School Safety and Transformative Funding Models

• In Event: Rethinking Policies for Justice and Equitable Education Systems

Abstract

School Safety & Transformative Community Funding Models

Objective
This paper will examine how issues around school safety are closely related to common challenges on how schools and communities are funded or underfunded for historically marginalized students. Making these empirical connections will allow for new scholarship, policy and potential advocacy across racial, economic and political lines.

Theoretical Framework
The authors for this paper make strong linkages between school safety ecological theories and a growing evidence base on how policies that deeply impact the conditions of schools like school finance laws must become more central to school safety policy. Making these theoretical connections will allow for a more comprehensive idea of school safety and school safety policy that extends beyond school.

Methods & Data Sources
Several large-scale studies examining school safety patterns across racial and economic lines are the foundation for the analysis in this paper. Mostly publicly available data at the local and state level is analyzed, along with consequent policy responses in a subset of communities.

Results
Scholars will explore evidence-based programs and policies that can have a significant impact on perceptions of safety in schools (e.g., Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development, 2020, Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, 2020; Mayer & Jimerson, 2018; U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2020). The authors will also provide examples of how resource equity policies have also influenced school safety efforts at multiple levels of government.

Scholarly Significance
Recent mass shootings in schools and community settings have once again raised the public alarm about safety in schools (e.g., Fernandez, Fausset, & Bidgood, 2018; Interdisciplinary Group on Preventing School and Community Violence, 2013; 2018; Marjory Stoneman Douglas H.S. Public Safety Commission, 2019). The intense public concern surrounding these mass shootings has focused the national dialogue on increasing security policies and procedures and armed personnel, and away from evidence supported prevention strategies that promote social-emotional health, prevent bullying, and create a positive school climate.
Fundamental to issues of school safety are questions about resource allocation and school finance models that often under-invest in communities of color as evident in school funding policies. This reality will require policymakers to engage in difficult conversations about economic, racial, and other forms of injustice, holding the potential to create transformative school finance policies that compensate students for the failures of existing financial structures.

Authors

• Oscar Jimenez-Castellanos, University of Southern California

• Ron Avi Astor, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

• Heather Meyer Reynolds, SUNY Empire State College