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Tools for Life: Relationship-Building Solutions (TFL) is a program designed to improve school climate and safety through the proactive development of elementary and middle school students' interpersonal skills (relationship-building and communication) and intrapersonal skills (self-regulation and resiliency). In the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 school years, the Jackson (Mississippi) Public School District (JPSD) implemented TFL in grades 1 through 8. RAND researchers conducted a randomized controlled trial to determine whether TFL, integrated into existing school practices, positively affected school climate and safety in the district.

This project described the implementation of TFL in JPSD, calculated its costs, and evaluated the program's effectiveness. TFL was designed to improve whole-school change in relationships among staff and students, but the project researchers found that implementation of TFL in JPSD schools was generally shallow, and the program was rarely, if at all, implemented across a whole school as it was designed. TFL had little impact: After one year of implementation, there were no practically or statistically significant differences between schools that implemented TFL and those that did not in measures of students' social and emotional, school climate, behavioral, or achievement outcomes. In addition to the uneven implementation of the program, methodological limitations of the study and contextual factors in JPSD may have contributed to these finding.

Across the United States (U.S.), school districts have grappled with how to create safe community- and achievement-oriented schools and how to ensure the necessary discipline is applied transparently, fairly, and without bias. Two programs that many schools have turned to in order to achieve these goals are Schoolwide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) and Restorative Justice (RJ). PBIS is an evidence-driven schoolwide behavioral management approach that aims to outline clear expectations for students and to cultivate shared norms and practices across classrooms and school spaces. PBIS has become a popular approach in schools and districts: as of 2020; over 19,000 schools in the U.S. have implemented PBIS.

A second program, Restorative Justice (RJ), has grown in popularity in recent years. RJ typically focuses on restorative relationship building between affected parties, peaceful reconciliation, and non-punitive approaches to rectifying harm, using a structured circle discussion format. RJ schools use both community circles, designed to build a safe space for students and staff to share and listen to each other, and restorative circles, designed to share perspectives on and redress a behavioral issue.

Working with a large school district in a mid-Atlantic state, researchers set out to test whether these two programs substitute for or complement each other. In partnership with the school district researchers conducted two separate school-level randomized controlled trials (RCTs). The first RCT (RCT 1) sought to uncover the marginal impact of RJ by adding the program to a set of randomly selected schools that were already implementing PBIS. The second RCT (RCT 2) was designed to discover the impact of introducing both programs together into schools that had neither program at baseline. Researchers conducted student and staff surveys to collect measures of school climate, teacher logs to record program implementation, and researchers also received administrative data from the district on student test scores, teacher and student absences, student disciplinary infractions, and school costs.

There is growing evidence of the effectiveness of each of these programs in isolation. A recent meta-analysis of 32 experimental and quasi-experimental impact studies of PBIS found that PBIS reduced disciplinary exclusions and problem behavior and increased academic achievement. The findings were statistically significant and showed small to medium effect sizes. Individual studies have found that PBIS reduces the use of office disciplinary referrals and other exclusionary disciplinary measures (including the use of in-school and out-of-school suspensions), while improving student behavior and attitudes across school levels. Individual studies show variable--some statistically significant and some null--impacts on academic outcomes.

The empirical evidence on the effect of RJ in U.S. schools is more limited, with little rigorous casual evidence published to date. Based on patterns across rigorous and non-rigorous research, restorative justice is associated with decreases in suspension rates and disciplinary disparities, improved student behavior, and improved school climate and relationships.

The School Crime Operations Package (School COP) is a software application developed by Abt Associates Inc. with funding from the National Institute of Justice. School COP is a free software package that persons responsible for school safety can use to enter, analyze, and map criminal incidents and school rule violations that occur in and around K-12 schools. School COP organizes information according to the data model that the United States Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics' Crime, Violence, and Discipline Reporting Task Force recommends. The School COP database includes data related to the incident (e.g., date, time, type, location) and to persons involved in the incident (e.g., name, grade, action taken). In other words, School COP is an incident-based system, rather than a student-based system. School COP offers a variety of techniques for analyzing school incidents, including tabular reports, bar graphs, pie charts, and maps. School COP can be installed on any Windows (95 or later) PC. It requires no other software to run, and is usable without formal training.

The origin of this project is an award to Abt Associates Inc. that was funded under the National Institute of Justice's (NIJ) June 1999 "Safe Schools Technology" solicitation, which requested proposals for innovative approaches to using technology to enhance the safety of our nation's elementary and secondary schools. School COP was initially released on CD-ROM in January 2001, and made available at the School COP Web site in June 2001. This Windows version of School COP was generally designed for individuals, for a single school, or for small offices within a school district. Abt Associates Inc. was subsequently awarded another grant in 2001 to enhance the School Crime Operations Package (School COP) and to conduct an evaluation of this software, which is used to enter and analyze incidents that occur on school campuses.

Two types of enhancements were made. First, an enhanced Windows version of School COP was developed that could run on a local- or wide-area network, thus allowing multiple users within a single school or across multiple schools to share a common School COP database. The enhanced Windows version also included two utilities: a Merge application (which enables a district-level School COP database to be constructed by merging several individual databases) and a Viewer application (which enables users to view -- but not add, edit, or delete -- incident information). Second, Web School COP was developed to meet the diverse information needs of persons charged with maintaining safe schools in large school districts, including persons at the school-level (e.g., principals, assistant principals, security officers, and school resource officers), the district-level (e.g., district-level administrators and security staff), as well as possibly parent organizations and state-level administrators. Web School COP was designed to run on either an Intranet (e.g., the school district's private Internet) or a secure third-party Web server, and was built to run on the current Microsoft Web platform.

The evaluation of School COP entailed case studies of six sites to address three main issues: (1) what decision process do sites go through when deciding whether to use School COP, (2) once the site decides to use School COP, what implementation obstacles exist, including those related to installation, customization, and training, and (3) what benefits do sites realize from using School COP.