School employee perpetrated CSA is a pervasive and untreated public health problem that effects 10% of PreK-12 students. There are few specific interventions that have been developed to prevent school employee CSA and none have been rigorously evaluated for reducing the number of child victims. This proposed study is the evaluation of a program for the primary prevention of school employee perpetrated sexual abuse, misconduct, and exploitation of students that places the responsibility of creating and maintaining safe cultures for children on adults. The prevention program ? Praesidium?s Armatus Learn to Protect ? was developed based upon root cause analysis of adult to child sexual abuse in youth serving organizations and offers the promise of a high impact prevention intervention. Praesidium Armatus Learn to Protect uses an eight-pronged approach to safety and teaches adults what policies must be in place, how to enforce policies, careful hiring and screening of new employees, addressing and stopping sexual and physical boundary crossing, acknowledging boundary crossings as gateways to sexual abuse, and monitoring staff who violate boundary requirements and codes of conduct with appropriate sanctions that reflect the seriousness of these actions. The proposed evaluation of Praesidium Armatus Learn to Protect ? a randomized nested mixed factorial design with individual-level and school level characteristics as nested factors within intervention dosage, the between-subjects component, and time ? employs multi-stage random cluster sampling from three insurance pools which include 95 school districts containing 407 elementary schools, 90 middle schools, 129 High Schools, 69 mixed grade schools, and 68 independent, charter, specialized schools will identify treatment and control participants. Schools will be randomly assigned to treatment (Armatus Learn to Protect process and training: Year two) and delayed intervention control (no process or training in year two; Armatus Learn to Protect in year 3). In year one, each sample school/district will be assessed for safety readiness to include current policies, training, hiring/screening practices, and internal communication systems. Pre-post measures include primary outcome indicators (number of police, Title IX, and insurance claim reports of school employee sexual abuse of students, staff self-report of boundary behaviors,) and secondary indicators of propensity for risky behaviors (staff attitudes toward boundaries between staff and students, bystander efficacy and intent to report). This study has the potential to provide evidence that could make Praesidium Armatus Learn to Protect the first evidence-based program for prevention of adult perpetrated CSA of students. 1
School employee perpetrated sexual abuse of students is a pervasive problem with implications for public health, safety, and social welfare; however this problem has not been confronted in PreK-12 schools and there are few attempts at prevention interventions and no rigorous studies of prevention efficacy. Praesidium Armatus Learn to Protect is a promising primary prevention program which uses an eight-pronged approach to safety and teaches adults what policies must be in place, how to enforce policies, careful hiring and screening of new employees, addressing and stopping sexual and physical boundary crossing, acknowledging boundary crossings as gateways to sexual abuse, and monitoring staff who violate boundary requirements and codes of conduct with appropriate sanctions that reflect the seriousness of these actions. The proposed evaluation of Praesidium Armatus Learn to Protect ? a randomized nested mixed factorial design with individual-level and school level characteristics as nested factors within intervention dosage, the between- subjects component, and time ? has the potential to provide evidence that could make Praesidium Armatus Learn to Protect the first evidence-based program for prevention of adult perpetrated CSA of students. 1
