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The Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (CSSI) is a research-focused initiative that was launched by the National Institute of Justice in response to high-profile incidents of school violence. The CSSI grant program aimed to identify and understand the root causes of school violence and identify effective strategies for responding to and resolving safety and security issues. The Atlanta Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (Atlanta CSSI) project, funded in 2016 under the National Institute of Justice's CSSI grant program, and as a partnership between researchers and practitioners, centered around the fundamental question of how to design and implement safe and supportive learning environments for students in Atlanta Public Schools (APS).

Since 2014, district leadership from APS and researchers from WestEd and Georgia State University (GSU) developed a blended research and technical assistance approach to make progress towards improving school safety. The findings are based on data gathered through:

1. focus groups with school-and district-based staff;
2. observational protocols and meeting notes; and
3. school-level student climate and discipline data gathered by the state.

Although the placement of school resource officers (SROs) in schools is widespread, little is known about its effectiveness in preventing school crime or the extent to which placement may harm schools and students (e.g., by facilitating the formal processing of minor offenses). The Study of Police in Schools sought to strengthen the evidence base on the effects of SROs on schools and students. Specifically, this study addressed two research questions: (1) What are the effects of SROs on school disciplinary offenses and disciplinary actions? and (2) Do the effects of SROs vary by implementation, school, and student characteristics?

The study focused on public secondary schools that increased SRO staffing through the 2013 and 2014 Department of Justice's Community Policing Services (COPS) Hiring Program (CHP) and on matched comparison schools that neither received SROs funded by CHP grants nor increased SRO staffing at the same time as treatment schools. Using longitudinal analyses of monthly school-level administrative data, the study compared the treatment and comparison schools on disciplinary incidents/offenses and actions. In addition, the study analyzed data from web surveys of school administrators and SROs at the sample schools, and from interviews with law enforcement officials at the agencies that placed the SROs in the schools. To assess the extent to which the presence of SROs affects the measurement of school crime, research staff also collected and analyzed qualitative information from interviews with school administrators in select treatment schools.

To conduct the study, the following data sources were collected or obtained:

1. Linking and SRO program information data files (1 file for CA, 1 file for FL)
2. California Department of Education administrative data files (5 files)
3. SRO web survey data files (1 file for CA, 1 file for FL)
4. School administrator web survey data files (1 file for CA, 1 file for FL)
5. Law enforcement agency interview data files (1 file for CA, 1 file for FL)
6. Moderator data file (1 file for CA)
7. School administrator interview data file (1 file for CA)

This study made use of existing data to examine the effect of implementing school resource officers (SROs) on exclusionary discipline (e.g., arrests, suspensions) as well as perceptions of school climate in a school district in the Midwestern United States. The data used in this study were from district administrative records from the 1999-2000 through 2015-2016 school years.

Among the schools in district that have implemented SROs, this study estimated the rates of exclusionary discipline and perceptions of school climate over the years before SROs were implemented, and compared those outcomes to parallel measures from after SROs were implemented. Schools that have not implemented SROs acted as a comparison group.

Analytic techniques included latent growth curve modeling with multiple group piecewise models to examine differences between (a) schools with and without SROs (b) before and after SRO implementation.

This study also incorporated interviews and surveys with SROs for the purpose of understanding how their roles and responsibilities in schools as well as their subjective experiences of stress may play a role in the relationships examined in the study.