Revisions Memo

CDC CPTED Study Revisions and Clarifications

7.27.11

• How much time do you estimate districts will spend recruiting schools and classrooms? 

The ICF Macro Recruitment Specialist will be responsible for recruiting school sites and selecting classrooms. Districts are only contacted to obtain permission to recruit the school sites directly and to garner their support for the study. School recruitment packets are sent by way of the district office as a way to inform districts about our planned communications with the school sites. Although districts are asked to convey their support for the study and encourage school participation, and may opt to inform the schools about the study directly, there are no formal recruitment expectations. We anticipate that district involvement will be minimal.

• How much time will schools spend providing advance documents and ensuring access for evaluator teams during site visits?  Do school policies require them to provide an escort for visitors?  If this time burden is more than minimal, it should be included in the hours estimate.

The expectation for schools to provide advance documents is also minimal. School administrative staff will only be asked to respond to occasional telephone and e-mail correspondence and to provide class rosters for health and physical education classes that include the teacher’s name, grade level and class enrollment totals. The ICF Macro Recruitment Specialist will use this information to complete the Summary of School Arrangements Form (Appendix R) for each sampled school, which records information about the selected class including the grade level, teacher’s name, class type, number of students, and class period start and end times. Recognizing that that minor administrative support tasks (e.g., responding to telephone calls, printing and e-mailing class lists, delivering packets to teachers) may, collectively, impose burden on staff, we have adjusted our burden estimate to include an additional 25 total hours, or 30 minutes per school site.

The CPTED School Assessment (CSA) process generally imposes minimal burden on school personnel, whose involvement is typically limited to providing access, on an as needed basis, to areas of the school campus that are inaccessible to visitors during school hours (e.g., a locked auditorium). However, schools may have protocols governing non-school personnel visits to the campus that would require CSA Site Assessors to be accompanied by an escort while on school grounds. To allow for this possibility and the additional burden that it might impose, we have adjusted our burden estimate to include another 350 total hours of burden, or 7 hours per school site. This allotment would cover the entire length of the CSA assessment period if a school staff member, most likely janitorial staff or a facilities manager, were to accompany the site team throughout the school day. This is not a requirement or expectation of the CPTED Site Assessment team, and may only be relevant for a small number of school sites with these designated policies.

Information reflecting these changes can be found in section A12. Estimates of Annualized Burden Hours Costs (A12A. Annualized Burden Hours and A12B. Costs to Respondents).

 

• Concern about duplicating efforts with the survey for administrators:  Have you consulted with the Department of Education and other agencies on this ICR to see if they already have the information you need?  (For example, the National Center for Education Statistics provides the Common Core of Data and conducts the School Survey on Crime and Safety, and the ED Office of Civil Rights also collects crime and safety information on an annual basis.)

The CPTED School Study involves a point-in-time observation of the physical school environment that will be analyzed in relation to students’ reported perceptions of safety and fear, and the incidence of violence-related events and disciplinary actions with the same approximate timeframe. To reliably assess the relationship between the climate of schools and the environmental characteristics of the campus, it is imperative that data sources all closely conform to the same time period. Archival data sources, such as the Common Core of Data or the School Survey on Crime and Safety, experience a lag between the timing of data collection and when data can be compiled, processed, and made available for release at the national level. All data requested on the School Site Data Form records incidents that have occurred either during the recently concluded 2010-2011 school year, or combines data from the 2010-2011 school year with the first few months of the present academic year. Data covering this same timeframe is not available from national sources.  We intend to initiate an interagency collaboration with the National Center for Education Statistics (Department of Education) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Department of Justice) on studies on crime and safety in schools.

• Similarly, on p. B9-10, you note, “School-Based Data Collectors may assist with form completion by pre-filling all data that is available through public sources or written materials and records that may be accessed through the school prior to e-mailing the form.”  Please elaborate on what information may be available from other sources, records, etc.  If information is available from other sources, is it necessary to include these items on your survey? 

The purpose of pre-filling information on the School Site Data Form is to minimize data reporting burden to a minor degree, while still allowing for school personnel to verify the accuracy of information gathered through external sources. The information that can be pre-filled on the data collection form is minimal, and only includes the school name, address, Principal’s name, the starting and ending date for the 2011-2012 academic school year, and information on the physical structure of the school campus (i.e., original year of construction, modifications or renovations), when available. School administrators will be asked to review the pre-filled information for accuracy and to provide corrections as needed. 

• Is the purpose of this collection to validate the CSA tool and assess association between environmental characteristics and actual and perceived violence/fear in Atlanta schools?  You also mention that you plan to formulate guidance for schools on environmental design - is that a long-term goal, or do you plan to develop guidance and/or policy recommendations based on the results of this study?

The purpose of the CPTED Study is (a) to assess the validity of the CPTED School Assessment (CSA) tool, which has been developed under a prior contract, but has not yet been validated in schools, and (b) to provide information on the relationship between features of the physical school environment and student perceptions and behaviors with respect to the safety of their schools. School districts and school sites will each receive an aggregate summary of CSA scores and responses to survey items measuring perceived violence, safety, and school climate on their campuses as a benefit of study participation. The study team will provide CDC with an aggregate summary of the distribution of scores, along with codebooks, data cleaning plans, and separate, clean electronic databases of the CPTED Assessment, student survey, and school site data forms. The data will be provided to CDC to support further analyses.

The study scope does not include formulation of specific guidance to schools on environmental design, although this may be a long-term goal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC), Division of Violence Prevention (DVP). Specifically, the validation of the CSA tool may establish a foundation for future use of the tool to help schools redesign features of a school environment to improve safety and change policies and procedures related to using the school environment. This does not, however, fall under the purview of the present study.