Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Incidents of physical violence in schools are a growing problem in the United States, where in a nationally-representative survey of high school students, 8.1 percent reported being in a physical fight at school and 7.6 percent reported being threatened or injured with a weapon at school (Kann et. al, 2014). In addition to the documented prevalence of these violent incidents, the percentage of students who reported missing school due to concerns about their personal safety has risen steadily over the past two decades. Between 1993 and 2013, the percentage of high school students who reported missing school due to concerns for their personal safety – including safety in school and safety on the way to and from school – increased from 4.4 to 7.1 percent (Kann et. al, 2014).

Exposure to violent incidents and concerns about safety in school are even more pronounced in large, urban districts, where students report rates of involvement in violent incidents and concerns about safety that are significantly higher than the national average. In Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the third largest district in the country, 16.9 percent of high school students reported being in a physical fight on school property and 12.9 percent reported missing school due to concerns about their personal safety (Kann et. al, 2014).

We ask the following question: Does community crime monitoring – delivered through a novel school-level safety intervention program – decrease crime near schools and increase student attendance? We investigate this question empirically using the staggered rollout of a community-based, school safety program – the Safe Passages Program (SPP) – in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). This program posts community monitors along designated routes around public schools in the city of Chicago during school arrival and dismissal times. These community monitors are employed by non-profit organizations that serve local community areas and neighborhoods in the city of Chicago. The community monitors provide supervision on selected routes to ensure that students get to and from school safely.

Our results suggest that the Safe Passages Program (SPP) reduced violent, property, and drug-related crimes near treatment schools. Moreover, we find that the program increased aggregate student attendance at the elementary school level by around 1.02 percentage points, which is a 1 percent effect relative to a baseline mean attendance rate of 94.1. We find further evidence to suggest that our aggregate impact on elementary school attendance is driven by increases in attendance rates among white, black, low-income, and disabled students. Interestingly, we do not find any impacts on school-level rates of chronic truancy.