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Recognizing the potentially deleterious consequences of criminalizing school discipline, schools are increasingly turning to alternative methods for holding students accountable for misbehavior. Restorative justice (RJ) practices--which seek to hold students who cause harm accountable without removing them from their learning environment--ostensibly represent an antidote to traditional discipline. However, RJ practices have been the subject of limited high quality scientific inquiry. This study aims to fill this gap through the implementation and evaluation of a restorative program in a school district (District 18) that struggles with the highest suspension rates in New York City.

Related literature presents inconclusive results regarding the effectiveness of restorative justice (RJ) in schools (Anyon et al. 2016; Augustine et al. 2018; Gonz?lez 2015; Gonz?lez et al. 2019). There is little uniformity in restorative justice implementation, although some key components of successful implementation (e.g., staff buy-in, resources) have been identified. Because no two schools are likely to implement restorative practices identically, evaluating them with scientific rigor--typically requiring large samples--has been inherently challenging. As such, randomized controlled trials of restorative justice in schools were virtually non-existent in 2015 (at the time the current study was proposed), and most existing research relied on qualitative, quasi-experimental or pre-post designs. The push for quantitative rigor resulted in the present study, a mixed method randomized controlled trial, along with other recently published or ongoing rigorous evaluations.

The restorative justice program in question aimed to improve school climate, strengthen relationships schoolwide, prevent and intervene in conflict, reduce incidents and suspensions, and enhance any existing restorative practices already in place. Restorative justice has the potential to reduce dependency on punitive measures (e.g., suspension) when an incident occurs at school. Additionally, given the priority placed on building community and providing mental health support, restorative justice may also reduce such incidents altogether, while creating a positive school climate. As such, the primary quantitative outcomes in this study were incident rates, suspension rates, and school climate. This study was a randomized control trial that included a treatment group (enrolled in RJ program), comparison group (no RJ program enrollment), and control groups (general restorative justice practices). The research team hypothesized the following:

• • Hypothesis 1: Students in the treatment group would have fewer incidents and suspensions than the control group.
  • Hypothesis 2: Students in the treatment group would have fewer incidents and suspensions than the comparison group.
  • Hypothesis 3: Students in all of District 18 would have fewer incidents and suspensions than the comparison group.
  • Hypothesis 4: The treatment group would have a more positive school climate than the control group.

These data are part of NACJD's Fast Track Release and are distributed as they were received from the data depositor. The files have been zipped by NACJD for release, but not checked or processed except for the removal of direct identifiers. Users should refer to the accompanying readme file for a brief description of the files available with this collection and consult the investigator(s) if further information is needed.

This study was designed to examine how districts that experienced an incident of school employee sexual misconduct in 2014 defined, interpreted, and implemented key elements of Title IX before, during, and after an incident. The study used a qualitative case study design with a purposeful sample of five districts recruited from a database of 459 districts who experienced a case of school employee sexual misconduct in 2014. The study was conducted between January 2016 and September 2017.

Data collected included: 1) various district documents, 2) 41 interviews with primary actors (school employees and county officials directly involved in responding to the incident), 3) 10 focus groups with 51 secondary actors (school employees who were not directly involved with the incident but who might have been indirectly affected by it), and 4) offender, victim and district characteristics. Documents reviewed included written policies and protocols, training materials and handbooks for staff and students, case documents, and other guiding documents as applicable. In interviews and focus groups, participants were asked to discuss their knowledge of district policies and procedures, to describe the dissemination of and any changes to these policies and procedures, and to provide recommendations for improvement. To protect the confidentiality all district and participant identifying information is confidential and has been removed from any reporting.

This study seeks to inform about the effectiveness and impact of school safety programs in the state of Virginia. In many Virginia schools, ensuring school safety often involves the use of School Resource Officers (SRO) and School Security Officers (SSO), or some combination of SROs and SSOs. This study investigated the current state of SRO and SSO programs in Virginia to illuminate how SRO and SSO programs are operating and uncover best practices associated with program development, implementation, and evaluation. Specifically, the research questions were:

• RQ1: How are SROs and SSOs trained to operate in K-12 public schools in the Commonwealth of Virginia?
• RQ2:What are the criteria that are being used to select SROs and SSOs to operate in schools?
• RQ3: How are the activities of SROs and SSOs that do not result in an arrest being documented?
• RQ4: How are SROs and SSOs operating in schools supervised by their own department and/or by the school(s) in which they operate?
• RQ5: What criteria are used to assess SRO and SSO performance?
• RQ6: To what extent are SROs and SSOs involved addressing school disciplinary matters that do not rise to the level of criminal activity?
• RQ7: Are there differences when comparing between school districts that have MOUs with local law enforcement, and school districts that do not have formal arrangements with local law enforcement?