To keep schools safe, educators must resist the push for cure-all solutions in favor of more comprehensive strategies that incorporate student behavior, school climate, and the thoughtful use of security measures.
That’s the conclusion of researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder who synthesized about 150 federally funded research studies conducted after the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Conn. Their final report covers a prolific decade for school safety researchers, with studies that involved more than 4,000 schools across 36 states.
It can be difficult for school and district leaders—even those who have studied reams of research on safety—to bring all of the recommended elements together into a practical strategy that fits their schools, said Sarah Goodrum, the director of the university’s Violence Prevention Project and a lead author of the report.
“I think our tendency is to seek a one-size-fits-all solution to school safety, and that just isn’t appropriate or realistic, both in the needs of the school and in the capacity of the school to meet those needs,” she said.
The Colorado researchers sought to clearly explain what works to keep schools safe and offer plenty of practical strategies leaders can select to build their own research-backed approach.
They did so by exploring peer-reviewed studies funded by $246 million in grants provided through the U.S. Department of Justice’s Comprehensive School Safety Initiative between 2014 and 2017. They also examined subsequent research that built on those projects.
The studies explored the root causes of school violence and how factors like discipline, security, and bullying prevention contribute to building safer learning environments.
Here are four key recommendations.
1. Schools should create multidisciplinary teams to review and monitor safety strategies.
A team of educators and staff members can balance differing viewpoints of school safety and practical implementation challenges related to funding, staffing, and time, the report says. Those teams should include administrators, counselors or psychologists, and law enforcement.
“Addressing all three components of a comprehensive approach to school safety requires that schools balance their safety needs with their capacities and resources,” the report says.
Research of strategies like school-based threat assessment—used by 85% of public schools in the 2023-24 school year—often identified implementation challenges, the researchers found. Schools might lack resources to carry out a program, they may deal with “uneven staff buy-in” for their efforts, or teachers might not carry out plans consistently without proper training and support.
In a study included in the analysis, researchers studying the use of behavioral interventions for high school students noted that, while school staff expressed a lot of interest in the method, full implementation “rarely occurred.”
A team can address those concerns by considering the culture of the school, the values of families, and practical considerations as they adopt programs and decide how to put them into place, the recommendations say. The report offers practical tools, like pre-implementation surveys, that teams can use to weigh concerns about staff capacity.
2. Schools should administer climate surveys annually.
School climate surveys can help regulators keep tabs on students’ perceptions of safety, support, and relationships with adults.
“A positive school climate benefits individual students and the overall school environment by fostering the interpersonal relationships that promote healthy youth development, prevent problem behavior, and encourage upstander reporting,” the report says.
In 2021, for example, researchers at the University of Virginia surveyed 86,000 students at 322 high schools about whether they would report a peer’s homicidal threat to an adult. The 16% of students who said they would not report the threat “were suspended more often, were less engaged in school, perceived teachers as less supportive, and perceived school discipline structure as less fair” than their peers who said they would report such a concern.
The recommendations include a collection of state and district school climate surveys that include a variety of indicators such as bullying, sexual harassment, and relationships with adults and peers.
And, as a growing number of states and districts adopt anonymous threat reporting systems, they should provide ongoing training about how and when students should use them—and how schools should respond to those reports, the recommendations say.
3. Schools should adopt multi-tiered systems of supports.
Schools should adopt multi-tiered systems of supports—strategies that provide a continuum of responses that escalate depending on the severity and frequency of student misbehavior, the recommendations say. And those strategies should be teamed with efforts to build schoolwide norms about what good conduct looks like.
Such approaches can help educators address the underlying causes of student behavior, not just individual incidents, the report says. And that can prevent problems from escalating into dangerous or disruptive behavior.
To address reports of possibly threatening behavior, administrators should assemble threat-assessment teams of staff like principals, counselors, and law enforcement to report imminent threats to police and to respond to others with strategies like counseling and monitoring, the recommendations say.
4. Schools should be choosy in selecting physical security measures.
There is limited rigorous research on the effectiveness of physical security measures like security cameras, weapons detection systems, and alert buttons.
Because schools have limited resources, they should be thoughtful about what technologies they use, taking steps to avoid a negative impact on school climate, the recommendations say. Researchers have found students in schools with higher percentages of Black and Hispanic enrollment are more likely to report “high security” measures like locked classroom doors and restrictions on restroom visits, the recommendations say.
The recommendations include tools used in Florida and Texas to conduct reviews of school security methods and procedures like lockdown drills.
“We don’t have good evidence on whether kids need bulletproof back packs,” Goodrum said. “Our desire for a quick fix sometimes hinders our ability to recognize that we haven’t built the systems that can provide support for students in crisis. Those aren’t easy to implement.”
