The Impacts of School Security Equipment on Students and Schools

Schools spend over $3 billion a year on school security, with funding partially driven by state and federal grant programs aligned with the STOP School Violence Act. For instance, the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) annual School Violence Prevention Program (SVPP) awards over 200 grants a year of up to $500,000 to school districts for activities including, “purchase and installation of certain allowable equipment and technology, and other measures to significantly improve school security.” Despite generous funding for such equipment, little is known about the effects of security equipment including potential ways in which security equipment can have positive intended impacts on school safety or negative unintended consequences, particularly on marginalized students. This proposal seeks to build evidence on the effects of school security equipment by evaluating a state-level grant program that is very similar to the STOP School Violence Act’s COPS SVPP through addressing five goals. First, the project takes advantage of funding given to schools whose school security equipment grant application score falls above a specific, unknown cutoff score to implement a regression discontinuity design to identify the impact of security equipment grants on school violence and safety. Second, moderation analyses will identify whether the effects of security equipment vary by school level, type of security equipment, and school demographics to provide actionable evidence to policymakers administering these grant programs. Third, the project will identify how the security grant program is positioned relative to statewide spending on security through web scraping of required vendor disclosure for public contracts of security companies to provide equipment to schools. Fourth, interviews with school and district-level leaders applying for security equipment grants will help to refine the logic model connecting security equipment to improved school safety and reduced violence as well as aid in interpreting findings from the first two goals on whether security equipment leads to intended outcomes. Fifth, findings will be contextualized through youth participatory action research with an established youth council that will aid in interpreting findings through a youth-designed research project on youth perspectives on school security and interpretation of findings from other aspects of the project. Findings seek to inform funding priorities on school security equipment through robust dissemination to educational policymakers and practitioners.