Jurupa Valley School Violence Project

The goal of the Jurupa Valley School Violence program is to improve school safety by providing parents, students, teachers and other stakeholders with the tools they need to recognize, respond quickly to, and help prevent acts of violence. Project activities will be implemented at the 24 schools within Jurupa Unified School District (JUSD). This district was chosen due to current partnerships for programming that addresses the root causes of violence and district demographics that align with OJP’s priority consideration to serve in areas historically underserved, marginalized, adversely affected by inequity, and disproportionately impacted by crime, violence, and victimization. JUSD is also a Specialty Mental Health Provider with the values and capacity to expand supportive services for students in a meaningful and profound way. This is not only an opportunity to create increased safety in local schools, but to build the capacity of community members, parents, school/district staff and other partners to implement and sustain effective violence prevention initiatives.

Project objectives include: 1) Improve school climate by training staff and educating students on LGBTQIA+ issues aligned with SB 857, mental/behavioral health, substance use prevention and/or conflict mediation; 2) Train all new hires for school sites with Trauma-Informed Care and De-escalation modules; 3) Create an environmental of physical, social, and psychological safety at school sites by offering Trust-Based Relational Intervention programming; 4) Conduct violence prevention educational campaigns created by and for youth through Jurupa Youth United and disseminated community-wide via Healthy Jurupa Valley; 5) Increase social emotional learning to prevent violence by offering peer-to-peer mentoring services, NCTI Crossroads programming, and offering additional staffing resources for violence interrupters and SEL programs, and; 6) Provide training for SROs in JUSD on mental health and de-escalation to improve positive responses to student behavior.