Miami-Dade County Public Schools Campus Shield Evaluation, Miami, Florida, United States, 2014-2019 (ICPSR 37332)

Version Date: Jun 30, 2020

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Principal Investigator(s):
Joseph L. (Joseph Lorn) McCrary, WestEd (Organization)

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR37332.v1

Version V1

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Summary

In 2015, Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS) received a three-year Comprehensive School Safety Initiative grant from the National Institute of Justice to implement, pilot test, and experimentally evaluate the effects of an innovative fusion center, Campus Shield, for proactively identifying and addressing school safety threats and issues. Three additional resources were also proposed to supplement and enhance the Campus Shield fusion center: visitor management systems (information on entries and exits from the school building to be recorded and fed into Campus Shield), surveillance cameras (which would also feed into Campus Shield), and the linkage of Campus Shield to "Mental Health Specialists" to provide direct services and act as a liaison between school-based student services professionals and community-based providers.

Citation

McCrary, Joseph L. (Joseph Lorn). Miami-Dade County Public Schools Campus Shield Evaluation, Miami, Florida, United States, 2014-2019. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2020-06-30. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR37332.v1

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Funding

United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. National Institute of Justice (2014-CK-BX-0019)

Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Smallest Geographic Unit

None

Restrictions

Access to these data is restricted. Users interested in obtaining these data must complete a Restricted Data Use Agreement, specify the reason for the request, and obtain IRB approval or notice of exemption for their research.

Distributor(s)

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
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Time Period(s)

2014 -- 2019
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Study Purpose

The goal of Campus Shield was to improve school safety and climate through the development and deployment of a data collection, analysis, and dissemination system that permits proactive responses to potential threats, both immediate (as in the case of gang activity) and those that emerge over time (such as deteriorating school climate or escalations in bullying). This project sought to attain these goals by achieving the following objectives:

* Developing a data system that integrates information from several sources, including school incident reports, tips from concerned citizens, and local jurisdiction police data;

* Developing tools to analyze the data to provide a comprehensive assessment of internal and external threats to schools;

* Developing a reporting mechanism that provides rapid, real-time information to schools concerning the nature of any threats and potential response options;

* Conducting a pilot assessment in 6 schools of the data system, analytic tools, information disseminated, and response, and using the results to fine-tune Campus Shield;

* Conducting a rigorous evaluation of Campus Shield in 24 schools (12 treatment, 12 control) to determine its effectiveness in reducing criminal and school offense incidents and improving school climate; and,

* Disseminating findings broadly, through academic and mainstream publications and web media, including a project website with videos demonstrating Campus Shield in action.

Due to a variety of reasons, the goal of the IDS was never fully realized and as a result the impact study was dropped. Instead, in order to contextualize the challenges faced by MDCPS and inform the field about efforts to construct IDS's for school safety, WestEd conducted interviews and surveys with district and school police staff in urban school systems to learn about their efforts to use data to inform policing.

Study Design

In January 2015, WestEd was contracted to conduct a formative and summative evaluation of the Campus Shield initiative. The formative stage was designed to include a pilot test conducted at three middle and three high schools in order to assess the development and implementation of the data system, analytic tools, methods of dissemination and related school-level response. The summative evaluation was designed to employ a cluster-based randomized controlled trial that relied on 12 experimental sites and 12 control sites to examine how the implementation of Campus Shield improves student behavior and school climate.

Sample

Data used derive from interviews of mental health professionals, surveys of administrators, interviews and surveys of staff from large urban school districts, organizational charts from large urban districts, and extant data from the Miami-Dade Schools Police department (M-DSPD) and Miami-Dade County Public Schools (MDCPS).

Time Method

Longitudinal, Cross-sectional

Universe

Participants are middle and high school students, parents, administrators, teachers/staff, mental health counselors, school police, and school resource officers in M-DCPS. For the current phase of the study, participants will be district staff responsible for safety and security (i.e. superintendent, school police, office of safety and security staff, district staff who oversee safety and security data.

Unit(s) of Observation

Individual

Data Type(s)

Mode of Data Collection

Response Rates

In order to contextualize the challenges of building an integrated, school safety data system and to describe school safety data use practices, WestEd surveyed the 97 largest school districts' police and/or safety and security offices; unfortunately researchers only received eight responses. The large school district police departments who participated reported a range of data use, data integration, and data sharing among groups of stakeholders. Social media and local news were the most commonly reviewed data sources reported by school safety staff.

In total, 31 administrators from the six pilot schools and eleven of the twelve treatment schools completed the online survey. Responses per school ranged from 1 to 3 administrators.

Presence of Common Scales

The surveys contained Likert scales, multiple choice questions and opportunities for open-ended comments.

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Original Release Date

2020-06-30

Version History

2020-06-30 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

  • Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

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Weight

None.

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Notes

  • The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

  • One or more files in this data collection have special restrictions. Restricted data files are not available for direct download from the website; click on the Restricted Data button to learn more.