Per Pupil and School Safety Spending: An Empirical Perspective

abstract:In response to growing concerns over school violence, crime, and safety, schools continue to implement school crime prevention and reduction policies and programs. Aside from the increased demands on school budgets imposed by new and enhanced school safety programs, two additional factors further complicate matters. First, just as schools vary in terms of their violence and crime prevention programmatic needs, schools (and districts) also vary in terms of their financial needs and health. Second, schools similarly vary in the magnitude of financial tradeoffs incident to school administrators’ reconciling competing claims for school crime prevention programs and other demands on an exhaustible supply of school funds. Exploiting the nation’s leading data set on public school crime and safety, the U.S. Department of Education’s 2017–18 School Survey on Crime and Safety (“SSOCS”), supplemented by district-level current per pupil spending data, we explore variation in school administrators’ views about the nature of the compromise between school safety and other budgetary claims. Our core findings imply that variation in student per pupil spending as well as perceived litigation exposure persistently informed administrators’ reports about the inadequacy of school funding and how it limits school crime prevention and reduction efforts. That school finance trade-offs implicate school crime prevention programs reinforce the broader point that school finance issues implicate a suite of factors that extend beyond student academic achievement and other traditional outcomes and into school crime, violence, and safety domains.