School/Justice Partnership Project to research the expansion of a school-based intervention to increase school safety while reducing delinquency referrals and improving student outcomes.

Statement of the Problem: School safety Interventions have Increasingly emphasized "get tough" responses to delinquency and misconduct through a focus on the most at-risk students. There remains a need to understand how best to Improve school safety, as well as to Improve student performance outcomes-Including attendance, suspensions, and grades-and to do so through intervention with both lower-risk and higher-risk youth. Subjects: The project will implement and evaluate, using an experimental design, a school-based Intervention that aims to Increase school safety while reducing delinquency referrals and Improving student outcomes. The intervention features school-based probation with wraparound mental health and substance abuse services and builds on a promising pilot initiative undertaken In Florida. The project will be Implemented in 5 high schools (Including a pilot high school and 4 other schools) and serve approximately 400 youth who will be randomly assigned to treatment; another 400 eligible youth will be randomly assigned to a control group. Three sets of youth will be Included: first-time delinquency referrals, youth under probation supervision, and those who are targeted for diversion from juvenile court. Partnerships: The program Is a partnership among the School District of Palm Beach County {SDPBC), the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ), local law enforcement, and Florida Stale University (FSU). Research Design and Methods: To determine the effect of the Intervention on Individuals and schools, respectively, we will employ a mixed methods approach thai Includes (1) an experimental design In which youth are randomly assigned to the program or a control group, (2) a longitudinal matched samples analysis of schools to assess school-level effects, and (3) a process evaluation that will document how well the program implementation conforms with programs design, barriers and facilitators to effective lmt>lementallon, and strategies that other schools could use to Implement the Intervention successfully. Analysis: The analytical strategy Includes (1) regression and survival analyses predicting youth-level delinquency, school-based behavioral incidents, allendance, suspensions, expulsions, academic promotion, and grades, (2) mutlllevel regression analyses examining schoollevel delinquency and student outcomes, and (3) analyses of Interview data on the Implementation of the Intervention. Products: Anticipated products resulting from this research Include: (1) a final report, data files, and all required deliverables, Including progress reports and an executive summary, (2) articles targeting high-tier scholarlyand policy-focused peer-reviewed journals, (3) presentations at professional conferences and policy, praclllioner, and school association meetings. ca/ncf