youth development. The Center's efforts in support of safer schools are directed at understanding the problems of school violence and developing solutions to them. The Center focuses on ensuring that schools function so that every student who attends does so in environments that are safe and secure, free of fear and conducive to learning. Positive youth development efforts are emphasized as the Center focuses beyond the school into the community and works in support of youth-serving programs and agencies which target the development of attitudes, behaviors, and conditions that enable youth to grow and become productive members of their communities.

Testimony presented to the United States Senate Subcommittee on Youth Violence of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary provides a description of the Center's approach to school safety. Written by director Joanne McDaniel, the testimony provides the Center's vision for safe schools, its definition of school violence, and information about trends in school violence and school violence prevention. It also provides a description of the Center's Safe Schools Pyramid, a model for thinking through school safety programs. Although not prescriptive, the Pyramid highlights that schools need to keep their community base in mind when pursuing safe school efforts and to combine multiple programmatic strategies that are facultative of one another. Additionally, the Pyramid communicates that schools should work to comprehensively address school safety by focusing on physical security issues, the relationships between and among people who are part of the school community, and the link between school safety and educational purpose.

The Center provides information and technical assistance to any and all stakeholders involved with safe schools and youth development. Information provision occurs via presentations, meetings, mailings, phone, mail and email responses, Center-generated materials, and this web site. Technical assistance includes provision of workshops, trainings, and facilitations, and efforts in the areas of program development, maintenance, research, and evaluation.

As part of the North Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the Center serves as a departmental resource, a resource to schools and communities in North Carolina, and a facilitator of collaborative school safety and youth development efforts. Because of the Center's track record as one of the nation's first school safety centers, it is also turned to as a resource by people outside the state of North Carolina.