An Introduction to SRO Programs, a 3-hour eLearning course, directly supports the mission of the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO) to provide the “highest quality of training to school-based law enforcement officers.” This course provides an overview of school-based law enforcement programs and illuminates the critical need for further SRO training.
The NASRO Basic School Resource Officer Course is a 40-hour training designed to prepare school resource officers, other law enforcement officers, and school safety professionals to fulfill their roles in the school setting effectively.
Featured Webinar
Effective De-Escalation Strategies for School Safety Professionals in a K–12 Environment
November 2024
Through effective de-escalation, stakeholders can improve student safety, maintain a positive learning environment, enhance trust between officers and students, and reduce student involvement in the juvenile justice system. With expert insights from the National De-escalation Training Center, this webinar introduces a comprehensive and nationally recognized model to enhance conflict resolution skills of school safety stakeholders that can be utilized to create a safer school environment.
This webinar series, based off the NGC Gangs in Schools guide, is designed to provide schools and law enforcement with sound practices and collaborative techniques to identify, assess, and address gang activity in the school setting.
Featured Publication
Guiding Principles for School Resource Officer Programs
September 2022
This publication presents additional principles and considerations to guide the COPS Office’s work relating to school resource officers (SROs) and jurisdictions choosing to implement SRO programs.
This fact sheet from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services provides guidance on developing a School Resource Officer (SRO) Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
This webpage contains tools to assist with creating a comprehensive school safety program.
This blog entry provides schools, students, and parents with strategies to address and prevent bullying.
In this report, the COPS Office’s School Safety Working Group identifies 10 essential things schools, school districts, and law enforcement agencies can do to mitigate and prevent school violence as well as to facilitate swift and effective law enforcement assistance when it is necessary.
This six-part video series addresses a variety of topics for school resource officers, including how to clarify your role and authority with school leadership, getting to know the staff and students, the importance of knowing your building inside and out, and how to become an immediate presence in your new community.
This report is an analysis of violence in schools in the 2022–2023 school year.
These documents provide protocols for assessing the threat and immediately responding during an active attack to limit serious injury or loss of life. While the term “active attack” is used throughout, these documents apply to all situations where there is an active assailant or assailants posing an ongoing deadly threat, to include, but not limited to, those from firearms, vehicles, explosives, and knives.
This report provides a detailed accounting and critical assessment of what transpired in the days and months leading up to the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, the immediate first-responder actions taken following it, and the efforts since then to address and improve upon gaps and deficiencies in procedures.
This website contains various active shooter safety resources.
Adolescent Mental Health Training for School Resource Officers and Educators is designed to help school resource officers and school personnel to better identify and respond to students who are suspected of having mental health needs.
The Advanced School Resource Officer Course is a 24-hour block of instruction designed for any law enforcement officer working in an educational environment. This course, following the SRO Triad model, advances the SRO’s knowledge and skills as a law enforcement officer, informal counselor, and educator.
The ASV database collects, analyzes, and publishes averted and completed acts of school violence that have occurred since the April 20, 1999, attack on Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
This report compares the 120 new cases to the 51 cases in the original sample from 2019 in an ongoing effort to provide as much information as possible to schools, law enforcement, and communities to enhance school security and protect our children.
This report examines 67 disrupted plots by current or former students against K–12 schools from 2006–2018. The findings should be utilized by schools and their surrounding communities to help intervene earlier and more effectively with students in distress.
Beyond the Badge: Profile of a School Resource Officer follows Officer Cockrell during a school day at Central Middle School in Riverview Gardens, six months after the police shooting and protests that left North St. Louis County reeling. The story focuses on Cockrell’s efforts to build relationships, listen to students address fear of the police in a school town hall, mentor young people on how to deal with conflicts, and work with his colleagues to respond and support a student whose father is
This product provides K–12 schools and districts with products, tools, and Counter-Improvised Explosive Device (C-IED) strategies to protect, prevent, mitigate, and respond to bombing threats.
This study examines the association between co-use of commercial tobacco products (hereafter referred to as tobacco) and cannabis with educational outcomes among high school students.
This website contains data and reports produced by the National Center for Education Statistics on the topic of school crime and safety.
The “Developing an Anti-Bullying Program” provides a comprehensive framework for schools and communities to create effective anti-bullying initiatives. It outlines strategies for prevention, intervention, and response to bullying incidents, aiming to foster a safer and more supportive environment for students.
Publication
Developing Practical Responses to Social Media Threats Against K–12 Schools
April 2024
Seeking to shed additional light on how K–12 schools in the United States are being targeted by social media–based threats, this report examines what schools are doing to investigate each threat’s credibility, ensure the safety of their communities, and work with local and other partners in these areas.
This article discusses how school resource officers can play a role in identifying human trafficking victims among the student body in which they serve.
This Resource Guide contains step-by-step instructions that detail the process for creating a simple, cost-effective method for capturing three-dimensional images on CD for use during a critical incident on school property.
This documentary explores the issue of school shootings and what schools, parents, and law enforcement can do to help prevent these attacks.
This webinar focuses on how to find partners that best suit your school safety program goals and determine when in the planning process to connect with them. Presenters also discuss how to define scopes of work, develop an outreach strategy, conduct an evaluation, and successfully implement a program.
In this webinar, learn about the role of officers on school safety teams, how they can help develop a school safety plan, and the resources available to support plans.
The guide provides schools and communities with a framework to identify students of concern, assess their risk for engaging in violence, and identify intervention strategies to mitigate that risk.
This webinar reviews the essential features of school threat assessment, how and when it should occur, and how it differs from other forms of threat assessment.
This study uses a fuzzy regression discontinuity design with national school-level data from 2014 to 2018 to estimate the impacts of school resource officer placement. It constructs this discontinuity based on the application scores for federal school-based policing grants of linked police agencies.
As a stand-alone training, this session considers Anonymous Reporting Systems (ARS) and their impact on school climate.
In this episode, we discuss Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) and their impact on school safety. Dr. April Zeoli guides us through a detailed discussion of ERPOs, their role in preventing firearm-related injuries in schools, and how they intersect with school safety.
This webpage contains statistics related to school crime.
This publication results from an ongoing collaboration between the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education. Its goals are to determine whether it could have been known that incidents of targeted violence at schools were being planned and whether anything could have been done to prevent them from occurring.
This guide from the National Gang Center is designed to provide schools and law enforcement with sound practices and collaborative techniques to identify, assess, and address gang activity in the school setting.
This webinar highlights the history and philosophy of anonymous reporting systems (ARS), their essential components, and how to effectively adopt and maintain ARSs in their schools.
Publication
Guide for Developing High-Quality School Emergency Operations Plans
June 2013
This guide is designed to help individual schools and school districts develop and update emergency operations plans in response to potential emergencies.
The purpose of this document is to present different strategies and approaches for members of school communities to consider when creating safer learning environments. No two schools are exactly alike, so it is impossible to establish one plan that will work well in all schools. Violence prevention programs work best when they incorporate multiple strategies and address the full range of possible acts of violence in schools.
Publication
Guide to Managing Threatening Situations and to Creating Safe School Climates
May 2002
This document uses findings from the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Secret Service to create a process for identifying, assessing, and managing students who may pose a threat of targeted violence in schools.
Among the tens of thousands of officers hired under grants from the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) since its establishment in 1994, local law enforcement agencies across the United States have hired school resource officers (SROs) to improve and preserve safety in schools. All SROs currently funded through COPS Office programs undergo special training for these positions. This publication presents additional principles and considerations to guide the COPS Office’s.
Local law enforcement agencies across the United States have hired school resource officers (SROs) to improve and preserve safety in schools, often using grants from the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office). This flyer outlines 13 principles to guide the COPS Office’s work relating to SROs and jurisdictions choosing to implement SRO programs. First published in 2022, revised in 2024.
This guide seeks to inform school resource officers about human trafficking and its indicators so they can be better prepared to recognize a potential victim at the
school they serve and know how to report a potential case.
This guide seeks to inform school resource officers about human trafficking and its indicators so they can be better prepared to recognize a potential victim at the
school they serve and know how to report a potential case.
This study examined the impacts of implementing school resource officers (SROs) on outcomes related to school climate and suspension rates, with attention to racial differences in these effects and the role of school context, as well as how SROs perceive their roles and responsibilities and how these may be shaped by school contexts.
In this episode of School Safety Today by Raptor Technologies, Michelle Dawn Mooney sat down with Jamison Peevyhouse, Vice President of Public Safety, RapidSOS. During the conversation, they discuss enhancing emergency response outcomes by securely linking life-saving data from connected devices directly to emergency services.
In this episode of School Safety Today by Raptor Technologies, Michelle Dawn Mooney sat down with Jamison Peevyhouse, Vice President of Public Safety, RapidSOS. During the conversation, they discuss enhancing emergency response outcomes by securely linking life-saving data from connected devices directly to emergency services.
In this interactive series, a multi-disciplinary group of experts come together to share their diverse perspectives on the various facets of school climate. Throughout this four-part series, each session will consist of an expert-led panel followed by an interactive roundtable in which participants have an opportunity to engage with the topic experts and one another.
This FBI-produced documentary focuses on best practices after school shooting tragedies, including family reunification, dealing with accompanying trauma, and crisis planning. It highlights the difficult journey of recovery while also giving hope to survivors.
Going back to school can involve worries beyond whether students will like their teachers or who they will sit with at lunch. Many students, parents, and educators live with a steady undercurrent of anxiety about school safety. With expert support, schools can work with their community to stop school violence before it starts. This article features several innovative school violence prevention programs.
Introduction to Behavioral Intervention Teams, an eLearning course, provides an overview of the function of a Behavioral Intervention Team (BIT) within a school environment. Main topics include identifying the role and purpose of a BIT, reviewing key terminology, and exploring strategies to implement a BIT in any school. Additionally, the course outlines the school resource officer’s role in a BIT.
This tool kit is designed to help K–12 schools and law enforcement and community partners create tailored approaches to addressing anonymous threats of violence, including those received on social media.
This tool kit offers simple strategies and guidance K–12 schools and school districts can use to implement and enhance safety reporting programs and encourage bystander reporting among students and other members of the school community.
Website/Clearinghouse
K–12 School Security Guide and School Security Assessment Tool
July 2024
The K–12 School Security Guide Product Suite is designed to provide K–12 districts and campuses with resources, tools, and strategies to improve school physical security. With these products, schools and districts will learn the steps necessary to assess vulnerabilities, strengthen security, and better protect K–12 communities.
A Guide for Preventing and Protecting against Gun Violence (2nd ed., 2018) provides preventive and protective measures to address the threat of gun violence in schools. The Guide is delivered in two parts: The first portion is a PDF with general security best practices and considerations in narrative format; while the second portion is a Microsoft Excel-based security survey. Together, these documents outline action-oriented security practices and options for consideration.
This website includes open-source school shooting data.
Publication
Law Enforcement Agencies that Employ School Resource Officers, 2019
November 2022
This report presents statistics about school resource officers, based on data from the first-time BJS Survey of Law Enforcement Personnel in Schools (SLEPS) agency survey, which was developed as a part of the Department of Justice Comprehensive School Safety Initiative.
A series of reports provides information on the Commission’s comprehensive approach to identifying and addressing issues presented by the tragedy that occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
This fact sheet serves as a guide for law enforcement agencies and schools on how to develop a Memorandum of Understanding that clearly documents the roles, responsibilities, and expectations of the individuals and partners involved in supporting school safety.
The National Center for School Safety is focused on improving school safety and preventing school violence.
This article provides recommendations and resources to help schools establish protocols for online safety for K–12 students.
This brief describes programs that focus on primary and secondary school law enforcement partnerships that ensure school safety.
Protecting Our Future: Partnering to Safeguard K-12 Organizations from Cybersecurity Threats reports on cybersecurity risks facing elementary and secondary schools and provides recommendations that include cybersecurity guidelines designed to help schools face these risks. The accompanying media kit includes three one-sheet reference guides on key findings, recommendations, and the most impactful security measures.
The International Association of Chiefs of Police, in partnership with the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, developed a 2-day training curriculum to prepare diverse teams of stakeholders to create or strengthen existing safe school plans that enhance the protection and wellbeing of students, school officials, law enforcement, and the community.
School Resources Officers (SROs) have become more consistently present in schools around the country. But how do students, teachers, principals, and parents perceive the role and effectiveness of SROs? To help answer this question, researchers from Michigan State University conducted a systematic review of the literature on SRO perceptions. In this video, they discuss the systematic review results and how SRO perceptions may affect long-term student outcomes and policy decisions.
This tool includes more than 20 recommendations to address cyberbullying from subject-matter experts working in law enforcement, youth trauma, mental health, computer crimes, victim services, and education. It provides guidance on cyberbullying prevention, preparation, response, and investigation to law enforcement administrators and first responders, and is available in both English and Spanish.
During this webinar, presenters shared their personal experiences of being students who have lived through acts of violence in schools or who are working and advocating to address school and community violence. They talked about what safety means to them and what schools can do to increase safety. Using the past webinars in this series as a blueprint, the speakers discussed each phase of addressing violence in schools: prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery.
This webinar introduces a trauma-informed approach toward the escalation and de-escalation cycle including strategies for responding to behaviors at the various levels and ways to remain calm and be present with a student during an incident.
This study aimed to further the prevention of targeted school-based attacks by exploring how students with prior knowledge of attacks made decisions regarding what steps, if any, to take after learning the information.
This training provides an overview of “Project Unite: The Four Integrated Systems for School Violence Prevention,” instruction on each key violence prevention system and best practices for implementation. Modules include group discussion and team exercises to assist multidisciplinary school safety teams as they assess their current school safety systems and identify gaps and areas for improvement.
Preventing Problems by Promoting Positive Practices, an eLearning course, advances community policing by further enhancing positive police interactions with students and school personnel in school environments. Learners utilize the SARA model (Scanning, Analysis, Response, and Assessment), a problem-solving method of community policing, to improve the elements of a positive school climate: physical and learning environments, relationships, engagement, safety, and discipline.
This report examines 41 attacks against K–12 schools in the United States from 2008 to 2017, and the backgrounds and behaviors of the attackers, in order to inform the best practices of multidisciplinary school threat assessment programs nationwide.
This Special Report from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) presents a synthesis of select findings from NIJ-supported research projects on public mass shootings, including school mass shootings, and identifies areas of need and interest for future research and recommendations.
This website provides resources, tools, training, and technical assistance aimed at helping education agencies, with their community partners, manage safety, security, and emergency management programs.
The Report on Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2022 provides the most recent national indicators on school crime and safety. The information presented in this report serves as a reference for policymakers and practitioners so that they can develop effective programs and policies aimed at violence and school crime prevention.
This template is designed for principals and school leaders to use to engage with parents and families about the importance of safe firearm storage.
CPTED (Crime Prevention through Environmental Design) uses design, management, and activity strategies to reduce opportunities for crime to occur, reduce fear, and improve the overall safety of schools. The course will include a hands-on CPTED evaluation of a school and attendees will be provided with tools to use on their school campuses or in their associated activities with school safety.
School Resource Officers (SROs) are present in many communities across the country. SROs must be youth advocates, educators, and protectors of all students in the schools they serve. This video series helps SROs consider the way students think, how to connect with them, how to break down barriers to communication, and how to become a successful presence in their school.
This report provides details on demographics and certification of school resource officers by the type of law enforcement agency that employs them. It also describes law enforcement, mentoring, and teaching activities performed by the officers.
This course provides educational stakeholders with a structure to develop and implement a school reunification plan.
School safety is an important concern for the more than 49.5 million students and staff in schools across the country. It is fundamental to addressing and preventing youth violence, and fostering positive student well-being, academic achievement, and prosocial behavior. However, new information from the Center for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance data shows that there is an increase in threats to schools, as more students are bringing weapons to school.
The School Safety Officer Course is for non-sworn safety and security officers working in schools with an SRO or solo. The course will emphasize three main areas of instruction: functioning as a security officer in the school setting, working effectively with students, and school safety and emergency planning.
The purpose of this study was to understand the frequency of school-related gun violence across a quarter century, considering both school shootings and school mass shootings.
This First Look report presents findings from the 2021–2022 School Survey on Crime and Safety data collection.
The School Threat Assessment Tool Kit is designed to aid schools in employing behavioral threat assessment and management as part of a comprehensive violence prevention strategy.
This infographic highlights social media threats affecting school districts in the United States, provides mitigation and response measures for social media threats directed at school districts, and connects school safety stakeholders to the suite of tools and resources provided by CISA and its partners to promote a culture of readiness and preparedness.
This infographic highlights social media threats affecting school districts in the United States, provides mitigation and response measures for social media threats directed at school districts, and connects school safety stakeholders to the suite of tools and resources provided by the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency and its partners to promote a culture of readiness and preparedness.
SRO Supervisors and Management course is for police supervisors and school administrators who have the responsibility of implementing, supervising, managing, and evaluating school-based police officers and/or programs.
Publication
SROs, School Law Enforcement Units, and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act
February 2019
This guidance document consists of 37 commonly asked questions about schools’ and school districts’ responsibilities under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) relating to disclosures of student information to school resource officers, law enforcement units and others, and seeks to explain and clarify how FERPA protects student privacy while ensuring the health and safety of students and others in the school community.
This chart lists several statewide school safety tip lines and relevant details about them, including whether they are anonymous or confidential.
The purpose of this guide is to help law enforcement agency leaders and strategic communications advisors develop the necessary knowledge and skill to create strategic communications plans to help build and maintain community trust.
This report includes various intervention options that are valuable for schools in the management phase of behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM). It also discusses decision support tools to help management teams implement BTAM as a critical part in preventing targeted violence and keeping school communities safe.
This website provides various resources to school resource officers in their efforts to support school safety.
Provides information on the number and characteristics of law enforcement personnel that work in public K–12 schools. Data collected include the number of sworn school resource officers (SROs), demographics of sworn SROs, and required training and activities.
This article discusses research on false reports of active shooters in the 2022–2023 school year.
The School-to-Prison Pipeline is a social phenomenon where students become formally involved with the criminal justice system as a result of school policies that use law enforcement, rather than discipline, to address behavioral problems. A potentially important part of the School-to-Prison Pipeline is the use of sworn School Resource Officers (SROs), but there is little research on the causal effect of hiring these officers on school crime or arrests.
This podcast episode discusses the National Institute of Justice’s research on school safety issues.
This study evaluates an anonymous reporting system called Say Something that includes 24/7 support for tips in addition to schoolwide training on recognizing and reporting warning signs of violence. This randomized controlled trial conducted in Miami found that students at schools with an anonymous reporting system experienced 13.5% fewer violent incidents than students at schools without one.
This website provides a one-stop shop to assist local jurisdictions in developing, implementing, and evaluating the right set of strategies to prevent, intervene in, and respond to acts of community gun violence.
This website includes tools and resources that help monitor adolescent health behavior changes over time. It identifies emerging issues and plans and evaluates programs to support youth health on national, state, and local levels.
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