The Student Substance Use and Safety Survey, administered annually to a random, representative sample of AISD middle and high school students, provides self-report data on student knowledge, attitudes, and behavior related to substance use and school safety issues. These are the results from the spring 2014 survey.

The nation's schools should be safe havens for teaching and learning, free of crime and violence. Any instance of crime or violence at school not only affects the individuals involved, but also may disrupt the educational process and affect bystanders, the school itself, and the surrounding community. Establishing reliable indicators of the…

Education is a $600 billion-a-year enterprise, but the investments states make in education will not benefit students unless they are physically and mentally present in the classroom. Too many students are not. In this report, the National Association of State Boards of Education asks policymakers to promote student engagement through a suite of…

The Supported Higher Education Program (SHEP), administered by the Human Development Institute at the University of Kentucky, was one of the funded Transition Programs for Students with Intellectual Disabilities (TPSIDs). SHEP's central goal was to support students with intellectual disabilities toward a meaningful post-secondary education…

The purpose of this compendium is to catalog NCER's and NCSER's contributions to social-behavioral research. Research undertaken as part of these projects is contributing to a knowledge base that ultimately aims to improve academic outcomes for students via improvements in students' social-behavioral competencies, teachers' practices, and the…

In the aftermath of several school shooting incidents in recent years, students' perceptions of unsafe schools has been a major concern for parents, teachers, school officials, school practitioners, and policy-makers. Using Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems framework, we examined the micro-, meso-, and exosystem level factors associated with…

This article is based on research conducted on the topic: "Safety and security in schools: The case of KwaZulu-Natal." For the research project a purposive sample consisting of secondary school learners, teachers, school governing body chairpersons and principals were selected from the rural and township schools used in this study to…

Seven schools in an economically challenged area of an urban school district in central California implemented mentored peer mediation programs under the guidance of a university-K-12 partnership project, Mediator Mentors. Individual student outcomes for social-cognitive dispositions, perceptions of school climate, conflict strategy choices, and…

Introduction: The problem of school violence has been studied in the last decades from different perspectives, especially focused on bullying conflicts. Whole school approaches have been recommended by many experts in the field. The aim of the present study is to assess climate changes in two secondary schools that implement a peer support…

All too often, managing a classroom means gaining control, dictating guidelines, and implementing rules. Designed for any teacher struggling with student behavior, motivation, and engagement, "Developing a Learning Classroom" explores how to create a thriving, learning-centered classroom through three critical concepts: relationships, relevance,…

The purpose of the study was to provide an assessment of campus police departments throughout the 15 public community and junior colleges in Mississippi. This research could provide Mississippi community and junior college administrators the opportunity to observe and appraise the overall safety of their respective campuses in comparison to safety…

In this article the authors address the limitations of framing "the problem" of in-school LGBTQ harassment within dominant anti-bullying discourses. They offer a critical sociological framework as an alternative way of understanding the issues of LGBTQ harassment and propose a research agenda in which school culture and gender policing are the…

For the past three years, SELF (Sports, Education, Life Skills, and Faith) has focused on improving academic, behavioral, and social skills of students at Key, Revere, and Meyerland middle schools in the Houston Independent School District (HISD). Tutorials, an essay contest, character-building lessons, sports, a high-school bridge program, and…

Despite the large body of research on neighborhood racial composition and perceptions of safety, only one geographically limited study has investigated the relation between school racial composition and student perceptions of safety. Using data from a 2010 national sample of high school seniors, this study found that being in a mostly-same-race…

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…