Preventing School Violence and Promoting School Safety: Contemporary Scholarship Advancing Science, Practice, and Policy

School safety is essential for children and youth in schools to learn and experience a positive developmental trajectory. School safety research featured herein intentionally draws upon multiple fields of study, including, but not limited to education; special education; school, counseling, clinical and community psychology; social work; juvenile justice; and sociology. The articles in this special issue draw on many theoretical frameworks, considering developmental theories, social-ecological and cognitive-ecological perspectives, information processing, normative behavior theory, social-identity, social-transactional processes, and social networking models. This overview of the special issue synthesizes and integrates findings from these articles across five areas: (a) conceptual foundations, (b) centering race and ethnicity in school safety, (d) school resource officers’ training and roles, (d) discipline and school climate, and (e) bullying and peer victimization. Many of these articles leverage scholarship across topics such as providing beneficial schoolwide systems of discipline, promoting positive school climates, addressing bullying, fostering authoritative models in schools, facilitating culturally responsive schools, and understanding mental health needs of students. Impact Statement This paper provides a synthesis of articles featured in the special topic section focused on preventing school violence and promoting school safety. Key implications for practice and policy include enabling stakeholders to understand the current state of knowledge in the field, empowering agents of change for broader policy and programming, and advancing research towards new understandings.