DOI: 10.3886/icpsr37486
title: Effective School Staff Interactions with Students and Police: A Training Model (ESSI), Connecticut, 2013-2018
title: Archival Version

description: This project assesses the effectiveness of a one-day, 5-hour workshop (ESSI training, hereafter) designed for joint instruction by school staff and police to all school staff. The goal was to promote positive outcomes and reduce police involvement in interactions between staff and students exhibiting inappropriate behavior through increased staff awareness of youth behavior, the functions of the juvenile justice system, and disproportionate minority contact (DMC) in disciplinary action. 1,024 school staff participated in 51 ESSI training sessions throughought the 2015/16 academic year, which also serves as the training year in the longitudinal data. Schools which did not participate in the training served as controls for the participating school. Data were drawn from a panel of students enrolled in either a training or control school, with ten schools in each group. Data on this panel of students was collected for a five-year period, from the 2013/14 through the 2017/18 academic years. School-level data serves as the unit of analysis, as the study's main goal was to test the effects of training on school-wide outcomes. The estimated coefficient indicates small attendance reductions during the post-training phase for the training group. This indicates that most of the differences between the training and control group were statistically insignificant and that there was no pattern of statistically significant positive effects across the training schools. The second set of analyses, performed on student-level data, indicates that male and minority students are more likely to be involved in disciplinary incidents and to receive suspensions or expulsions as a consequence of their behaviors than White and female students.
description: The purpose of this project was to assess a one-day, 5-hour, workshop (ESSI training, hereafter) designed for delivery by one school staff trainer and one police officer trainer in a classroom setting and targets all school staff, including teachers, administrators, and support staff (including SROs). The goals for the training included: 1) increasing school staff knowledge of youth behavior, strategies for interacting effectively with students, the role of law enforcement in schools, and how the juvenile justice system works; 2) increasing school staff awareness of disproportionate minority contact (DMC) within the school disciplinary; 3) improving school staff attitudes toward students exhibiting inappropriate behavior; and 4) increasing the likelihood that interactions between school staff and students exhibiting inappropriate behavior will have positive outcomes for students and reduce involvement of police.
description: The data for this study was drawn from a panel of students enrolled in the training and control schools (10 schools in each group) in the state between the 2013/14 and 2017/18 academic years. The core dataset was provided by the state's Department of Education. Based on a large longitudinal sample including an intervention and control condition, program effects were evaluated across 5 years, including 2 years before and 2 years after the training. The training, occurring in the 2015/16 academic year, serves as the "training year" for this study. School-level data was the unit of analysis in the first set of analyses. Training effects on school wide outcomes were tested using Piecewise hierarchical linear models. Next, logistic multilevel models were run separately for each year to explore the impacts of gender,race, and age on the outcomes. Students were the unit of analysis for the second set of analyses, taking into account non-independence of observations.
description: The school-level data file includes 52 variables: schoolID, group (training vs. control school), attendance, school policy violations, fighting and battery, physical and verbal confrontation, personally threatening behavior, in-school suspension, out-of-school suspension, bus suspension, expulsion, and arrest across 5 years. The student-level data file includes 13 variables: academic year, group (training vs. control group), school, race, age, gender, grade, membership, attendance, attendance_re, incident, sanction, arrest. Researchers selected 4 disciplinary incidents (i.e., school policy violations, fighting and battery, physical and verbal confrontation, and personally threatening behavior) from the incident variable based on prevalence of the incidents. Similarly, 4 different types of sanctions were selected: in-school suspension, out-of-school suspension, bus suspension and expulsion.
description: This project utilized data from the Connecticut State Department of Education across 5 years from 2013-2018. Through secondary analyses of these data, researchers studied the impact of the training at school-level. 10 schools in the training group and 10 schools in the control group were identified across the state of Connecticut, with approximately 10,000 students in each group across 5 years.
description: Datasets: DS0: Study-Level Files DS1: School-level Data DS2: Student-level Data
description: Staff and students at select Connecticut high schools.