Civil Society & Community Studies Associate Professor Ben Fisher and a team of fellow researchers have received a $1.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice to study the impact of school security equipment on students and schools.
Schools spend over $3 billion a year on security, according to the researchers, but little is known about security equipment’s impacts, whether positive or negative, especially on marginalized students. This project will evaluate a state-level grant program very similar to a DOJ program that awards federal money to school districts for activities including the “purchase and installation of certain allowable equipment and technology, and other measures to significantly improve school security.”
Researchers hope the findings will be used by policymakers and education leaders to inform funding priorities for school security equipment.
“School districts spend so much money on security equipment, but we don’t have a good base of research evidence to understand whether this spending makes schools safer, or whether it might have unintended consequences,” Fisher says. “We hope this project can shed some light on those dynamics.”
The team includes Samantha Viano of George Mason University as principal investigator and several co-principal investigators: Fisher; Meagan Call-Cummings of Johns Hopkins University; Trevor Fronius of WestEd; and Lucy Sorensen of the University at Albany.
Fisher’s work is focused on school criminalization, or the way the criminal legal system appears in schools. He explores issues like police in schools, school discipline and schools’ use of a variety of security measures. Much of his research addresses racial equity with the goal of making schools more just and equitable places for students.