​Positive School Safety Program.

The Positive School Safety Program (PSSP) is a 16-session manualized program that coaches non-instructional school staff (i.e., School Safety Officers, School Climate Staff) to use specific skills to positively and effectively interact with students to enhance school climate, school safety, and student behaviors. The PSSP has been developed for School Officers and for School Climate Staff. 

More specifically, the PSSP sessions teach skills to:

• Form positive relationships with students, teachers, and school staff
• Promote positive student behaviors
• Prevent student misbehavior
• De-escalate challenging student situations
• Solve ongoing problems related to student behavior
  
  

Over the course of one school year, coaches work individually with school staff to teach them new skills, help them practice these skills, provide them with feedback about their use of these skills, and help them problem solve when they encounter challenges applying these skills.

NOTE: The PSSP is designed to teach a set of core skills to enhance relationships with students and to improve school climate and safety. It is not designed to train individuals to become school safety officers or school climate staff. It does not provide training in ethics, physical safety, or crisis responding. The PSSP must be used in combination with school district policies, procedures, and trainings.

The Positive School Safety Program for School Officers

The Positive School Safety Program for School Climate Staff

With funding from the National Institute of Justice, the JJR&R Lab developed and is now implementing and evaluating a series of trainings and a 16-session Positive School Safety Program to teach school officers empirically based, procedurally just, and trauma-informed practices to transform their role in schools and enhance their impacts on students. Each training is designed to fit into professional development days, and each Positive Policing session involves 15 minutes of coaching instruction and skills practice. 

With grants from the U.S. COPS Office/Department of Justice and the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, the JJR&R is partnering with the School District of Philadelphia to expand implementation of the Positive Police Curriculum and trainings across the district.

With funding from that National Institute of Justice, the JJR&R Lab is creating a version of the Positive School Safety Program for use with school climate staff and will implement and evaluate the program through a randomized controlled trial of approximately  100 K-12 public schools in the Philadelphia. School climate staff include individuals such as lunch and recess monitors, hallway and bathroom attendants, and other individuals who supervise non-classroom activities.

This project will:

1. Identify when and where violence occurs in schools, and the team will collaborate with the School District of Philadelphia to use results to guide staffing and resource allocation in and across schools to enhance school safety and climate;
2. Investigate use of the Positive School Safety Program in Philadelphia schools to identify facilitators of and barriers to high-quality program implementation; and
3. Examine impacts of the Positive School Safety Program on youth, staff, schools, and the district, including violence reduction, decreases in threats and bullying, student and staff perceptions of safety, school attachment, attendance, achievement, and racial equity.

​If you are a school district or police department interested in learning more about using the Positive School Safety Program, contact Dr. Naomi Goldstein at [email protected].