The West Virginia Department of Education (WVDE) conducted a Special Circumstance Review of Philippi Middle School at the specific direction of the State Superintendent beginning on November 9, 2023, to examine compliance with the laws and policies affecting students' safety and well-being, discipline and administrative protocols, and academic…

School leaders must make decisions and implement strategies to improve a school climate and student achievement, and it benefits them to understand which areas of school climate have the greatest impact on student achievement. The State of Georgia measures school climate and student achievement with its school accountability measure, the College…

This study examined factors that impact Black middle and high school students' academic and psychosocial well-being. Qualitative analysis of focus group data using grounded methodological approach on 51 middle and high school students in a predominantly White urban school district. Findings show Black students are constantly exposed to racial…

General education intermediate students in three Pacific Northwest school districts are expected to learn and meet state standards while sharing their classroom and learning environments with emotional and behavioral disorder (EBD) students. EBD students have the potential to create barriers to learning by disrupting the classroom environment,…

Nearly 15% of American students are chronically absent from school. To address absenteeism, many states have recently made chronic absence a core component of their school accountability plans. Scholars have theorized that a positive school climate can promote student attendance, but empirical support for this idea is lacking. In this study, the…

This poll was conducted between February 27-March 6, 2024 among a national sample of 1,002 Teens. The interviews were conducted online and the data were weighted to approximate a target sample of Teens based on gender, age, race, and region. Results from the full survey have a measure of precision of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. Among the…

Poverty shapes the experience of more than twelve million children in the United States. To further an understanding of the relationship between poverty and school performance in South Carolina public schools, we investigated the association of high and low poverty levels with a range of state report card variables for three school levels:…

During the last decades, a significant increase in empirical studies concerning school violence is observed. Evidence-based interventions that promote positive school climate have been found to improve social competence, resilience, and students' well-being in schools, resulting in team bonding, feelings of acceptance, respect, and a sense of…

School safety continues to be a concern in today's schools, and comprehensive approaches to school safety are one way to address this concern. However, few comprehensive approaches have been rigorously evaluated. To address this gap, we evaluated the implementation and effects associated with Safe Communities Safe Schools (SCSS) comprehensive…

The Pennsylvania Department of Education's (PDE's) Office for Safe Schools partnered with REL Mid-Atlantic to conduct a study using data from PDE's school climate survey. This survey, which is available on a voluntary basis to any school in the state, provides a way to track school climate and identify schools that need additional support to…

These are the appendixes for the full report, "Changes in School Climate during COVID-19 in a Sample of Pennsylvania Schools." The REL study analyzed changes in scores from a pre-pandemic year (2018/19) to the 2020/21 and 2021/22 school years, both of which were affected by COVID-19 and related policy changes. These technical appendixes…

School climate is an important construct for guiding violence prevention efforts in U.S. schools, but there has been less consideration of this concept in its neighboring country Mexico, which has a higher prevalence of violence. The U.S. Department of Education outlined a three-domain conceptualization of school climate (i.e., safe and supportive…

Relationships among individual- and school-level factors and students' perpetration of violence, victimization, and safety were studied in two southeastern school districts (N = 26,160, Grades 6-12). Both student demographics (sex, ethnicity, and grade) and school level (high vs. middle school) were associated with perpetration, victimization, and…

The full GLSEN 2021 National School Climate Survey report includes information on LGBTQ middle and high school students' experiences, including: (1) Hearing biased language, from both students and educators; (2) Experiences of harassment and assault; (3) Anti-LGBTQ discrimination; (4) Effects of a hostile school climate on educational outcomes and…

This is the executive summary for the report, "The 2021 National School Climate Survey: The Experiences of LGBTQ+ Youth in Our Nation's Schools." The full GLSEN 2021 National School Climate Survey report includes information on LGBTQ middle and high school students' experiences, including: (1) Hearing biased language, from both students…