School Safety

With over 200 shootings in K-12 educational settings since the year 2000, serious violence has become an unfortunate reality for American schools. RTI conducts essential school safety and violence prevention research to identify, understand, and inform evidence-based best practices for promoting the safety and security of the nation’s students and school staff. We build this knowledge base through rigorous, multimethod research evaluations and exploratory studies, producing actionable knowledge that schools can use to become better prepared to prevent and respond to violence.

Our researchers have worked in hundreds of schools to study critical issues such as school violence and gang prevention, discipline disparities, mental health, and anti-bullying programs and initiatives, active shooter response and emergency preparedness, anonymous threat reporting tip lines, and The Cost of School Crime. RTI’s broad range of expertise, including conducting on-site observations and assessments, surveys, and in-depth interviews and focus groups with district officials, students, teachers, support staff, and top administrators and our ability to turn complex findings into practical solutions for schools positions as a leader in the field.