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Community Works for School Resource Officers: A First-Rate Prevention Choice

NCJ Number
225157
Date Published
2004
Length
14 pages
Annotation
This guide introduces school resource officers (SROs) to “Community Works” (CW), a comprehensive law-related education curriculum, and to Youth Safety Corps (YSC), a club model that involves youth in designing and implementing projects for creating safer schools and communities.
Abstract
CW is a component of Teens, Crime, and the Community (TCC). This guide assists a SRO in planning, developing, implementing, and evaluating a TCC program at his/her school. The SRO who has been effective in delivering a TCC program is in an ideal position to build on this success by organizing an YSC club within the school. The YSC is designed as a school safety and youth leadership club that brings students and adults together to develop and implement projects that benefit the school and community. The guide outlines the general roles of the SRO as law-related educator, law enforcer, and law-related counselor. This is followed by an overview of CW as an ideal law-related education curriculum that can be used by SROs. CW is TCC’s curriculum, which has eight core lessons that teach students how to examine violence and law-related issues in the context of their schools and communities and then applying what they have learned to real-life circumstances. This guide instructs SROs in how to start a TCC program. The SROs strategy for gaining the support of stakeholders for the program focuses on school administrators, teachers and school staff, and parents/community members. This is followed by guidelines for adding the YSC club to the TCC/CW program. The guide concludes with suggestions for how a SRO can contact one of TCC’s national partners, which can help the SRO gain support for implementing programs in a specific school setting and providing resources and training needed to ensure a successful program. 5 notes and 7 resource sources/contacts