This study investigated the relations between student perceptions of support and student willingness to seek help for bullying and threats of violence in a sample of 7318 ninth-grade students from 291 high schools who participated in the Virginia High School Safety Study. Hierarchical linear modeling indicated that students who perceived their…

This quasi-experimental study examined the adoption of the Virginia Student Threat Assessment Guidelines in 23 high schools. After training, school administrators and other staff members demonstrated substantial increases in knowledge of threat assessment principles and decreased commitment to zero tolerance approaches. Schools using the…

In this study we examined authoritative discipline theory, which posits that 2 complementary aspects of school climate--structure and support--are important for adolescents' safety in school. Using a statewide sample of over 7,300 ninth-grade students and 2,900 teachers randomly selected from 290 high schools, we showed, using hierarchical linear…

Threat assessment has been widely recommended as a violence prevention approach for schools, but there are few empirical studies of its use. This nonexperimental study of 280 Virginia public high schools compared 95 high schools using the Virginia threat assessment guidelines (Cornell & Sheras, 2006), 131 following other (i.e., locally…