THE IMPACT OF THE SAFE SCHOOLS HEALTHY STUDENTS INITIATIVE ON ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

One premise for students to experience academic achievement is the need to have a safe school environment. The Safe Schools Healthy Students (SS/HS) initiative was established by the Department of Education to provide support for creating an educational setting that gives an opportunity for every student to prosper. It involved the implementation of a comprehensive community-wide partnership plan of action focused on establishing healthy childhood development to provide the students with skills needed to address alcohol abuse and domestic violence. The initiative serves as the basis for the study to investigate its impact on the academic achievement of high school students in mathematics, reading, science, and social studies. The Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Bandura's Self-efficacy Theory guided the study.
The study focused on students in two rural school districts in South Texas. The analysis focused on students for whom the data was available who had participated in the 2009, 2011, and 2012 administration of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) tests during the funding duration of the SS/HS grant and passed all sections at the first administration. The students were divided into two groups-those that participated in the initiative, characteristic-present (N = 31-34) and a comparison group (N = 44-48). An ex post facto, causal-comparative design was employed. No causal inferences were drawn due to the non-experimental nature of the study.
The initial results of the study showed that the characteristic-present group outperformed the comparison group in all subject fields. When the outcome measures were adjusted on the basis of at-risk status of the students, however, the analysis showed that group differences were not statistically significant.
Thus, the findings suggest that the SS/HS students could have benefited from the additional programs that focused on environmental concerns, domestic violence, alcohol and drug abuse, mental health concerns, and violence prevention programs. Participants in the study were less likely to be academically at risk than were the students in the comparison groups who had not received the additional program support. The SS/HS initiative can be instrumental in providing the structure which enables the students to be in a safe learning environment that promotes academic success.