Inside the Journal of School Health Special Issue: New Research on Positive Youth Development and Safety
There is an urgent need to address school health, safety, and overall well-being holistically, and this special issue brings together diverse perspectives to transform the field. The Journal of School Health has a special issue on comprehensive school safety coming out early next year. This issue was born out of the ASHA School Violence Taskforce. Founded in 2018, comprising former ASHA presidents and our Executive Director, this taskforce called for strong and purposeful actions to prevent school violence.
What is “comprehensive school safety” and why is it important? Let us see what the Journal of School Health has to say in “Positive Youth Development Approach to School Safety: A Comprehensive Conceptual Framework” (2024). Dr. Stilwell is the lead author of this article and the guest editor for our upcoming special issue.
Our proposed model of comprehensive school safety attends to different school environmental contexts that are the focus of school safety strategies, and recognizes that both school policy and capacity, as well as parents, guardians, caregivers, and community stakeholders, play a vital role in what is possible for developing successful school safety strategies.
This requires fostering proactive partnerships among parents, communities, and schools. It involves recognizing the needs of the whole child. It requires locally tailored plans for school safety. The model is inseparable from ASHA’s vision of “…healthy students who learn and achieve in a safe and healthy environment nurtured by caring adults functioning within coordinated school and community support systems.” These environments must promote both psychological and physical safety.
As the current president of ASHA, I recognize the Journal of School Health is an asset in furthering the scholarship of comprehensive school safety and preventing school violence in a scope that goes beyond preventing shootings and protecting only the physical environment. Data from the 2023 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey show the necessity of this comprehensive approach; in the preceding 30 days:
- 4.2% of students had carried a weapon at school,
- 9.0% had been threatened or injured with a weapon on school property, and
- 12.8% missed at least one day of school due to feeling unsafe at school or traveling to or from school.
To quote former ASHA President and Founder of the School Violence Taskforce, Ty Oehrtman, “Something must change.”
School health and school safety form an interwoven fabric; we cannot separate the individual threads if we are to achieve our mission to transform all schools into places where every student learns and thrives.
We all play a role in comprehensive and proactive school safety, no matter where your work falls within the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child Model. Together we can make schools a space in which every child learns and thrives. Visit nc2s.org to learn about the Positive Youth Development Approach to School Safety and see how researchers and practitioners apply this model in the real world.
