Spokane Public Schools Multi-Tiered System of Supports

The Comprehensive School-Based Approach to Youth Violence and Victimization, Category 1 provides funding to support a comprehensive effort to address youth violence and victimization through implementing evidence–based prevention, intervention and accountability efforts in a school based setting. The goals of the program are to (1) reduce the incidence of school violence through accountability efforts for offenders; (2) respond to victimization, exposure to violence, and trauma as a result of violence that occurs in the school, community, or family, (3) improve school safety and climate; and (4) prevent violence, delinquency, and victimization in the targeted community. Project sites will provide direct services to youth.

Spokane Public Schools (SPS) has implemented programs and strategies to address school discipline, youth school violence, and victimization. The list includes Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, hiring in-school mental health therapists, hiring campus resource officers, adopting and implementing the Gang Resistance Education And Training (G.R.E.A.T.) Program, restorative practices, in-school mentoring, and facilitating peer-to-peer conflict resolution. SPS would like to improve upon its practices and programming to provide an even more comprehensive, multilayered and tiered supports to address school violence and student and staff victimization. Spokane agencies formed a steering committee in 2016, called Safe Communities Partnership, to enhance gang prevention, intervention, and suppression efforts in alignment with the Comprehensive Gang Model. SPS has explored its disciplinary and survey data to develop and implement multiple interventions and supports to improve school safety and climate; reduce the incidences of school violence through accountability efforts for offenders, including innovative programs, suspension, expulsion, and arrest; and enhance its own and the community’s capacity to address youth violence and exposure to violence through evidence-based interventions. The school and community liaison will also collect data about in-school diversion participant offender and victimization records from project partners in law enforcement and the Spokane County Juvenile Court. CA/NCF