The school shooting will eventually land on college campuses in the invisible backpacks of students. Regrettably, most colleges are not trauma-informed nor trauma-responsive. And folks will be shocked when these students struggle or barely stay in school or drop out or stop out. Their learning, their memories, their engagement can all be impacted.…

Drawing upon an ongoing school mental health survey being conducted in California, this article examines associations between high school students' mental wellness, including covitality (as measured with the Social Emotional Health Survey--Secondary), and school safety perceptions and experiences. Student self-reports reveal a strong positive…

School climate is increasingly intertwined with efforts to create safe schools and improve social-emotional learning and academic outcomes. While current definitions of school climate implicate the decisions and actions of school staff members, the majority of school climate research focuses on the perspectives of students. This study presents an…

Improving school climate remains a priority for improving academic achievement and social emotional learning, and for reducing violence and promoting safe schools. This study examined staff member experiences of school climate with the goal of identifying the quality of climate (negative or positive) that staff experience and how certain…

The Department of Justice Appropriations Act, 2015 (Pub. L. 113-235) provides $75 million for the Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (CSSI). This Initiative, originally launched and funded at the same amount in FY 2014, is overseen by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) within the Office of Justice Programs (OJP), U.S. Department of…

The present study explores the causal link between school climate, school violence, and a school's general academic performance over time using a school-level, cross-lagged panel autoregressive modeling design. We hypothesized that reductions in school violence and climate improvement would lead to schools' overall improved academic performance.…

It is possible that multiple moves and deployments of family service members are associated with military-connected students' gang membership and involvement with school violence behaviors. In this study, 13,484 students completed modules of the California Healthy Kids Survey. Logistic regressions examined the odds of a student being a member of a…

Part enthnograpy and part testimony, this book analyzes a school setting and community from the standpoint of a group of immigrant mothers (las madres) in South Central Los Angeles who were concerned about the education of their children and the violence in their communities. Written in both the first and third person, in Spanish and English, the…

There is insufficient empirical evidence exploring associations between gang membership and school violence behaviors. Using a sample of 272,863 high school students, this study employs a structural equation model to examine how school risk and protective behaviors and attitudes mediate effects of gang members' involvement with school violence…

Teacher education programs can't prepare educators for everything that they might encounter on the job. Regardless of where they earn their degree--and even if they have had solid student teaching experiences before they claim their credential--new teachers are bound to face unexpected, upsetting, occasionally funny, and sometimes awkward…

The need for U.S. teachers to better understand School Violence Prevention is growing. Evidence suggests however, that 10 years and 10 billion dollars after the Columbine High School massacre, our public schools are not safer (www.community-matters.org). There has been an "after the fact" approach to the problem of school violence. After…

Since slavery, attempted enclosures upon Black spaces of cultural production and autonomy (i.e. music, language, art) have manifested in various forms. In the context of the post-industrial terrain of urban southern California, the formation of the prison is the dominant model of forced enclosure in the lives of Black people. Moving beyond the…

Background: While crime and violence in schools are derived primarily from factors external to schools, violent behavior may also be aggravated by factors in the school environment, including the physical environment, its educational and social climate, and its organizational capacity and composition. The objective of this study is to examine the…

This study examines various factors that contribute to assaultive behavior in school. We focused on the differences between youth whose behavior was not problematic and those who admitted to threatening, stealing from, or physically assaulting students, teachers, or staff. A questionnaire was developed and distributed to a random sample of…

A personalized education, according to Ted Sizer, means that students are known by adult professionals in the school. Administrators at a California high school with 2,000 students and very large classes initiated an adopt-a-kid program by matching adult volunteers on campus with low-achieving students. This program, along with a successful block…