WITHDRAWN: The Community Effect: Reconsidering Correlates of School Safety in Urban, Suburban, and Rural Contexts

This presentation will introduce a five-year longitudinal research study funded through the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). The study examines (1) how student safety and educational outcomes change as the ecology of risk and protective factors in the school and community context change and (2) determine the extent to which school, staff, and community readiness to mitigate these risk and protective factors is associated with improved outcomes. The purpose of this presentation is to raise awareness to the different risks and needs that exist in urban, suburban, and rural communities that relate to violence, crime, and their relation to social, emotional, and physical safety in schools.

Although rare events, school shootings have raised awareness to the conditions in schools that lead to violence. These concerns are being addressed with a variety of funding sources that are made available at the local, state, and federal levels. Some of these funding opportunities have been directly geared towards physical safety while others aim to fund intervention programs that address school safety, school climate, and student well-being. In addition, while most of these resources have been geared towards urban and suburban areas, the needs for the 18.7 percent of the students in rural public school districts are often ignored.

As we respond to understand and address school safety, how do we think about community and school disadvantage in association with youth safety? How do we think about individual, school, and community readiness to address school safety? And how do we understand safety in association with urban, suburban, and rural schools and communities?

We will (1) introduce the conceptual framework that guides the study, and (2) discuss the multiple strategies (concentrated disadvantage, social determinants of health, and environmental scanning) and different criteria we used to examine rural, urban, and suburban school districts in California that are in high risk-high need communities and sampled from for our study.