University of Arizona to help create safer schools

A UA-led team headed by Kris Bosworth will be providing training and technical assistance to high schools throughout Arizona working to improve their school climates.

By La Monica Everett-Haynes

TUCSON, ARIZONA (UANews) - February 25, 2011 -- School climate, as researchers are more consistently finding, is increasingly important in deterring or fostering a culture of bullying, high drop-out rates or alcoholism and drug use among students.

This carries tremendous implications for the ways educators interact with one another and with their students and what practices and procedures are supported on K-12 campuses.

Along with 10 other states, a federal agency has awarded Arizona a nearly $5.9 million Safe Supportive Schools grant, naming the University of Arizona one of the subcontractors.

Kris Bosworth, who holds the Lester L. and Roberta D. Smith Endowed Chair in Education, and her team will be helping high schools around the state beginning in August. 

Arizona received the second-highest grant to fund efforts at the 28 high schools in 16 school districts the UA team will support in its efforts to improve school climates. 

"The basic intervention has to do with changing the school climate so that students feel connected to their high school," said Bosworth, principal investigator on the UA's subcontract.

The team is chiefly concerned with how schools go about their work and how the people within them approach and interact with one another and with the student body. 

The driving belief is that the more connected and intellectually engaged students are, the less likely they are to participate in dangerous and risky behaviors such as bullying and drug use. 

The U.S. Department of Education noted that the grant is meant to "measure school safety at the building level and to help intervene in those schools with the greatest safety needs. The goal of the grants is create and support safe and drug-free learning environments and to increase academic success for students in these high-risk schools."

In Arizona, district-level awards range between about $70,000 and $289,000 annually over the four-year grant period. 

As part of the state-level grant, an Arizona State University team currently is conducting surveys to determine an index that will gauge how safe and supportive, or not, the climate is in participating schools.

Bosworth's team then will use that data to inform its work with the individual schools, helping their leadership teams to design and implement individualized approaches to improving school climate.

“It’s important that we be able to measure school safety,” Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement released by the U.S. Department of Education.

“These grants will allow states to do that by surveying the real experts – students themselves," Duncan also said.

Bosworth's role, along with a team of five others – three of whom have yet to be hired; two in Phoenix and one in Flagstaff – will be to aid the high schools' leadership teams in developing and implementing programs and initiatives to improve school safety.

Of greatest concern are discipline referrals, suspensions and expulsions, underage use of alcohol, adolescent drug use, bullying and other forms of violence.

"The research is showing that this climate issue and the nature of the school – the nature of the student experience – has an effect on all of the risk behaviors," said Bosworth, a UA educational policy studies and practice professor in the College of Education.

"All the risk behaviors are affected by climate," she added. 

Bosworth pointed to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which found that the connection students feel to their schools is directly correlated to how happy they are and how fairly they feel they are treated.

Also important, as the study revealed, were whether students felt threatened or safe at school.

Such studies serve to inform the fact creating a nurturing environment for today's learners does not stop with class size or highly qualified teachers.

"We have had so much of an emphasis on academics, but we have not addressed behaviors," said Bosworth, a leading national expert on prevention and alcohol and drug use, sexuality and violence among youth. "And not addressing the behavior is like trying to run with lead tennis shoes." 

The effort, then, is in direct contrast to the more family 10- and 12-step plans to campus climate reform. Here, no formula exists. "It's not a canned, 10-week curriculum," she said.

Consequently, Bosworth and her team will work individually with school districts and schools on improving things like creating more welcoming signage for students, families and visitors.

The team also will work with schools on policies and procedures related to disciplinary practices and ways in which teachers, administrators and staff engage with one another and their students. 

"It's all about feelings and perceptions," she said, "and it is important because perceptions become reality." 

Bosworth noted that, for example, one school currently is considering online requirements for students who are suspended to help students avoid delayed graduation as the result of foregone attendance and assignments. 

Another school wants to focus more keenly on the type of language used informally in an effort to instill more cohesion and a culture of respect, Bosworth said. 

"Each district and each school has different needs. If you work with the schools where you are, it's not a cookie cutter approach," Bosworth said.

"I am so excited about doing this work," she added. "It's tough work, but I want also to see is a permanent network of support that develops to continue supporting prevention and school climate change."