Thesis (Ed. D.) -- University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2006. / Title from title page screen (viewed on Jan. 31, 2007). Thesis advisor: Vincent A. Anfara. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Over the last several decades, punishment in school has become increasingly harsh. Students are suspended and expelled for minor infractions or are being referred to the criminal justice system for behaviors that, in the past, were largely dealt with by school administrators. In addition, school districts are hiring their own police and security forces, and surveillance technologies are becoming a permanent part of school budgets and spaces. Three converging social trends have facilitated these changes in school discipline: (1) the steady growth of a pervasive sense of social anxiety coupled with a political and cultural shift away from rehabilitative to more punitive forms of punishment (e.g., imprisonment, the death penalty, etc.); (2) a series of moral panics in the 1980s and 1990s about drugs, gangs, and violence that heightened fear of, and for, the nation’s youth; and, (3) shifts in both policing philosophy and funding towards increased police penetration into community settings. Concerns are mounting that the intertwining of schools and criminal justice has forged a “school-to-prison pipeline” for some students, especially special education students, poor students and students of color. My dissertation focuses on one aspect of the pipeline: issuing citations to students for school misbehavior. There are three questions I seek to address: For what behaviors or activities are students being ticketed? What are the characteristics of students being ticketed? After school- based citations enter the courtroom, how are these students processed? I use quantitative and qualitative data to address these questions. My larger argument is that school discipline processes not only have significant consequences for the life chances of our country’s young people, but they also have very serious consequences for the civil liberties of all public school students and for the socialization of our young people into the principals of democratic citizenship. / text

The aim of this work is to deal as fully as possible with the issue of ensuring the readiness of pupils, students, teachers and other pedagogical or non-pedagogical staff to pose a threat of attack by an active assailant in schools and school facilities. In order to achieve this, personal knowledge of the given issue, elaborated case studies, adopted legislation and methodological analysis of the questionnaires on the topic will be used. Attention is paid to all areas that may affect the behavior of people who find themselves in similar situations where the primary objective is to minimize the number of victims of such an attack. I progress here from the field of prevention, which includes a wide range of measures, from passive, solving questions of unauthorized access to schools, their authorization and identification, through education of pedagogic and non-pedagogical personnel in the field of the ability to solve unexpected and extraordinary situations to the personal readiness of all persons, moving in schools that can positively affect the situation caused by the activity of the active invader. I am personally involved in the issue in my entire career in the armed and security corps of the Czech Republic, as well as in my current position as the Chief Security Manager of a public institution. At present I am personally involved in the activities of the City of Prague, aiming at increasing the awareness of teachers and other school staff about the possibilities of preventive security measures in the field of emergency situations, with a primary focus on behavior in case of a conflict with the participation of an active striker. So I can continuously monitor the teachers' reactions to the lectured substance, use their feedback to further improve the education process in this area, and, last but not least, influence the composition of teaching materials. This work should be beneficial to the scientific community and to the professional public by its complexity and consistency in the knowledge of the topic, collected in one publication, and can contribute to the creation of further legislative procedures created by state administration bodies.

The purpose of this study was to examine student perceptions of the deterrent effect of School Resource Officers on crimes that may occur on school campuses and the factors that may influence those perceptions. The first school resource officer (SRO) program was implemented in 1953 and gained popularity in the 1990s. This study (conducted in 2008) reveals that the majority of students perceive that school resource officers are a deterrent to specific crimes and the overall crime rate on school campuses. The results of the survey indicated that the crimes of rape (74.1%), homicide (73.7%), aggravated assault or threat with a weapon (70.5%), sexual assault (67.0%), robbery (64.9%), and weapon possession (68.4%) had the highest percentage of students who responded agree (strongly agree or agree) that the school resource officer was a perceived deterrent to those crimes on the school campus. The incident with the lowest perceived deterrent effect was truancy with 48.9% of the students responding with strongly agree or agree. Based on a multivariate analysis, this study found that the factors that influenced the students' perceptions of the School Resource Officer as a deterrent to crime were students' age, class standing, school attended, exposure to a SRO, friends' crime history, and family crime history. The students' race, past crimes, income level, and gender were not statistically significant for any of the dependent variables. The examination of the ordinal logistic regression showed the percentage of variance the model explained was low. Based on this research with the limitations presented, the SRO is perceived as a deterrent to crime on school campuses. The deterrent effect was not stronger in any one demographic group. Peer pressure was one factor that was an influence in the majority of studied crimes.

This was a quantitative study designed to determine the role orientation and role behavior of school resource officers in public secondary schools in a metropolitan area of central Texas. The perception of role orientation and role behavior was assessed by two relevant groups: secondary school principals and school resource officers. Each group's perception of role orientation and role behavior was compared to determine if role conflict was an inhibiting factor in the job performance of the recently created school resource officer position. This instrument relied heavily on the work of James Telb who conducted a 1982 study involving the role perceptions of public safety officers in public institutions of higher learning as viewed by senior patrol officers and campus judicial officers. A questionnaire was distributed to both groups to assess perceptions of role orientation of school resource officers as either service oriented or law enforcement oriented. A statistically significant difference in role orientation was identified between groups on two factors: maintenance of traditional police values and police discretionary powers and handling of behavioral scenarios.