School safety: The relationship between academic performance, perception of safety and reality

To ensure that schools are safe places where students can learn without fear, researchers and educators must be able to understand the indicators of school safety as well as student and staff safety concerns. Data gathered from school, law enforcement and justice systems can provide archival measures of school safety. A missing element in these indicators is the perceptions of both students and faculty about the safety of their campuses. This study examines the perceptions of students and faculty and compares those perceptions to archival data to answer the following questions: 1. How well do the various sources of data measure school safety? 2. How well are the various sources of data correlated? 3. How well do the perceptions of students and faculty reflect the archival school safety indicators? 4. How do the perceptions of school safety differ in schools with high standardized test scores from those with low standardized test scores?

For this study, researchers selected a stratified random sample of charter and public schools. At each school researchers conducted focus groups of students and teachers as well as interviews with principals and counselors on their perceptions of school safety. Archival data were from each school's report to the state department of education, local law enforcement crime reporting, and juvenile justice records.