JPRC

Joint JPRC-NIJ Panel on School Safety at ASC (Past Event)

Event

Joint JPRC-NIJ Panel on School Safety at ASC (Past Event)

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One of the leading conferences for criminology and justice researchers is the American Society of Criminology (ASC) Annual Meeting, held in San Francisco, from November 13-16. Given that our teams lead several school safety studies funded by the U.S. National Institute of Justice (NIJ), we organized a panel with NIJ for the conference. The panel, entitled Large-Scale Assessments of School Safety Strategies: Implications for Policy and Practice, featured findings from three of these NIJ-funded studies. Patricia Campie of the American Institutes for Research, served as the panel discussant (in picture: Patricia Campie speaking, and from left to right, Arena Lam, Sarah Russo, Hannah Sutherland, and Trevor Fronius).

 

Trevor Fronius and Arena Lam are completing a study of school policing in California. The study used a quasi-experimental study to compare school districts that removed school police during academic school years 2019–2020 or 2020–2021 with a matched comparison group of districts that did not remove school police. Arena Lam (pictured) presented preliminary results.

 

The JPRC is also completing a national evaluation of State School Safety Centers. Sarah Russo and Hannah Sutherland (pictured) jointly presented results from this evaluation, including survey and interview data from school safety key informants, SSSC directors, and SSSC intended service recipients (e.g., principals and superintendents) to understand the SSSC practices and characteristics associated with stronger awareness, use, and perceptions of SSSCs among key stakeholders.

Regression Discontinuity Design Roundtable (Past Event)

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The JPRC team organized and moderated a roundtable at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology, in San Francisco, on November 15. The roundtable, entitled Regression Discontinuity Design in shaping future justice policy, focused on the strengths and challenges of the design, drawing from examples in the field.

Pictured left to right: Trent Baskerville, Alexis Grant, Trevor Fronus, Ojmarrh Mitchell (UC-Irvine), Sean Tanner, Jonathan Nakamoto, and Steven Belenko (Temple University).

Panel on School Policing at the IACP Meeting (Past Event)

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The JPRC team contributed to a panel at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) annual meeting in Boston, MA on October 19 to discuss school-based law enforcement. This panel, entitled “Asking better questions: New research on policing in schools,” highlighted recent, new, and ongoing research funded by the U.S. National Institute of Justice (NIJ).

Our team highlighted an ongoing study of school police reform in California and a recently funded study on training offered by the National Association for School Resource Officers (NASRO). This panel offered critical discussion and recommendations on best practices in implementing school policing programs.

Jennifer Loeffler-Cobia Presenting at the Joint Meeting On Youth Prevention, Treatment, and Recovery (Past Event)

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Jennifer Loeffler-Cobia, Justice and Public Health Policy and Practice Director at WestEd’s Justice and Prevention Research Center, will present at the Joint Meeting On Youth Prevention, Treatment, and Recovery  March 18-20, 2024, in Baltimore, Maryland. During this meeting, experts from around the country will convene to discuss pressing public health issues that impact our nation’s youth.

View details on WestEd’s presentation below.

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WestEd Session

Monday, March 18

Jennifer Loeffler-CobiaSession: Helping Communities Address the Opioid Epidemic Through Systems Thinking: The Opioid Response Planning Checklist for Systems Thinking Readiness
Time: 1:00 p.m.–2:30 p.m.
Presenter: Jennifer Loeffler-Cobia

Description: Prevention efforts often operate in silos and fall to organizations that have access to populations of interest, like public health, justice, and education organizations. Unconnected prevention efforts by organizations have failed to reduce rates of opioid misuse, morbidity, and death.

Both research studies and practical expertise have emphasized the need for a more synergistic approach that includes the entire substance misuse ecosystem in developing common system-level mission, vision, resource sharing, and practices to achieve better outcomes and save lives. However, implementing a system thinking approach to prevention first requires understanding implementation readiness factors, including motivation to change, access to resources, skillsets, buy-in, and leadership.

This session will explore the prevention implementation readiness literature as it relates to effective outcomes, and present information about a new assessment tool, the Opioid Response Planning Checklist for Systems Thinking Readiness. This tool is designed to help leaders within an ecosystem gauge their readiness to implement a system thinking approach to prevention and a process to support and build capacity in high-risk and high-need communities in the adoption, implementation, and dissemination of effective strategies to prevent opioid overdose deaths.

Communication, adaptability, responsiveness, system culture, power dynamics, community demographics, and data practices are some of the components that will be discussed in the session.