Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ+) students, LGBTQ+ staff and LGBTQ+ parents report schools can be unsafe and unwelcoming environments. Yet few studies have explored LGBTQ+ student, LGBTQ+ staff and LGBTQ+ parent perceptions of the school climate simultaneously or adopted person-centered perspectives. The present study sought to identify LGBTQ+ related strategies adopted by schools, and whether these were differentially related to perceptions of school safety and community. Data were collected in 2021 via online sampling of the current Australian school (1,937) students, (124) staff and (75) parents. Four distinct inclusion strategy profiles were identified via latent class analysis: Comprehensive Inclusion, Curriculum & Pedagogical Inclusion, Extracurricular Inclusion and Limited Inclusion. Just under half (48.2%) of schools lacked LGBTQ+ strategies, with participants from these schools reporting greater safety concerns. Our findings suggest that curriculum and pedagogical strategies are likely the most effective and should be a key focus for improving the school climate. Schools that employed LGBTQ+ affirming practices and included LGBTQ+ resources and activities, like Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs), saw improved perceptions of safety and community.

UNASSIGNED: The increase in school violence following the COVID-19 pandemic underscores the need for schools to adopt a multilevel whole-school approach. This study examines a national program designed by the Chilean Ministry of Education, in collaboration with universities, as part of the Ministry\'s Educational Reactivation Plan, aimed at improving school climate management across Chile.
UNASSIGNED: The \"Learning to Live Together Program\" (LLT) was implemented across all 16 regions of Chile, focusing on establishing school climate networks, providing direct intensive university technical assistance, and enhancing professional development and training. The feasibility, acceptability, and appropriability of the LLT program were assessed through a survey distributed to 1,561 staff members from 783 schools. Participants responded to a comprehensive set of instruments measuring acceptability, appropriability, feasibility, attitudes toward implementation, fidelity, and initial perceived results.
UNASSIGNED: The results indicate high initial adoption rates and significant improvements in the assessed dimensions. The enhancement of school climate practices and strengthening school collaboration networks were of considerable relevance.
UNASSIGNED: These findings support the efficacy of the multilevel whole-school approach as a viable strategy for Latin American countries, providing critical data for educational and governmental decision-making. Furthermore, this study provides evidence that these outcomes may be applicable to the implementation of similar policies in different contexts and countries.

BACKGROUND: The school climate concept has been promising, but has long-standing critiques that have not been adequately addressed to date. The School as a Protective Factor approach represents one attempt to offer a new approach that builds on and extends beyond the concept of school climate while addressing previously identified limitations.
UNASSIGNED: The School as a Protective Factor approach offers a new framework for conceptualizing, measuring, and establishing protective school social and learning environments that co-promote academic achievement and student health in schools, especially student mental health and substance use/abuse prevention. This new framework includes clear definitions, explicit goals, firmly established constructs, validated measures, and an intentionally parsimonious approach that prioritizes the implementation of well-established, high-impact constructs. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR SCHOOL HEALTH POLICY, PRACTICE, AND EQUITY: The School as a Protective Factor approach presents a simple, easy-to-use means of ensuring a school social environment that meets the developmental, academic, and health needs of all children and adolescents while maximizing protection across a range of desired outcomes. Perhaps most importantly, it does so in a manner that is manageable and easily integrated into every aspect of schooling, resonates with the practical experience of school personnel, and includes brief, effective, and free measurement tools.

BACKGROUND: The conceptual framework for School as a Protective Factor approach was presented in a companion article in this issue of the journal. The current article describes the validation of the School as a Protective Factor-Brief (SPF-Brief), a 13-item survey measuring the 3 core constructs and 13 defining characteristics of this framework.
METHODS: The SPF-Brief was validated through 2 studies. The developmental study used a longitudinal design including 1349 participants who completed surveys over 5 semesters, while the validation study used a cross-sectional design with 2775 participants. Both studies included middle and high school students. Factor analysis, growth model analysis, criterion-related validation, and outcome analysis were employed.
RESULTS: Analyses provided strong evidence supporting the reliability and validity of the instrument and conceptual framework. Higher SPF-Brief scores were associated with higher math grades, English grades, and quality of life, as well as lower rates of anxiety, depression, conduct disorder, alcohol, e-cigarette, tobacco, and cannabis use. Effect size estimates ranged from moderate to strong.
CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest the utility of the SPF-Brief instrument and the School as a Protective Factor framework. Together, they may offer advantages to the traditional school climate approach.

Schools are often encouraged to foster a positive climate to reduce adolescent violence, but evidence on the effectiveness of this approach varies significantly. This study investigates the roots of this variation by testing alternative hypotheses about how positive school-level climate and school-level student friendship network density interact to shape adolescent violence perpetration. Research on informal social control and network closure suggests that the violence-reducing association of positive school climate will be enhanced among schools where students are more densely tied through their friendships. Research on youth conflict and subversion of control suggests the opposite. These hypotheses are tested with data from Waves I-II of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (n = 11,771; 49% Female; Age mean = 15.04, SD = 1.60). Consistent with the conflict/subversion hypothesis, analyses indicate that the inverse association between positive school climate and adolescent violence is only evident among schools with a very low density of friendship ties. Strikingly, however, there is evidence that a more positive school climate is associated with increases in violence among youth attending schools with a high density of friendship ties. These findings suggest that efforts to reduce violence by fostering cohesion among youth in their schools and other social contexts can be undermined by youth network processes.

There is evidence that promoting school physical activity (PSPA) benefits children and adolescents, but little is understood about how this promotion may relate to academic achievement and school climate across varying levels of socioeconomic status (SES). Hence, the study aimed to address this knowledge gap by examining two main objectives: (1) determining the association between PSPA and academic achievement and school climate according to schools\' SES and (2) exploring the potential mediating role of PSPA in the relationship between schools\' SES and academic achievement and school climate. This cross-sectional study at the school level focused on 4,990 schools (including public, subsidized, and private schools) that participated in the National Educational Study 2018 (Chile), which was applied to primary schoolchildren (4th grade, aged 8-10 years). Schools were divided into non-PSPA (n = 4,280) and PSPA (n = 710) during the year 2018. Changes in academic achievement from 2017 to 2018 and school climate were considered. PSPA was associated with improvements in maths (low-SES OR: 1.80, p < 0.001) and reading (middle-SES OR: 1.45, p = 0.029; low-SES OR: 1.47, p < 0.001). The indirect effect (IE) showed that PSPA partially mediated the relationship between SES and academic achievement in reading (IE = 1.017; SE = 0.12; 95%CI, -1.27, -0.77), maths (IE = -1.019; SE = 0.12; 95%CI, -1.25, -0.78), and school climate (IE = -0.46; SE = 0.52; 95%CI, -0.56, -0.35). In conclusion, PSPA was linked to positive changes in academic achievement, especially among low SES, and PSPA presented a potential mediating role in the relationship between SES of schools and academic achievement and school climate.

Studies on the influence of family and school climates on the relationships between sibling and school bullying victimization and children\'s subjective well-being (SWB) in Indonesia are still scarce. The aims of this study are to investigate family and school climates as protective factors for children from the negative consequences of bullying by siblings or other children in school on SWB. The study used the third-wave data of the Children\'s Worlds survey that was collected in Indonesia in October 2017. Participants of the study were children aged 10 and 12 years old (N = 15,604; 49.8% girls, 50.2% boys, Mean age = 10.55; SD = 1.17). There are four questionnaires used in the study: five items measure bullying at home and at school, the Children\'s Worlds Subjective Well-Being Scale, six items measure family climate, and four items measure school climate. Data were analyzed using R and the lavaan library for multilevel structural equation modeling, using full information maximum likelihood (FIML) for missing data and robust maximum likelihood (ML) estimation. Results showed that children who experienced bullying incidents, both at home by siblings and at school, predicted lower levels of SWB. School climate and family climate predicted higher levels of SWB. Results also showed that school bullying interacted significantly with school climate, while sibling bullying interacted significantly with family climate. Schools with students that reported more positive levels of family climate also reported higher levels of SWB. Students from public schools reported higher levels of SWB, which is unexpected.

UNASSIGNED: Many previous studies reported that autistic children have fewer social connections. Yet, recent studies also show that autistic children more often feel lonely in school than allistic (i.e. non-autistic) children. This outcome seems to go against the traditional view that autistic children do not desire to have social connections. Therefore, this study aimed to find out how autistic and allistic children feel about their social connections. We included 47 autistic and 52 neurodiverse-allistic children from two special education primary schools (aged 8-13 years). We tested their social connections and loneliness in school, through a new approach. This new approach includes questionnaires, and sensors for tracking social contacts on playgrounds during school breaks. We found that allistic children felt more loneliness when they spent little time in social contacts during school breaks. Yet, autistic children felt more loneliness when their peers did not like to play with them. For these autistic children, feelings of loneliness may go beyond face-to-face contacts. Being liked as part of a peer group was key. Understanding differences in children\'s needs can lead to a more effective design for a welcoming school climate.

Families indicate that fit and safety are priorities in school selections. It is not clear, however, whether school racial composition shapes families\' perceptions of anticipated school belonging. Using a survey experiment with students and parents actively choosing NYC schools, I find that families expressed racialized judgments of belonging. Among schools that were otherwise similar, respondents anticipated feeling most welcome in schools with the highest proportion of their racial group and least welcome in schools with the lowest portions of their ingroup. Families\' race-based assessments of school quality could be a key mechanism to explain racial segregation in school choice programs.

This research investigated the relationships between school climates and bullying behaviors in Chinese adolescents, and tested the mediating effect of prosocial tendency according to the seesaw effect. School climates were operationalized using three constructs: subjective diversity of student development goals, teacher support, and peer trust. Bullying behaviors included traditional (i.e., physical, nonphysical, and relational) and cyber bullying behaviors. We recruited 538 adolescents from three schools in Beijing, China (286 girls, 252 boys; average age = 12.47) and asked them to fill out the surveys measuring school climates and prosocial tendency at the outset and to report school bullying behaviors three months later. The results showed that subjective diversity of student development goals and peer trust were directly associated with less cyber bullying behavior. Moreover, teacher support and peer trust were indirectly associated with less traditional bullying behaviors via prosocial tendency. Our findings extend the existing literature on the relationships between school climates and bullying behaviors by incorporating different types of bullying behaviors, concentrating on Chinese adolescents from a cultural viewpoint, and tapping into the underlying mechanism via revealing prosocial tendency as a mediator. Theoretical and empirical contributions of this study, as well as practical implications are discussed.