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.