An Unexpected Audit Finding
A recent
report by the Seoul Shinmun brought to light the findings of a Board of Audit
and Inspection review into how school violence committees in major school
districts in Seoul, including Gangnam and Mokdong, keep their counseling
records. The audit found that more than 90 percent of the sample had failed to
retain counseling records at all, and in some cases the absence of records
meant that an incident of school violence was never even recognized as such.
The report also noted that a good number of teachers had simply repeated the
same boilerplate language in the comprehensive comments section of students'
school records.
A Different Experience After the 2024 Reform
Reading this,
I was genuinely surprised. In the school violence committee proceedings I have
handled recently, the facts were, for the most part, already well organized by
the time a case reached the committee. I suspect this has to do with the timing
of my own experience, which comes after Korea introduced its dedicated school
violence investigator system in 2024. Whether the written statement came from
the student or from the investigator, the facts were consistently laid out
clearly before the case was submitted to the committee. I have not personally
seen a case proceed to deliberation with the facts still in disarray.
What struck me
most was that the poor recordkeeping turned up in districts such as Gangnam,
Seocho, Gangseo, and Yangcheon, precisely the areas one would expect to have
the most stable and well-run systems. I have my own history with this issue.
Years ago, when I sat on a school violence committee under the earlier,
self-governing committee model, the facts often had not been sufficiently
organized before deliberation began, and committee members had to press the
parties directly to re-establish what had actually happened. It was a genuinely
difficult process, difficult enough that I stepped away from this kind of work
for a while after my term ended. When I returned to it years later, I was
struck by how much the system had improved. The facts were now laid out in a
far more systematic way.
Why the Timing May Explain the Gap
Given my own
experience, I suspect the period the audit covered, 2021 through 2024, largely
predates the introduction of the dedicated investigator system and may reflect
a period of transition and confusion rather than the way things work today. A
closer look at how committees have handled cases since the system took full
effect in 2024 might well tell a different story. It is also worth remembering
that before this reform, it was teachers, not legal professionals, who bore the
full burden of interviewing students and investigating these cases. I have a
good deal of sympathy for the workload that must have placed on them at the
time.
When the Verdict Comes Before the Reasoning
As for the
cases where a committee's ruling looks arbitrary, I think this usually traces
back to a particular habit: reaching a conclusion first and then working
backward to justify it factor by factor. In my own experience, when a committee
properly scores each factor, such as severity and duration, and then adds those
scores together to reach a result, it is genuinely hard to end up with a low
sanction. So when a case like the one described in the report shows school
violence continuing for more than six months, and the committee still concludes
there was 'no persistence,' that strongly suggests the total score was decided
first, and the individual factors, the persistence score in particular, were
then adjusted downward to match it.
I don't think
it is inherently wrong for committee members to walk into a deliberation with
some rough sense of where the total score is likely to land. That kind of
intuition is a natural part of the process. But committees need to build the
habit of doing the work in the right order: scoring each factor first, on its
own terms, and only then adding those scores together to arrive at the total.
The result should follow from the reasoning, not the other way around.
