Background: Mass school shootings have created fear in the American public. The results of this fear have been the hardening of schools, lockdowns, and active shooter drills, yet the mass shootings have not ended. The goal of this study was to analyze the mental health awareness of K-12 public schools teachers in Texas with a goal to identify the…

Today, schools' climates impact every student across the globe (Thapa et al., 2013). "A positive school climate is critically related to school success" (National Center for Safe and Supportive Learning, 2021, para. 2). School climate consists of the many aspects of an educational atmosphere including the physical environment,…

The main goal of the current paper was to determine the effects of perceived school climate dimensions (leadership, relationships, professional learning-teaching climate, safety, and physical environment) on students' learning performance in upper primary schools. Correlational design consisted of structural equation modeling with mediation…

This dissertation examines the relationship between teacher retention and student perceptions of school climate in an urban school district, both in individual school years and across multiple school years. This secondary analysis uses a school-level measure of teacher retention from New York City (NYC) public schools and measures of school…

Background: Youth violence, victimization, and bullying are pervasive in schools across the United States and are detrimental for learning and healthy development. K-12 school safety is an increasingly urgent issue to research and understand from multiple perspectives. Physical and psychological safety in school is linked to better student and…

The COVID-19 pandemic and recent racial justice movements have made it very apparent that our current approaches to keeping students safe and healthy in schools need major restructuring and reform. The country lacks mental health supports in many schools at a time when students need them most. Students of color are being punished and removed from…

The experience of teachers who cope with the potential of violence in their workplaces was the topic of this dissertation. The research question was the following: What is the process of coping with the increased potential of violence in the school/work setting for teachers? This question was posed to examine how teachers process and cope with the…

Although all stakeholders agree that schools must be safe places to learn, there are discrepancies among researchers, policy makers, and the general public about what constitutes school safety, and how best to accomplish the goal of making schools safe. This article reviews what we have learned about components of school safety by examining trends…

Although several studies have focused on why school climate is important, the timing of the collection of climate measures should be considered. This is of particular interest to schools that gauge school improvement efforts within a school year and are interested in how climate changes from the beginning to the end of the academic year. We show…

This article aims to fill a gap in the literature regarding violence against students in humanitarian crisis contexts by comparing the risk perceptions of young refugees during the time they were out of school to the time they were enrolled in an educational program. Through this comparison, the article aims to generate deeper reflection on the…

School climate is crucial for understanding everyday school life. For pupils, breaktime seems to be associated with how they feel about their school climate. To better understand school climate and what social processes pupils address, this study explores pupils' perspectives on school climate with attention on how they perceive their breaktimes.…

Increased attention has been given the safety of students and school staff members following highly publicized acts of violence within schools, including the mass shootings at Robb Elementary School in 2022, Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, and Columbine High School in 1999. In response to these tragic events, schools have implemented various…

Classrooms should be inviting and safe places where students can strive to achieve worthwhile goals, even as they learn that the road to improvement is not always paved. This deceptively simple guiding principle is what Ron Nash has spent four decades in education pursuing and refining. "In Praise of Foibles: The Impact of Mistakes, Failure,…

To explore issues of safety and security at school the research reported here investigated the way a sense of security was created in school, how security was linked to different locations and situations, and the influences that acted on pupils' sense of security. Pupils in year 1 in Sweden took photographs associated with insecurity and security,…

Students, families, and communities across Chicago are affected by gun violence, but the levels and experiences differ greatly by location and by the racial composition of communities. In Chicago, recent rates of violence rose sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic, and then declined to pre-pandemic levels in 2022. Still, there were more than 4,000…