Illinois Regional Safe School Programs for chronically disruptive students: An evaluation of the Madison County Regional Safe School Program

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of continued educational and social/emotional treatment services with expelled RSSP program participants. With the ever-increasing prevalence of expulsions for school violence, federal, state, and local education agencies are attempting to research, develop, and implement policies that create conducive learning environments in public schools. A review of the related literature resulted in the identification of five trends in current research. They include: (1) studies that focus on the origin, nature, and causes of violence among students; (2) studies that attempt to identify best practice for the creation of safe schools; (3) current trends in the development and implementation of zero tolerance policies; (4) the growing need for the development of policy, program, and services for at-risk students; and (5) studies that focus on best practices of alternative education programs.; In order to examine the issue of continued educational and social/emotional services during expulsion from public schools, the research design is a quantitative and qualitative study. The results are descriptive quantitative and qualitative research. Collected data includes self-reported information from ten parent open-response interviews, archival demographic data from 40 students, and data from 27 days of observation. Questions addressed focus on understanding the target population in the natural setting of a therapeutic school environment and the participants' transitions back to regular school environments.; The results of each data collection source (archival data review, observation, and interviews) are presented. Although one data source cannot provide a complete picture of the study, it is anticipated that themes will emerge from all three data sources providing a better understanding of the target population. With hope, this approach will provide insight to the research questions developed for this study.