The Effects of School Safety Strategies on K-12 Schools: Armed Civilians, School Resource Officers, and Metal Detectors as Contributors to the School-to-Prison Pipeline

In recent decades, K-12 public schools have introduced get-tough measures ostensibly to improve school safety through punitive responses to misconduct and delinquency--expanding from traditional security measures to more punitive, zero-tolerance policies and surveillance-based approaches. Academic literature and media accounts highlight that such efforts continue to proliferate and extend across our nation's school spaces. This three-paper dissertation examines how specific safety practices--namely, the presence of armed civilians, School Resource Officers (SROs), and random metal detector checks--influence student outcomes and contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline. Rooted in Becker's (1963) and Lemert's (1967) labeling theory, as well as Sampson and Laub's (1997) cumulative disadvantage theory, the argument suggests that exclusionary discipline practices--often framed as school safety strategies, contribute to racial and ethnic inequalities in educational spaces. These practices theoretically align with the concept of cumulative disadvantage, wherein initial exclusions or disadvantages can compound over time, reinforcing cycles of exclusion and perpetuating educational inequities. This dissertation consists of three interconnected papers, all centered on school safety strategies. While they share a common focus, each paper explores a different topic within the school-to-prison pipeline--offering unique insights into this broader area of research. Paper A examines the role of principals' perceptions of the schools' academic climate on the arming of civilians on school grounds, seeking to better understand how these perceptions contribute to school safety strategies. Paper B explores the presence of full-time SROs in school spaces and their potential role in student arrests. Paper C assesses the influence of random metal detector checks on students, in particular their association with actions that remove students from educational spaces, potentially reproducing socioeconomic disparities within school spaces. Collectively this dissertation argues that some schools might potentially be blurring the line between strategies meant to ensure the safety of students (i.e., school resource officers, use of random metal detector checks on students, and use of armed civilians in schools) and those meant to enforce discipline (like suspensions or expulsions), thus we potentially risk overlooking how certain disciplinary actions disproportionately affect certain student groups and push them out of educational settings--via the school-to-prison pipeline. The goal of this dissertation is to shed light on this distinction, so we capture a more granular understanding of how different, and specific school safety strategies influence the outcomes for students and, ultimately, work to reduce the practices that is associated with the school-to-prison pipeline. Taken as a whole, the three studies emphasize the need to examine school safety policies that, although intended to protect students, may disproportionately influence outcomes for those from marginalized backgrounds. By using the nationally representative SSOCS dataset (2017-2018) and addressing critical gaps in existing literature, this dissertation offers a nuanced view of how school safety and discipline practices intersect, and it seeks to reveal whether some practices push students out of school, potentially fueling the school-to-prison pipeline.