Since the formation of schools, schools have developed ways of understanding discipline and ensuring a safe and orderly environment. Governmental personnel began to influence local school policies beginning in 1989, with United States President Ronald Reagan's "War on Drugs" campaign. This led to the creation and development of…

School safety and student well-being are crucial to the social, emotional, and academic development of young people. Many districts have turned to school security measures that offer visible signs or outward appearances of safety; however, other approaches--those that create positive and inclusive school climates--both support students' well-being…

An African American community and an all-White school board struggled along racial lines over re-naming an elementary school. In opposition to the name change, the school district enforced its school naming policy via a race-neutral approach in practice. The study chronicles an African American community's successful political actions in…

Background: The school nutrition environment has a large impact on child diet. However, there is a paucity of nationally representative research on factors that predict effective nutrition policies, practices, and education in schools. Purpose: The current study utilized Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data from the 2016 School…

This report presents the results of an exploratory study of suspension, discipline, and climate in K-5 and K-8 schools in the School District of Philadelphia (SDP). The study was conducted between January 2016 and October 2017 by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) at the University of Pennsylvania, in close partnership with SDP…

Researchers have identified challenges for sexual minority individuals in schools; however, attention to lesbian and gay parents' experiences with their children's schools has not been given. We used a qualitative case study involving one identified gay couple and one identified lesbian couple to document their experiences and relationships…

Despite mounting evidence that zero-tolerance policies do not deter misbehavior, teachers and administrators continue to respond to a range of student infractions through punitive measures, such as ticketing, expelling, and suspending students. Black boys, black girls, and Latinx students are most adversely affected by discipline in the era of…

Background: School officials and nurses play an important role in facilitating asthma management in schools. Little is known about their perspectives on in-school asthma management and barriers to physical activity (PA) at school. Aims: The goal of this study is to explore school officials' and nurses' perspectives on asthma care and barriers to…

In September 2008, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Schools Chancellor, Joel Klein announced Chancellor's Regulation A-832, which established policies and procedures on how New York City schools should respond to bias-based harassment, intimidation, and bullying in schools. The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), the Sikh…

Purpose: Availability and access to food is a determinant of obesity. The purpose of this paper is to examine food availability within and outside of post-primary schools in Ireland. Design/methodology/approach: Data on the internal school food environment were collected from 63 post-primary schools using questionnaires. The external school food…

Purpose: Attention to improving the school environment is a common activity in school health promotion. The role of the school environment in supporting improved health and wellbeing has a theoretical base, but has rarely been directly investigated empirically. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the associations between school…

The purpose of this study was to determine how an urban school district's code of conduct aligned with actual school/class behaviors, and how stakeholders perceived the ability of this document to achieve its number one goal: safe and productive learning environments. Twenty participants including students, teachers, parents, and administrators…

What are the features of the school environment that make students' of color incorporation greater at some schools than at others? Prudence L. Carter seeks to answer this basic but bedeviling question through a rich comparative analysis of the organizational and group dynamics in eight schools located within four cities in the United States and…

In this article, we report the results from a randomized evaluation of the Safe and Civil Schools (SCS) model for school-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports. Thirty-two elementary schools in a large urban school district were randomly assigned to an initial training cohort or a wait-list control group. Results suggested that SCS…

Several studies have shown that the need to create safe and orderly schools has increasingly been addressed in a manner that disconnects these priorities from broader concerns related to student success, school culture, and child development. In this paper, we explore the consequences of expanding security procedures in response to an incident…