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The purpose of this paper is to assess the perspectives of law enforcement executives and public school principals regarding school resource officers (SROs), armed teachers, and armed school administrators in order to inform the policy discussion surrounding school safety issues.

This study utilizes data collected from two surveys that were sent to law enforcement executives and public school principals in South Carolina. Respondents were asked about their experience with SROs and their perspectives on these officers’ ability to maintain school safety. Both groups of respondents were also asked about their attitudes regarding arming school employees.

There is a large amount of support for SROs from both law enforcement executives and principals. However, in general, both groups of respondents do not believe armed administrators or armed teachers to be an effective school safety strategy.

SROs have been the primary strategy adopted by schools to maintain safety, but in the wake of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, public outcry and political debate has spawned a number of proposed alternatives. Among these alternative security measures has been the idea of arming school teachers and/or administrators. However, there appears to have been little effort to empirically consider the perspectives of those directly impacted by school safety policy decisions. In particular, a gap in the literature remains regarding the perceptions of police executives and school principals concerning school safety policies and how the attitudes of these key actors compare. Thus, the current study addresses this gap by exploring the perspectives of key school safety stakeholders.

This study aims to examine parent perceptions of school active shooter preparedness and prevention efforts, as well as parent perceptions of the risk of an active shooter event.

Data were obtained in 2019 through an online survey of 182 Pennsylvania residents who were the parents or step-parents of children enrolled in pre-Kindergarten, Kindergarten-12th or college/ university. Respondents were a subset of a state-representative sample of 668 individuals.

Actions taken by schools were largely unrelated to parent perceptions. Parents who reported that their child’s school had provided information about active shooters to students had better attitudes toward preventive efforts overall. Parents who reported that their child’s school had changed firearms policy perceived a higher level of risk. Parents were also asked to share what they felt their child’s school could do that would help them feel more prepared for an active shooter event. The most common response was for schools to install metal detectors or perform random metal detector checks.

While there is extensive research on the views of students about school safety and security and, to a lesser degree, the views of school administrators and teachers, parents have largely been neglected in school safety research.

Mobile robots with dextrous hands and sophisticated sensory systems will require intelligent, knowledge‐based, expert controllers. A design is developed for a robot controller which can acquire task knowledge as it interacts in the world with its human users. The design is based on four reasonable assumptions which lead to a theoretical framework for robot learning systems. The framework is called a multiple‐context learning system. It is a production system with multiple templates for forming productions as the system interacts with the world. Elaborations of the framework and experimental tests of the system are discussed.

Purpose: The study explores how educators use mass media to sensemake their experiences in relation to school shootings.

Methodology/approach: The present chapter uses content analysis to analyze educator tweets and results from an anonymous online survey.

Findings: Twitter is used by educators in the aftermath of school shootings to sensemake the impact these events have on teaching and learning outcomes. Moreover, educators turn to Twitter to debate larger issues related to gun control and arming teachers. Collectively, educators remain committed to their institutions and students; however, they may struggle to meet the ever-changing demands of what it means to be a teacher in the post-Columbine educational landscape.

Research limitations: While providing a starting point for understanding how educators sensemake their experiences with mass media, there are limitations. The sample size was limited to 55 tweets and 40 survey respondents. Furthermore, researcher bias is a concern. Both researchers work in higher education and have experienced the emotional “heaviness” that comes with discussions of school shootings.

Originality/value: This study provides insights into how educators use mass media to sensemake school shootings as both content producer and consumer. Findings indicate that through the identification of patterns within educators’ sensemaking processes, educational institutions can develop better systems for processing the effect of gun violence on the teaching experience and within the classroom.

Recent highly publicized acts of violence and shootings on campus have prompted numerous crime prevention suggestions including having an armed presence in the schools. The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of protective measures, policies, and school/neighborhood characteristics on school violence.

The data used in this study were part of the School Survey on Crime and Safety collected in 2006. The dependent measures of school violence include reports of violence, threatened attack with a weapon, attack with weapon, and gun possession. The sample was divided into high schools and all other grades to consider differences in levels of school violence among grade levels in relation to various law enforcement security measures, school security measures, and school characteristics.

Findings revealed mixed and often counterproductive results for law enforcement and school security efforts to control school violence. School characteristics, such as reports of bullying, location, and gang activity yielded numerous statistically significant findings. Policy recommendations and suggestions for future research are provided.

This study differs from much of the previous literature, which typically examines student and administrator attitudes about victimization and crime prevention. The current study examines detailed information on the actual effects of school violence prevention efforts. Furthermore, this study moves beyond most other works (that typically focus on high schools) as it considers school safety approaches by different grade levels.

Addresses the question of whether military expenditures in the Arab world have been at the expense of human capital development. Mainly finds that countries in the Arab world have experienced increases in human capital development associated with increased rates of military participation (armed forces per capita). This phenomenon is in sharp contrast with that found in non‐Arab countries. Also this phenomenon appears to be relatively recent, increasing in strength during the period after 1980. In part Arab governments have chosen to subsidize the education of increased numbers of civilians during periods of steppedup military expenditures with the understanding that upon completion of training those individuals will serve some time in the military.

Vaccination became a vital tool in the prevention against COVID-19 worldwide. The government of Uganda rolled out its first phase of vaccination in March 2021, targeting specific prioritised groups including health workers, armed personnel and teachers among others. Amidst the struggles to procure, administer and convince people about the safety of the vaccine, various, and at times seemingly credible influences came up to warn people against being vaccinated. Different reasons, specifically with regard to safety were raised by critiques and as such, some people including those in priority groups opted out of taking the vaccine. Due to this ambivalence in regard to COVID-19 vaccination, in 2021, government directed that all teachers who had not been vaccinated should not be allowed in schools upon reopening in 2022. This mixed approach study therefore, interrogated how teachers, as part of the priority groups, perceived of COVID-19 related vaccination, what level of knowledge they had about COVID-19 vaccination and their sources of information. In addition, tests were done to find out how perception and attitudes, level of knowledge and sources of information affected uptake of COVID-19 vaccines. Results indicate that teachers hold different conflicting views about COVID-19 vaccines. That although the majority get their information from traditional media, they have doubts, doubts about the cause and origin of COVID-19, about the intent behind vaccination and about their leaders.

We describe a holistic approach to promoting school safety that merges an emphasis on student voice with staff training in restorative practices. We first describe current approaches to keeping schools safe based on the existing research literature. Given that most of these approaches rely on access to credible information about potential threats to school safety, we then discuss student voices as one critical source of information, especially at the middle and high school level. We report on a recently developed tool designed to encourage students to share threats to school safety they are aware of with adults. Initial testing identified potential barriers and facilitators to students' willingness to share information. We discuss teacher training in restorative practices as one approach that might address some of these barriers, including anti-snitching cultures in schools, students' lack of trust in adult responses to student-identified concerns, and punitive school climates. Based on recent work, we identify barriers and facilitators to implementing restorative practices in schools. We provide recommendations about potential strategies to merge student voice with school personnel's training in restorative practices to minimize peer victimization that can escalate into violent behavior.

In a context where standardized testing and achievement scores have become the hallmark of accountability frameworks, the issue of social responsibility is not given much attention in schools in Jamaica. This has led to a continuous decline of the moral and spiritual dimension of schooling in the country. This is evidenced through an increase in school violence and other disparities among students. This paper aims to explore teachers’ perception of how they are prepared for their role as agents of social responsibility.

Through interviews of 16 in-service teachers, this research sought to explore teachers’ perception of how they are prepared for their role as agents of social responsibility. Each participant in the study was interviewed using a structured interview schedule comprising six questions. Data collected were transcribed and analyzed by sorting and identifying codes. Pattern codes were established which were then interpreted to form themes. Three themes emerged which are used to present findings.

Findings revealed that teachers had a shared understanding of social responsibility; they felt that they were prepared for this role through ad hoc curriculum encounters, were not adequately prepared for their role and social responsibility required a belief in the idea first before it can be taught.

The findings from the research are used to present arguments in the paper for emphasis on preparing student teachers to be agents of social responsibility and for a rethinking of teacher preparation curriculum in Jamaica. The paper also presents strategies that can be used to guide the re-thinking of teacher preparation programmes.

Teacher preparation programmes represent the avenue through which teachers can be prepared to develop their social consciousness, so that they can in turn help students. The results of this paper are means of helping teacher educators understand this.

This paper is one of the first since the early 1990s to discuss social responsibility as a key component of teacher preparation in Jamaica. It also fills the void of scarcity of research in Jamaica on teacher education on a whole and social responsibility in teacher education in particular.

Although mentoring is increasingly hailed as one of the most critical components of US teacher induction programs, the corresponding research base has failed to provide conclusive support for the effectiveness of teacher mentoring.

Cross-sectional data from the 2015 to 2016 National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) was used to empirically evaluate the relationship between school-based mentoring programs and US first-year teachers' occupational stress risk. NTPS items assessing teachers' workplace demands, resources and mentoring experiences were used to examine associations between stress risk and mentoring supports received. Multiple regression analysis and chi-square tests of independence were conducted to answer the study's three research questions.

Mentor status and study covariates statistically significantly predicted teacher stress risk, with mentor assignment being associated with decreased stress risk. Findings also revealed teachers who were not assigned a mentor were significantly more likely to experience greater stress risk and when assigned mentors, teachers with greater stress risk reported significantly different mentoring experiences than did teachers with less stress risk.

The current study addresses common limitations found in research on teacher mentoring and occupational stress, including the use of local, small samples and the absence of a comparison group and control variables. The associations between first-year teacher mentoring experiences and stress risk have not been firmly established and the current study provides needed evidence to support that mentored first-year teachers are more likely to report lower stress risk than their unmentored colleagues.