Find School Safety Programs on CrimeSolutions

Speaking in this video: Stephanie Gerstenblith, Research Scientist, Development Services Group

Crimesolutions.gov is actually a website that is a clearinghouse of programs and practices that are available to anyone who is interested whether it be schools, social service agencies or criminal justice related agencies. So, individuals can go onto the website and either do a search for a specific program if they know they want to implement a program they can look for that specific program or they can just do a general search and just look through the list of programs that are available, they can look at the topic areas so they can look specifically for school-based programs and see the whole list of programs, and the ratings that are associated with each program or they can narrow it down. They can decide “okay, I only want to look at effective programs in the school arena.”

Currently, there are 30 safety programs on the website. Five of those programs are rated as effective, 17 were rated as promising and eight were rated as having no effects. There are also six practices related to school safety on CrimeSolutions.gov. If a school knew they were having a bullying problem they could go onto Crime Solutions and easily find an effective anti-bullying program.

It is really helpful also to know what programs we lack, so programs that are not listed on Crime Solutions and what research opportunities are still out there so researchers could go on there and figure out “okay, this program that I have heard about has not been evaluated and I would like to go evaluate it and see if it works, if it is effective, and if it is something that we could get onto the website.”

We have found that while there are a lot of evaluations of different school safety programs there are not a lot of high quality evaluations of programs or practices that schools are actually implementing and investing in, especially related to safety in and around the schools and security and technologies that are used such as metal detectors, locks, hardened windows and doors, and physical design features within schools and around schools. Also, we did not find a lot of high quality research on school resource officers, but luckily we do know that school resource officers are being evaluated right now so stay tuned.