Giving Compass' Take:

• A research gap has left us without a clear idea of how to create a safe school environment, in spite of many theories of what will help. This study aims to fill that gap so that we can better understand how to keep students safe.

• How can this study, and other studies, best help educators to protect their students? What are potential shortcomings of this study? 

• Find out why some attempts to increase school safety may backfire. 

What are all the things that make a school safe and the people inside it feel connected with each other and the surrounding community?

This question is most often answered with some variation on the following: a school is safe if it is a secure facility in good physical condition. Students, teachers, and parents feel connected if class sizes are reasonable and it has a full menu of extra-curricular activities.

However, a growing body of research is demonstrating that such answers only scratch the surface — and the health and welfare of our children depends on schools and communities digging much deeper into the question.

A new addition to this work is a five-year, $5-million study led by the Washington D.C.-based American Institutes for Research (AIR) that promises to be a groundbreaking examination of school safety in California schools.

This requires studying a number of factors affecting school environments, including school discipline policies and how they are enforced, how students from different backgrounds and orientations are treated by their classmates, whether there are people and protocols for addressing the trauma students experience at home and the quality of parent and community engagement.

Read the full article on a school safety study by David Washburn at EdSource