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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.

This project assesses the effectiveness of a one-day, 5-hour workshop (ESSI training, hereafter) designed for joint instruction by school staff and police to all school staff. The goal was to promote positive outcomes and reduce police involvement in interactions between staff and students exhibiting inappropriate behavior through increased staff awareness of youth behavior, the functions of the juvenile justice system, and disproportionate minority contact (DMC) in disciplinary action.

1,024 school staff participated in 51 ESSI training sessions throughought the 2015/16 academic year, which also serves as the training year in the longitudinal data. Schools which did not participate in the training served as controls for the participating school. Data were drawn from a panel of students enrolled in either a training or control school, with ten schools in each group. Data on this panel of students was collected for a five-year period, from the 2013/14 through the 2017/18 academic years.

School-level data serves as the unit of analysis, as the study's main goal was to test the effects of training on school-wide outcomes. The estimated coefficient indicates small attendance reductions during the post-training phase for the training group. This indicates that most of the differences between the training and control group were statistically insignificant and that there was no pattern of statistically significant positive effects across the training schools. The second set of analyses, performed on student-level data, indicates that male and minority students are more likely to be involved in disciplinary incidents and to receive suspensions or expulsions as a consequence of their behaviors than White and female students.

Funded by the National Institute of Justice, and in collaboration with the Flippen Group, the South Carolina Department of Education, and the districts of Charleston, Georgetown, Greenville, and Richland County Schools, WestEd conducted a randomized controlled trial of violence prevention and a school climate improvement program known as Capturing Kids' Hearts Campus by Design (CKH).

CKH is a skill intensive, systematic process, whole-school intervention, designed to strengthen students' connectedness to school through enhancing protective factors (strong bonds with teachers, clear rules of conduct that are consistently enforced) and targeting modifiable risk factors (inappropriate behavior, poor social coping skills). The CKH training program aims to address the mechanisms and processes of social skills instruction that lead to improved student behavior by promoting skills acquisition (i.e., modeling, coaching, and behavioral rehearsal), enhancing skills performance, removing competing behavior, and facilitating maintenance of social skills.

Components of CKH have been widely used throughout the United States. As of 2013, CKH training has been offered to over 200,000 staff in more than 7,000 schools. Although widely used, the whole package of CKH training and service has not been sufficiently subjected to a rigorous evaluation to assess the effectiveness of the program.

The purpose of this study is to test and evaluate the Capturing Kids' Hearts package of programs and processes offered in the school-wide model, CKH Campus by Design, which includes Capturing Kids' Hearts, Process Champions-Plus, Campus TrAction Pacs, Teen Leadership, CKH Recharged, and Leadership Blueprint.