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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?

The goal of this mixed-methods study was to evaluate the effectiveness of community based cross-age mentoring to reduce negative outcomes related to violence exposure/engagement and promote positive development among African-American and Latinx youth from multiple sites serving four low-income, high violence urban neighborhoods, using youth mentors from the same high-risk environment. The program was named by youth mentors, "Saving Lives, Inspiring Youth" (or SLIY henceforth). Cross-age peer mentoring programs promise to solve problems and ineffectiveness of other types of mentoring programs, but few have been systematically studied in high-poverty, high-crime communities. In collaboration with several community organizations, a prospective approach was implemented to follow cross-age mentors and mentees for up to one year of mentoring. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were employed to examine possible changes in a number of relevant constructs, and to understand program impact in greater depth.

Mentoring sessions lasting one hour took place each week, with an hour debriefing session for mentors following each mentoring session. Quantitative data were collected pre, post and at a 9-12 month follow-up. Throughout the mentoring intervention, several forms of qualitative data were gathered to make it possible for youth voices to permeate understanding findings, to illuminate program processes that youth perceived as helpful and not helpful, and to provide multiple perspectives on youths' resilience and their understanding of the risks they faced. Both mentors and community collaborators were trained and engaged as community researchers. School-based data were also collected. Demographic variables include participants' age, race, and grade in school.