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School resource officers (SROs) are sworn law enforcement who are responsible for providing security and crime prevention services in the American school environment. SROs have become commonplace in American schools, but support for their continued work is meeting more resistance from those who feel that schools need to be focused on education and not police actions. The responsibilities of SROs are similar to regular police officers in that they have the ability to make arrests, respond to calls for service, and document incidents that occur within their jurisdiction. They are expected to be more than a law enforcement officer; they are expected to be leaders, educate students about law-related topics; be a role model to youth; and typically have additional duties to include mentoring and conducting presentations on youth-related issues. SRO programs receive valuable augmented training from a partner in school safety, the non-profit organization – National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO). Towards this end, we will: (1) provide a historical context of SRO programs in the United States, (2) highlight concerns and challenges of school communities, (3) briefly present the case of SRO in Los Angeles, and (4) highlight implications for educational leadership. Conclusions and recommendations are presented.

Despite nationwide decreases in school crime and violence levels, a relatively high and increasing number of students report feeling unsafe in their school environments. In response, many school and law enforcement officials are collaborating to develop school–police partnerships, especially in urban areas as an effort to significantly deter student criminal activity and violence in schools. This chapter examines the beginning efforts of New York City's Impact Schools Initiative, a punitive-based school–police partnership created in January 2004 to significantly increase police presence at some of New York City's most violent public schools. An initial examination of school-level demographic and environmental variables reveal that despite increased police presence, students enrolled at New York City's Impact Schools continue to experience higher than average problems linked directly to future criminality, including more student suspensions and lower attendance rates compared to other New York City Schools. Additionally, the data revealed that compared to other New York City public schools, Impact Schools experience greater student overcrowding and receive less funding.

This chapter considers the school-to-prison pipeline (STPP) within the United States as a network of flows and feedback loops that connects the education and delinquency systems. This system is heavily biased to funnel students with disabilities, disproportionately from low-income minority families, away from productive educational outcomes through punitive, exclusionary, and restrictive measures that too often result in incarceration. Congress intended special education and disability rights laws to ameliorate injustice and ensure long-term positive outcomes for all students. Through a systems theory perspective, this chapter outlines key leverage points inherent in disability rights laws, which can and should be activated to interrupt and reverse the STPP. Many provisions within the law are overlooked or inadequately enacted within current educational practices. The authors present problem-solving strategies, rooted in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and other disability rights laws, for educators, juvenile justice advocates, and policymakers to use in order to reduce school exclusion and incarceration of vulnerable youth and to provide education opportunity for all students.

One of the most challenging issues facing building level administrators is the supervision of special education programs in their schools. This chapter outlines the role of the building administrator in overseeing the implementation of special education laws and policies from the initial process of referring students for special education services through the implementation and monitoring phases of service delivery at the building level. Detailed topics include dealing with parents, regular education staff, and student privacy issues. This text examines student discipline and due process complaints as well as strategies for dealing with outside agencies, such as child welfare departments and law enforcement officials. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the No Child Left Behind Act, and its impact on special education services at the building level.

In response to a critical need for uniform school crisis preparedness and response efforts across districts, the National Association of School Psychologists developed PREPaRE, a model and training curriculum aimed to equip school-based professionals to engage in comprehensive school crisis prevention and intervention practices. The PREPaRE acronym stands for: Prevent/Prepare for psychological trauma; Reaffirm physical health, security, and safety; Evaluate psychological trauma; Provide interventions (and) Respond to psychological needs; and Examine the effectiveness of prevention and intervention efforts. The model spans four crisis preparedness phases: Prevention, Mitigation, Response, and Recovery. This chapter provides a detailed overview of the development and structure of the PREPaRE model's core components and the organizational framework of the Incident Command System. It delineates elements of the basic school crisis response plan, assessment of mental health risk following a crisis event, and the provision of crisis interventions within a multitiered system of support framework. Additionally, it summarizes ongoing effectiveness and implementation research used to evaluate and improve the model based on immediate training outcomes assessed through pre and postmeasures and training transfer to applied school contexts. Implications for research and public policy regarding school safety and crisis prevention and intervention, as well as the future of PREPaRE curriculum development, are discussed.

Findings from a prior study confirm schools are relying more extensively on law enforcement to police student behavior (Torres & Stefkovich, 2009). The same study suggests further that decisions to report student offenses to law enforcement may be motivated in part by school poverty and school minority student concentration. These findings are concerning in light of the NAACP's suggestion that disciplinary action may be overly harsh in schools serving large populations of children of color. Minimal research however has examined the effect of policy interventions (e.g., prevention training) and community involvement (e.g., engagement) in minimizing the likelihood student offenses are criminalized. Using the NCES School Survey on Crime and Safety (2000), policy involvement in student discipline is explored by schools’ action in mitigating/resolving problems through prevention, alternative resolution, and external involvement. Implications for ethical leadership and responsibility are explored.

The proliferation of zero-tolerance behavioral policies and the presence of school resource officers (SROs) are receiving justifiable scrutiny for the deleterious effects they have on students’ functioning. While many have argued the convergence of these policies thwart the development of Black and Latino boys, critiques examining the experiences of Black girls are scant. Disaggregated disciplinary data from across the country reveal “… black girls are suspended at higher rates (12%) than girls of any other race or ethnicity and most boys …” (U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, 2014, p. 1) suggesting that when it comes to schooling, Black girls are, indeed, “pushed out, overpoliced and underprotected” (Crenshaw, Ocen, & Nanda, 2015, p. 1). The authors of this chapter argue that youth advocates can use hip-hop culture, a tradition rich with resistant prose, to develop critical consciousness and engage Black girls in discussion about socially contrived binaries that reinforce the STPP. The authors demonstrate how the anti-oppressive lyrics of women emcees (e.g., Rapsody, Sa-Roc) can foster therapeutic alliances and dialogues with young Black girls, and how these lyrics might serve to inspire Black girls in composing their own counterhegemonic autobiographical narratives to resist the school-to-prison pipeline.

The United States has an uncomfortable relationship with pleasure. Cultural ambivalence is evident in discourses surrounding pleasure and the labeling and treatment of those who act on their desires. Pleasure seeking, generally understood in moral terms, is often medicalized and criminalized (as in the case of pregnancy prevention and drug use), placing questions of how to manage pleasure under the purview of medical and legal actors. At the macrolevel, institutions police pleasure via rules, patterns of action, and logics, while at the microlevel, frontline workers police pleasure via daily decisions about resource distribution. This chapter develops a sociolegal framework for understanding the social control of pleasure by analyzing how two institutions – medicine and criminal justice – police pleasure institutionally and interactionally. Conceptualizing medicine and criminal justice as paternalistic institutions acting as arbiters of morality, I demonstrate how these institutions address two cases of pleasure seeking – drug use and sex – by drawing examples from contemporary drug and reproductive health policy. Section one highlights shared institutional mechanisms of policing pleasure across medicine and criminal justice such as categorization, allocation of professional power, and the structuring of legitimate consequences for pleasure seeking. Section two demonstrates how frontline workers in each field act as moral gatekeepers as they interpret and construct institutional imperatives while exercising discretion about resource allocation in daily practice. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how understanding institutional and interactional policing of pleasure informs sociolegal scholarship about the relationships between medicine and criminal justice and the mechanisms by which institutions and frontline workers act as agents of social control.

Acts of mass violence are not a new phenomenon in the United States. Law enforcement and homeland security officials prepare, prevent, respond, investigate, and assist in prosecuting offenders in these events. How then can the greater homeland security community effectively avert future acts of mass violence with its even broader mission set? Physical and technological security countermeasures are not enough to prevent these types of incidents from occurring. The purpose of this chapter is to briefly give an overview of some of the research into the indicators and traits exhibited by perpetrators of mass violence and the best practices that have evolved to intervene as a result. Recognizing the common traits and behaviors displayed by past attackers, their surrounding influences and the common traumas most of them have experienced, is an essential first step in developing effective strategies to prevent acts of mass violence.