Reviews federal and state activities over the course of the two years since CHIPRA was enacted to bring the nation closer to ensuring that all children in America have health coverage and notes some of the plans for continued and enhanced activities in 2011.

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Discusses, according to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, under what emergency situations it is acceptable, for safety reasons, that a school override the "written consent" requirement.

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Discusses the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV), which measured the exposure to violence for children across several major categories: conventional crime, child maltreatment, victimization by peers and siblings, sexual victimization, witnessing and indirect victimization (including exposure to community violence and family violence), school violence and threats, and Internet victimization.

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Summarizes analysis of equity and educational opportunities between various ethnicities in public schools with attention to Resource Equity, College and Career Readiness, and Discipline.

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Provides information on how to identify, respond to, and provide services to drug endangered children; includes a compilation of related resources and a toolkit of promising practices to assist States, local, and tribal governments in identifying, responding to, and providing services for drug endangered children.

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Presents findings from a literature review that investigated how underage drinking can affect a youth’s physical, emotional, and neurological health. Discusses the personal, legal, and economic consequences of underage drinking. 

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Summarizes what is known about young people and electronic aggression and discusses the implications of these findings for school staff, educational policy makers, and caregivers.

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Provides an overview of OJJDP’s Enforcing Underage Drinking Laws program, which supports and enhances efforts by States and local jurisdictions to reduce the availability of alcohol to minors. 

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Provides information on the implementation of PEP (the Carol M. White Physical Education Program), focused on developing high-quality physical education programs, creating an environment supportive of physical activity, and encouraging healthy eating habits and good nutrition.

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Describes the federal services, programs, publications, and training sessions that address child sexual exploitation issues, child pornography, child abduction, Internet crime, and missing children cases.

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Offers guidance on improving the effectiveness of efforts to collect and use disciplinary incident data, including reporting accurate and timely incident data to the federal government. Provides recommendations on what types of data to collect, why it is critical to collect such data, and how to implement and manage an incident database.

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Answers questions about school connectedness and identifies strategies school districts and administrators can use to foster it among their students.

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Identifies several components that, when effectively addressed, provide schools with the foundation and building blocks needed to create and maintain safe schools.

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Examines issues such as patterns of offending among adolescents and how they differ for girls and boys; risk and protective factors associated with delinquency, including gender differences; and the causes and correlates of girls’ delinquency.

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Outlines the evidence-based, financial implications of schools that have implemented strong nutrition standards to address childhood obesity.

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Reviews the characteristics of 21 instruments that measure student engagement in upper elementary through high school; summarizes what each instrument measures, describes its purposes and uses, and provides technical information on its psychometric properties.

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Identifies the various terms, constructs, and instruments used in the study of student connection to school.

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Offers strategies for working with external evaluators and key stakeholders in planning and implementing a scientifically sound evaluation. Organized in a logical sequence that reflects the order in which to undertake the eight basic steps of planning and implementing an evaluation.

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Collects supplemental information about school factors that may influence students’ achievement, including items about the length of the school day and year, school enrollment, absenteeism, dropout rates, and the size and composition of the teaching staff. Also collects information about tracking policies, curricula, testing practices, special priorities, and schoolwide programs and problems; and the availability of resources, policies for parental involvement, special services, and community services.

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Reports on the prevalence of past year nonmedical use of prescription pain relievers among young adults aged 18 to 25 and how they obtained the prescription pain relievers they used most recently for nonmedical purposes.

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Provides State child care administrators and other school-age stakeholders with an overview of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) program, and highlights potential areas for coordination with the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF).

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Examines how student attitudes about personalization and advisory were related to academic outcomes.

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Gives schools, districts, and communities the critical concepts and components of good crisis planning, stimulates thinking about the crisis preparedness process, and provides examples of promising practices.

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Presents 15 principles for state, district, and school staff; parents; and other stakeholders to consider when developing policies and procedures which should be in writing on the use of restraint and seclusion; and highlights the current state of practice and implementation considerations for each principle.

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Provides a broad overview of the issues related to children’s environmental health in schools and describes how one administrator successfully manages environmental health issues for the largest public school district in California using a software tool designed by the district.

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Assesses school health policies and practices at the state, district, school, and classroom levels.

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Offers recognized physical activity and healthy eating, strategies, undertaken by states, that have shown promise in helping schools address and prevent childhood obesity.

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Summarizes research indicating how Social And Emotional Learning addresses the Safe Schools/Healthy Students core elements of safe learning environments and violence prevention activities; substance abuse prevention; behavioral, social, and emotional supports; mental health services; and early childhood SEL programs.

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Illustrates the relationship between social and emotional factors and bullying; explains how an SEL framework can be extended to include bullying prevention; and provides suggested resources for doing so.

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Policymakers and other stakeholders can use cost-benefit analysis as an informative tool for decisionmaking for substance abuse prevention. This report reveals the importance of supporting effective prevention programs as part of a comprehensive substance abuse prevention strategy.

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Provides critical information and resources to help schools in creating safe and healthy environments for students. It is a publication of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Safe and Healthy Students.

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Presents national estimates from a variety of sources on the school environment of adolescents in the areas of health, safety, social support, academics, and civic engagement.

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Outlines critical components of truancy programs such as family involvement, use of incentives and sanctions, developing a support network, and program evaluation. Available online only.

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Estimates the costs that are incurred by states as a direct result of underage alcohol consumption.

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Reviews states' bullying laws and model bullying policies and school districts' bullying policies, using the U.S. Department of Education's guidance document, "Anti-Bullying Policies: Examples of Provisions in State Laws," as an organizing framework for the review.

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Examines the prevalence of research-based drug and violence prevention programs in schools and the programs' implementation fidelity.  

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Reports on the health and well-being of children, as well as the factors in the family environment and aspects of the neighborhood that may support or undermine the health of children and their families based on data from the 2007 National Survey of Children's Health.

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Argues that successful school violence prevention programs should involve a strategy of understanding where and when violence takes place in a particular school and then developing and implementing safety programs adapted to what is found in that school. Provides instruction on how to collect information on when and where violence occurs and how to use information collected to create a strategic violence prevention plan.

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Suggests monitoring school violence from multiple perspectives, using multiple indicators, and comparing the results of national, regional, and state level studies in order to empower decision makers at each of these levels to provide the best solutions to school violence based on a picture showing, in full perspective, what the biggest problem areas are. 

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Identifies the need for monitoring systems of school violence at the national, district, and school level who’s data can be gathered together and compared in order to make decisions on dealing with school violence that are based on both a global perspective and on the needs of independent cases.

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Examines variables that explain how, while typically the level of safety within a school is a reflection of the level of safety in that school's surrounding community, there are some outlier schools with levels of safety that do not correlate with that of the community.

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Determines that school violence often occurs when there is a lack of adult supervision and explores what feasible adaptations could be made to lower school violence rates in light of these findings.

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Provides estimates of criminal incidents that occur at school based on incident-level data obtained from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the nation’s primary source of information on criminal victimization and criminal incidents in the United States.

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Presents 41 key indicators in seven domains: family and social environment, economic circumstances, health care, physical environment and safety, behavior, education, and health.

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Presents detailed information on the welfare of children and families including such topics as family and social environment, economic circumstances, health care, physical environment and safety, behavior, education, and health. 

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Provides annual updates on the well-being of children and families in the United States across a range of domains.

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Describes the analysis of millions of school and juvenile justice records in Texas to improve policymakers’ understanding of who is suspended and expelled from public secondary schools, and the impact of those removals on students’ academic performance and juvenile justice system involvement.

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Summarizes studies exploring the connections between bullying in schools, school attendance and engagement, and academic achievement.

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Presents the survey results from the National Survey of Children's Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV) regarding authorities' knowledge of victimization incidents involving children and youth, particularly police, school, and medical authorities.

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Compiles secondary data for many health status indicators, and provides both graphical and textual summaries of data and addresses long-term trends.

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Collects data, that are disaggregated by race/ethnicity, sex, limited English proficiency, and disability, from a representative sample of schools and districts, representing 85% of the students in our nation's schools, on a range of issues including college and career readiness, discipline, school finance, and student retention.

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Provides data and reports produced by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) on the topic of school crime and safety, organized by survey respondent.

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Presents findings on crime and violence in U.S. public schools, using data from the 2009–10 School Survey on Crime and Safety. Survey asks public school principals about the frequency of incidents, such as physical attacks, robberies, and thefts, in their schools; and asks about school programs, disciplinary actions, and the policies implemented to prevent and reduce crime in schools.

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Examines research on peer mentoring programs, highlighting their benefits and noting conditions and components of successful programs.

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Summarizes the data, to highlight the research gaps, and to suggest future topics for research to better understand the growing problem of electronic media and youth violence.

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Presents findings from an independent evaluation of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s (OJJDP’s) Gang Reduction Program—a comprehensive, multifaceted approach to gang reduction.

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Provides national data about how public school districts identify students at risk of dropping out, programs used specifically to address the needs of students at risk of dropping out of school, the use of mentors for at-risk students, and efforts to encourage dropouts to return to school.

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Maps the geographic variability of obesity across the nation by drawing on state-level collected through the Pediatric Nutrition Surveillance System (PedNSS).

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Looks at the factors that lead youth who have committed serious offenses to continue or desist from offending, including individual maturation, life changes, and involvement with the criminal justice system.

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Summarizes findings from the 2006 survey and reports data on the number of gangs, gang members, and gang-related crime. Based on survey results, it is estimated that approximately 26,500 gangs and 785,000 gang members were active in the United States in 2006. 

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Reports findings from the 2007 National Youth Gang Survey. Based on survey results, it is estimated that nearly 3,550 jurisdictions across the United States experienced gang activity in 2007. 

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Summarizes findings from the 2009 National Youth Gang Survey (NYGS), a systematic survey of law enforcement agencies across the United States regarding the presence and characteristics of local gang problems; discusses the prevalence of gangs in the U.S., rates of gang activity and gang homicides, and factors that may influence gang violence.

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Presents analyses of survey data regarding how students experience social and emotional conditions for learning, and the relationship of these conditions to academic outcomes.

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Provides data on crime and safety at school from the perspective of students, teachers, and principals. Provides crime and safety information for students’ travel to and from school. Highlights the most current detailed statistical information on the nature of crime in schools and school environments and responses to violence and crime at school. 

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Documents the existence of disparities for minorities in mental health services and the underlying knowledge base; reviews issues relevant to the mental health of racial and ethnic minorities; and provides a historical and cultural context within which minority health may be be better understood.

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Describes the percentage of secondary schools that have adopted policies and practices for student wellness, physical education, food service, and nutrition education across the seven jurisdictions in the Pacific Region.

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Explores age and gender trends among adolescents' perceived risk associated with the use of cigarettes, heroin, LSD, cocaine, alcohol, and marijuana.

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Reports that nearly 17% of children and adolescents aged 2-19 years of age are obese; covers trends and racial/ethnic disparities in obesity among young people.

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Presents the most recent national data on obesity prevalence among U.S. adults, adolescents, and children based on measured weight and height.

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Illustrates the relationship between student experience of support from teachers, student engagement, and academic achievement among elementary and middle school students.

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Presents information on drug, alcohol, and tobacco use, as well as drug and alcohol dependence and abuse and treatment, by a variety of demographic, geographic, and other variables, including rates of the behaviors, numbers of persons engaging in these behaviors, and other measures.

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Examines the association of school organizational characteristics with school crime and disorder in a nationally representative sample of 254 secondary schools.

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Collects information on teacher demand and shortage, teacher and administrator characteristics, school programs, and general conditions in schools, as well as principals' and teachers' perceptions of school climate and problems in their schools; teacher compensation; district hiring practices and basic characteristics of the student population. Four core components: the School Questionnaire, the Teacher Questionnaire, the Principal Questionnaire, and the School District Questionnaire.

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Examines the percentage of teens age 12 to 17 who begin using alcohol, marijuana, or cigarettes each month.

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Evaluates the effectiveness of a multi‐level approach (i.e., targeting a young, universal primary prevention audience with classroom‐based curricula and school‐level interventions) to dating violence and harassment (DV/H) prevention programming (in terms of knowledge, attitudes, intended behavior, and behavior of youth participants) for middle school students from a large urban school district.

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Uses data from the 2007 School Crime Supplement (SCS) to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to show the relationship between bullying and cyber-bullying victimization and other variables of interest such as the reported presence of gangs, guns, drugs, and alcohol at school; select school security measures; student criminal victimization; and personal fear, avoidance behaviors, fighting, and weapon-carrying at school.

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Uses data from the 2009 School Crime Supplement (SCS) to examine student criminal victimization and the characteristics of crime victims and nonvictims. Also provides findings on student reports of the presence of gangs and weapons and the availability of drugs and alcohol at school, student reports of bullying and cyberbullying, and fear and avoidance behaviors of crime victims and nonvictims at school.

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Provides a summary of findings from a review of evidence concerning the effectiveness of universal school-based violence prevention programs.

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Considers how Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED), a crime reduction approach that focuses on reducing crime opportunities and on promoting positive social behavior, can be applied to school violence prevention.

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Describes key features of the high school alcohol and drug policies in the 100 largest school districts in the United States. 

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Reviews the characteristics of 21 instruments that measure student engagement in upper elementary through high school; summarizes what each instrument measures, describes its purposes and uses, and provides technical information on its psychometric properties.

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Simple, concise tool for schools, families, and communities.

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Explores on-site toxic releases and hazardous waste sites from the EPA's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and the Superfund National Priorities List (NPL).

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Allows user to select year to compare physical activity statistics and demographics (age, race/ethnicity, gender, education) in two or more states.

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Addresses the issue in monitoring of choosing between research based and “state-grown” systems and recommends ways to reach toward validity, reliability, and useful results when unfamiliar instruments are used.

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Presents the importance of sustaining a positive school climate, lists tools and initiatives used by schools to improve school climate, discusses challenges to implementing changes and their possible solutions, and finally, makes recommendations for getting started with program implementation.

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Provides rules and strategies for successful development and administration of staff and family surveys on school climate. Uses lessons learned from “The Healthy Kids School Climate Survey” and surveys conducted by “New Teacher Center”.

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Identifies two sources of data on school climate variables: “Civil Rights Data Collection” and “Incident Data”. Describes types of data each source offers and explores their potential uses and applications.

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Suggests future approaches to researching school safety, such as working with attention to understanding school violence in context, understanding the interrelationships among types of violence at school, understanding cross-cultural and within-culture, variability in etiology and prevention of school violence, replicating evidence based practice studies to establish greater external validity, and observing and learning from schools that have independently made marked improvements in school safety.

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Promotes tapping into and integrating existing state and local agencies and initiatives who’s missions are aligned with one or more of the areas outlined in the mission of school climate improvement as a strategy for gaining access to more data, strengthening supports, and ultimately, making school climate improvments more sustainable. Provides examples of cross agency collaborations that have proved beneficial.

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Introduces the concept of school climate, providing a description of its variables and a picture of its history. Compares national, regional, and local school climate monitoring in terms of advantages and disadvantages and what types of conclusions can be drawn from each. Presents examples of monitoring from schools in Israel and U.S. Military Schools.

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Walks through the reiterative process of evaluating school climate, raising support for change, and implementing needed changes. Presents an example of this process from the California School Climate Surveys, outlining the steps taken, and, with the results as a guide, painting a picture of what a school climate that promotes academic achievement looks like.  

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Provides instruction on demonstrating the connections between school climate and academic outcomes as a means of appealing for the support of the parties in a position to champion and sustain the programs. Provides tips for selecting the best evaluation tools and considerations for presenting the resulting data to various audiences in ways that strategically appeal to their interests.

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Proposes a comprehensive study of school violence as it appears in cultures across the globe, suggesting that regions could share with one another their proposed theories on school violence, and, share interventions and policies that have been found effective. Discusses inherent challenges in performing a study of this kind and identifies resources and supports needed to accomplish the objectives of such a study.

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Provides direction on developing a valid and reliable method for measuring school safety using and balancing the different data sources and measurement tools available. Recommends approaches for presenting results of measurements to key audiences.

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Presents a step by step approach to generating public interest and support for a school improvement program and sustaining support for the program over time. Discusses researching audience (key influencers), demonstrating importance of the program, maintaining engagement, and using feedback to evaluate overall effectiveness of the engagement strategy. 

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Presents evidence and logic for school climate’s positive correlation with academic achievement. Examines evidence for and describes characteristics of the school climate variables of “Safety”, “Support, Care, and Connections”, “Challenge and Engagement”, and “Social Emotional Competency”.

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Suggests approaches to using data on school climate to assess shortcomings and address them. Emphasizes the need to use multiple sources of data and presents a step by step guide to making improvements based on data collected.

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Defines communities of practice as they pertain to sustaining school climate improvement programs.  Discusses how these learning communities contribute to sustaining efforts, providing examples from the National Evaluation and Technical Assistance Center for the Education of Children and Youth Who Are Neglected, Delinquent, or At Risk (NDTAC).

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Provides examples of student success programs partnering with their local communities and other student success related programs within or beyond the school itself in order to to create wrap around intervention systems for those students who are struggling academically or behaviorally to various degrees.

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Compliments "Sustainability Planning Worksheet" as a program financial sustainability planner.  Coinsides with the "Planning for Sustainability" resource which presents this step-by-step worksheet tool for making plans of sustainability within school climate improvement programs from the beginning of implementation.

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Discusses implementing programs that ensure school safety and academic success, covering what makes up Iowa's program as an example.  Demonstrates Iowa's success via participation in standard LEA implementation activities and their Safe School Certification Program as well as via completing items on an implementation checklist.

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Discusses the foundational role of universal prevention in school-climate program implementation, and, reveals that the change process must be developmental, or completed over a period of years, and executed with attention fidelity.

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Shares experience and results so far of Maryland’s S3  school climate program as an example of program management, evaluation and implementation.  Discusses the makeup of a 3 tiered system of support for students applied by this state's specific program.

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Presents a step-by-step worksheet tool for making plans of sustainability within school climate improvement programs from the beginning of implementation.

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Documents descriptions and links to a variety of guides, briefs, tools, and websites by the school climate content areas of programmatic intervention, measures, school climate (engagement, environment, and safety), and special populations.

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Cites programs and measurement resources for the content areas of bullying, challenging behavior, character education, health, school climate, school safety, student engagement, and mental health.

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Coinsides with the "Planning for Sustainability" resource which presents this step-by-step worksheet tool for making plans of sustainability within school climate improvement programs from the beginning of implementation.

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Answers questions about sustaining innovations including: What is sustainability? What is innovation? What factors effect innovation implementation?  What do you want to have last? And, what strategies do we need to use to bring about broad, deep, enduring impacts?

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Defines and discusses the strategic value of communities of practice in achieving and sustaining goals and provides examples of success with this model.  Reveals how communities of practice are involved in the evolution of knowledge management.

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Shows what activities Kansas State Department of Education schools partake in that generate and sustain school climate improvement.  References programs and partnerships taken on by Kansas both of their own authorship and from without to meet these ends.

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Reveals keys and make-up of school climate improvement program success, based upon the example of Virginia's experience with S3 implementation.  Defines and discusses the value of student assistance programing (SAP) as well as the levels of Virginia's multi-tiered model of supporting students.

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Discusses the strategic steps taken to provide an organizational framework for planning in the West Virginia model for positive school climate. Demonstrates the model's use of an internet-based intervention plan and vetting process for programs.

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Houses archive of the event called "Creating a Safe and Respectful Environment on Our Nation's School Buses" organized to bring together national and state leaders, representatives of key education organizations, and other federal agencies who want to improve working conditions for our nation’s school bus drivers, to create a safe and respectful environment on our schools buses, and to generate confidence and partnerships in school with administrators, teachers, parents, students and community members.

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Shares how the Highmark Foundation spearheaded the creation of a coalition of experts to implement the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program (OBPP) in the largest statewide bullying prevention initiative in the country and how other stakeholders around the country can replicate this unique, model program.

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Discusses justification for schools’ attention to students’ mental health and why school is an ideal setting for mental health work to take place, presents evidence based programs that can be used to improve school mental health, and provides examples of existing school mental health programs that have found success.

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School Climate Survey Compendium (as of December 20, 2011)

To assist educators and education agencies in locating a valid and reliable needs assessment that suits their needs, the Safe and Supportive Schools Technical Assistance Center is developing a compendium of student, staff, and family surveys that can be used as part of a school climate needs assessment.  Below is an initial list of school climate survey batteries. (Alternatively, click  here to download a summary table (PDF) of each survey by respondent type.)

Please note that the Office of Safe and Healthy Students does not endorse any particular scale or survey presented in this compendium. Additionally, the database presented is not an exhaustive listing of available measures or survey instruments.  If you would like to nominate a survey that is not currently included in the compendium, click on the link below.

 Nominate a Survey
 

Alaska School Climate and Connectedness Survey