Long before closures due to the coronavirus pandemic, many Pennsylvania schools faced a different health crisis: unsafe facilities. Crumbling buildings, asbestos, lead, and other school facility health and safety risks plague many schools across Pennsylvania, particularly in low-income districts and those that enroll a high percentage of Black and…

Colleges and universities commonly review the criminal history of students who apply to live in campus housing, but this practice may be inherently discriminatory. New guidance from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development warns that the Fair Housing act, which applies to higher education institutions, prohibits the use of any practice…

This commentary details a news event in which Carrie Weber Middle School in Port Washington, NY, supposedly banned students from using balls, playing tag, and doing cartwheels during recess. Public reaction in the form of news items, tweets, blogs, and commentary is sampled, and news releases from the Weber Middle School that were barely covered…

The author of this article observes that, while much has been written on the overall topic of safety with regard to allowing guns on college campuses, little has been said about how allowing the possession of deadly weapons can create a "chilling effect" on academic discussions. This article considers how some universities have…

Cyberbullying has been identified by school leaders and researchers as one of the most serious adverse consequences of incorporating information technology into the classroom. This article examines the legal status of cyberbullying by conducting an analysis of selected federal appellate court opinions. This analysis identifies a set of legal…

The first police in the United States to embrace the kind of community-focused policing that "modern" law enforcement embraces, and which was extolled by Sir Robert Peel in 1826, were the New Haven, Connecticut police officers hired by Yale University in 1894 to patrol and keep order on campus. Why did Yale not simply rely on the New…

Public school districts in Buffalo, USA and Toronto, Canada reviewed their safe schools policies in 2008. Revised Codes of Conduct are compared to earlier versions and each other, and a conceptual policy web is used to understand how local, state/provincial, national, and international influences affect local safe school policies. The comparison…

Every school day bus drivers are responsible for transporting children safely over many miles, yet they are rarely polled for their opinions or contributions to school safety. School bus drivers are in a unique position to inform the discussion on aggressive behavior during the school day. This exploratory study collected information from school…

The objective of this report was to determine whether the State Education Department (SED) has developed effective processes for (1) ensuring that school districts report violent and disruptive incidents to SED in accordance with State law and regulations, (2) identifying schools that should be designated as persistently dangerous because of their…

More than $20 billion a year currently is being spent to construct public schools. Hundreds of billions are being spent to carry out public education. Everyone wants the best possible use of that money. Families want safe, nurturing, challenging, and effective schools for their children. Community members and policy-makers want schools to be…

This document reports findings of an audit that examined the New York State Education Department's administration and oversight of school-district construction practices and state building aid. The Department's Bureau of Facilities Planning must approve all school-construction project plans and specifications to ensure that facilities are designed…

Despite nationwide decreases in school crime and violence, a relatively high and increasing number of students report feeling unsafe at school. In response, some school officials are implementing school-police partnerships, especially in urban areas, as an effort to deter criminal activity and violence in schools. This article examines the initial…

This paper offers a focus group approach to the understanding of student perceptions of campus community. Using the Strange and Banning (2001) framework of community, the author argues that students' sense of campus community should be studied as it exists within the institutional environment. The results of the study include: 1) There is a strong…

This article seeks to address the challenge of activating the seven educational resources, ordered by Justice Leland DeGrasse in the case "Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) v. State of New York," into effective teaching and learning methods, and mobilize the constructs advanced by the improved school finance framework as an analytical…

Well-disciplined schools make appropriate school discipline a part of every curriculum, program, and practice. Key organizational variables include staff and community involvement, sensitivity to students' racial and socioeconomic concerns, and effective intervention strategies, such as the anger-management seminars, awareness discussion groups,…