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The purpose of this paper is to examine the availability of training for police officers working in a school setting and to assess the relationship between training and the types of discipline school-based law enforcement (SBLE) officers most commonly administer to students.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with SBLE officers in Texas over a six month period.

The findings suggests that almost 40 percent of SBLE officers have not received any specialized training in school policing and more than half report the need for more specialized training to improve job performance. The findings also suggest a relationship between training and the type of disciplinary response SBLE officers provide in schools.

The placement of law enforcement officers in schools serves to preserve campuses as safe and secure learning environments; however, it is also viewed as a catalyst for criminalizing student misconduct, often referred to as the school-to-prison pipeline. Although much of the existing literature on SBLE is focussed on its nexus with the school-to-prison pipeline, there remains a lack of investigation into the training SBLE officers receive and how this potentially impacts discipline outcomes in schools.

With the expansion of school resource officer programs and the increased use of harsh disciplinary measures in schools, there is a growing concern that school safety measures are contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline, particularly in already disadvantaged schools. However, there is a lack of research on the relationship between social and educational disadvantage in schools and the roles and functions of school resource officers. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Using the School Survey on Crime and Safety (2006), this paper utilized structural equation modeling to investigate to what extent, if any, does social and educational disadvantage in schools influence the roles and functions of school resource officers.

Findings suggest that school resource officers assigned to schools with greater levels of social and educational disadvantage perform more law enforcement-related functions, while school resource officers assigned to schools with less social and educational disadvantage perform more education-related functions.

There is a lack of empirical literature on the specific roles and functions of school resource officers and whether or not the varying levels of social and educational disadvantage can predict how school resource officers are utilized. The current study aims to address this gap in the literature by examining how the social and educational disadvantage of schools predicts the roles and functions of school resource officers.

Ideally, information literacy instruction is sequenced throughout students’ academic careers, reinforcing and building on earlier instruction. The purpose of this exploratory study is to identify structural problems that potentially impact student learning. This research surveyed school librarians and academic instruction librarians along the K-20 pipeline to capture information about their instruction programs, their pedagogical approaches and their perceptions on student information literacy skills at points of transition.

The study uses a 58-item survey instrument to capture the perceptions on elements of information literacy instruction from school librarians and academic instruction librarians in the state of Utah. The exploratory survey generated 255 eligible responses.

The study identifies several areas where the information literacy pipeline has challenges: staffing, scheduling, curriculum integration, teacher collaboration and student assessment. Suggestions for improvement include providing educational support for paraprofessionals, facilitating cross-institutional collaboration and creating a scope and sequence document that spans the entire educational spectrum paired with specifically teaching for transfer.

The study was limited to surveying the perceptions of library employees who teach students information literacy as part of a school or university. Study findings imply that better support for information literacy learners requires increased collaboration across the pipeline.

Information literacy education is often siloed – in the way it is taught, studied and discussed. This research is unique in that it explores the information literacy pipeline as a whole, as each level of instruction is related to the next and studying a single section might obscure larger issues.

Recent highly publicized acts of violence and shootings on school campuses have prompted numerous crime prevention responses. The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of protective measures such as law enforcement, security policies, and school/neighborhood characteristics on school violence within the context of the racial composition of the school and grade level.

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 serious violence, physical attacks/fights, gun or knife possession, and threats and attacks with a weapon. The sample was divided by racial composition of the school (predominately white, and predominately minority schools) and by grade level (high schools, and all other grades). A negative binomial regression was conducted due the count-based dependent variables.

Findings revealed that minority schools often face higher levels of reported violence and had a heavier law enforcement presence, which often had mixed or counterproductive results for reducing school violence. School characteristics, such as reports of bullying, location, gang activity, and security measures yielded numerous statistically significant results.

Officials proposing school violence prevention efforts should strongly consider the importance of school and community characteristics, most notably grade level, and the unique context of a predominately white or minority school as there were different statistically significant results. Furthermore, officials should be cautious about relying on simple efforts such as more security personnel to address school violence. Violence and crime on school grounds should not be viewed as being isolated from violence and other forms of crime in the community. 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 effects of school violence prevention efforts and moves beyond most other works as it considers school safety approaches within the context of racial composition of the school and by different grade levels.

As useful as police data have been in furthering our knowledge of gangs and gang violence networks, not everything about gang networks can be learned from examining police data alone. There are numerous alternative sources of data that already exist on gang networks and some that can be developed further. This study aims to introduce existing research on social networks and gangs with a specific focus on prisons and schools.

This study reviews the existing empirical literature on gang networks in schools and prison settings and use the broader literature on social networks and crime to propose directions for future research, including specific suggestions on data collection opportunities that are considered to be low-cost; that is, strategies that simply make use of existing administrative records in both settings, instead of developing original data collection procedures.

The author found the existing literature on each of these settings to be quite limited, especially when the spotlight is put specifically on gang networks. These shortcomings can be addressed via low-cost opportunities for data collection in each of these settings, opportunities that simply require the network coding of existing administrative records as a foundation for gang network studies.

Investing in these low-cost network data collection activities have the potential for theoretical and empirical contributions on our understanding of gang networks, and may also bring value to practitioners working in school and prison settings as a guide for network-based planning or interventions.

The purpose of this paper is to describe Seattle’s School Emphasis Officer (SEO) program, a distinctive approach to school policing that aims to connect at-risk students with services and has potential to incorporate a trauma-informed approach.

Using qualitative data collected from a process evaluation of SEO, including interviews, observations, and analysis of activity logs and program documentation, the authors explore elements of the program that could be adapted for the development of a trauma-informed policing (TIP) model and highlight some potential pitfalls.

SEO activities align well with trauma-informed principles of safety, promoting collaboration, and impulse management and are delivered in a context of trust-building, transparency, and responsivity. However, the program is poorly defined and has limited reach, has not been rigorously evaluated, and faces serious threats to sustainability.

This study does not assess the effectiveness or appropriateness of TIP. A rigorous evaluation is needed to improve upon and test the model to ensure that increased contact between police and youth is effective and does not contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline.

To the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to describe a potential framework for TIP and lay out an agenda for further research and policy development around this idea.

After the closing of four of the five historically Black college and university (HBCU)–based library and information science (LIS) graduate programs (leaving only that of North Carolina Central University), there is a need to revitalize HBCU-LIS degree program pathways to increase racial diversity in LIS education.

This mixed-methods study entails survey and interview research with HBCU librarians. The researchers explored participants’ professional experiences and perspectives on creating partnerships between HBCU institutions and LIS graduate programs.

Participants demonstrated substantial experience, expressed high levels of job satisfaction, viewed pipeline programs favorably and believed that LIS can be strengthened through the inclusion of HBCU educational practices and students.

This study provides recommendations and a model for forging culturally competent and reciprocal HBCU–LIS degree program partnerships.

Community-led knowledge of HBCUs can disrupt rescue and deficiency narratives of these institutions. Such prejudices are detrimental to HBCU-LIS degree program partnerships.

Past HBCU-LIS degree program pipeline partnerships did not culminate in research or published best practices. This paper presents literature-derived and community-sourced guidelines along with a model for future initiatives.

The number of juvenile offenders admitted to Malaysian prisons is alarming. The purpose of this paper is to determine the presence of any psychiatric disorders and their association with personal characteristics of juvenile detainees in prisons across Peninsular Malaysia.

Detainees were recruited from five different prisons in Peninsular Malaysia and interviewed by a psychiatrist using the MINI-Kid and FACES-IV, relevant personal and family information was also collected.

A total of 105 detainees participated in the study. Almost all of the offenders (93.3 per cent) had at least one diagnosable psychiatric disorder and more than half (76.2 per cent) had two or more psychiatric diagnoses. Conduct disorder (CD) was the commonest disorder (59.0 per cent), while substance use disorders (SUD) was the commonest co-morbidity. A significant correlation was found between presence of CD, education level and SUD. Almost all (61/62, 98.4 per cent) of the detainees with CD, had not completed schooling (OR 8.03, 95 per cent CI 1.01-71.35), and detainees with this disorder were more likely to use substances than detainees without CD (OR 4.35, 95 per cent CI 1.90-9.99). Detainees with any psychiatric diagnosis were more likely to have four or more siblings in their families (OR 5.5, 95 per cent CI 1.1-26.9).

There is a high prevalence of psychiatric disorders among juvenile offenders in Malaysian prisons, detection and intervention would be important.

Restorative practice programs in the USA and Western elementary and secondary schools have been the focus of intensive, large scale field research that reports positive impacts on school climate, pro-social student behavior and aggressive behavior. This paper aims to contribute to a gap in the research by reporting a case study of transformation of an urban middle school in a multi-year implementation of restorative practices.

This paper reports how Creative Response to Conflict (CRC) supported the transformation of Middle School 217, in Queens, NY, from a school with one of the highest suspension rates in New York City to a model restorative school. CRC’s model, which incorporates the themes of cooperation, communication, affirmation, conflict resolution, mediation, problem-solving, bias awareness, bullying prevention and intervention, social-emotional learning and restorative practices, helped shift the perspective and practice of the entire school community from punitive to restorative.

Implementation of a full school advisory program using restorative circles for all meetings and classes and development of a 100% respect program committing all school community members to dignified and respectful treatment aided the transformation. Key to MS 217’s success was the collaboration of multiple non-profit organizations for provision of peer mediation training, after-school follow-up work, staff coaching and preventative cyberbullying training through the Social Media-tors! Program.

Challenges to the restorative practices implementation are reviewed with attention to the implementation online during COVID-19.

Next steps in the program post-COVID are articulated as a best practice model for other schools interested in adopting MS 217’s commitment, creativity and community-building to become a model restorative school.

The purpose of this study is to explore school resource officers (SROs) and their role in preventing, detecting and intervening in bullying incidents.

Using data from 214 survey respondents, the present study attempted to identify the personal and situational characteristics that help to understand when SROs are likely to identify and intervene in bullying incidents.

Taking a multivariate logistic regression approach, the results show that SROs – regardless of race, age, gender and education – who can identify instances of bullying are more likely to intervene to stop it.

The implications of improved training for SROs are discussed, as are ways to enhance the integration of SROs into schools’ overall anti-bullying efforts.

Bullying and violence in schools have been a growing concern for school districts and SROs are being increasingly seen as critical components of anti-bullying programs.