This report describes the features and evaluation of the Atlanta Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (Atlanta CSSI), which was funded in 2016 under the CSSI grant program.
The Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (CSSI) involves a partnership between researchers and practitioners in 1) developing and implementing a comprehensive, districtwide process leading to safer and supportive schools; 2} study the implementation of the process to understand which factors aid or inhibit implementation; 3) describe the extent to which the process is associated with improvements in school safety. Although the five schools were successful in expending Atlanta CSSI funds in creative ways, II is not clear from the findings how much of a role the process played in facilitating successful implementation of successful security measure. However, other school teams did not articulate a connection between their funded activities and their initial C&I planning process. Some school team members conflated the C&I process with other planning processes (e.g., school improvement plans or improvement science for SEL; see chapter 6). When asked about C&I activities, they sometimes described activities that, although related to C&I goals, were funded as part of other initiatives. For example, one school had multiple SEL and mental health staff positions funded by various sources, but the focus group sessions did not clarify which position was funded by the Atlanta CSSI grant. Additionally, many school team members did not appear to understand what was meant by some security principles.