Abstract
The Wisconsin School Violence and Bullying Prevention Study, funded by the National Institutes of Justice (NIJ), was a two-year case-control study in 24 Wisconsin middle schools (11 experimental; 13 control) seeking to understand the impact of a comprehensive bullying prevention program on bullying victimization rates. Participating schools’ bullying prevention programs were assessed at baseline and project-end using the Wisconsin Bullying Prevention Program Assessment Tool (BPPAT). This self-assessment tool, developed prior to the start of the research project, was developed by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and partners throughout Wisconsin. The BPPAT is an open-source 42-item assessment tool across 9 topic areas focused on policies and procedures with minimal financial and logistical burdens towards implementation. By design, it acknowledges wide variance across schools and districts for current practices and provides guidance, going forward, for program improvement. In the accompanying study, experimental schools were instructed to, with technical assistance, enhance their program by filling gaps identified through their completion of the BPPAT over two school years. A significant enhancement resulted among all schools, experimental and control, between 2015 and 2017 with a spill-over effect due to data collection requirements reducing programmatic differences between groups. Experimental schools reported significant declines in verified incidents of bullying with a non-significant decline among control schools. From this project, researchers determined that (1) schools are able to make program improvements in a short time period and (2) this concerted, and largely non-prescriptive, effort can have a positive and measurable impact on bullying victimization at this age group. Broader implications for the BPPAT and its use are preliminary and next steps are discussed and recommendations made.
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