UMR professor using $2 million grant to research solutions to school shootings

Abby Sharpe, Post-Bulletin, Rochester, Minn.
·3 min read
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Apr. 8—ROCHESTER — Angie Mejia has been interested for years in finding solutions to school violence but was catalyzed by the

shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas,

on May 24, 2022.

"This is something that we need to explore further, because it's just becoming an American pattern," she said. "Violence has become a thread in the American tapestry. It's everywhere."

Now, the University of Minnesota Rochester assistant professor is part of a team of researchers awarded a $2 million federal grant to develop effective strategies to prevent gun-based violence in schools.

Mejia, who is also a civic engagement scholar at UMR, is the principal investigator supervising the Minnesota aspects of the project. The University of Illinois Chicago is also involved in the grant project, which is funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance in support of the STOP School Violence Program.

The team received the grant in the fall after a couple years of discussion about the importance of finding solutions to school safety.

"We applied and I guess they liked what we had to say. It's student-led, it's community-led. We saw the youth walking out on this," Mejia said, referring to the day

Uvalde students' walked out

in protest of gun violence, 11 months after the school shooting at Robb Elementary. "It is now the time for youth-led solutions. They're the ones who are living this reality."

Lourdes High School will be involved in the three-year project. While the Illinois site is more quantitative and survey based, the research in Rochester will be qualitative, relying on focus groups and community-based methodologies, like photo elicitation, performative ethnography and other arts-based research approaches.

"The research is to understand the communities' — whether it's staff's, parents', childrens', school resource officers' — perspectives around safety, community safety, school safety," Mejia said. "We are also hoping to do an evaluation of schools, a behavioral threat assessment, responses to threats and practices around keeping the school safe and secure."

Cradle 2 Career works as the community liaison between the project and Lourdes. Kelsey Duffy is the organization's director of data and research and is facilitating the data collection processes.

"How do you engage students? How do you engage parents in driving some of those solutions? Also, in informing our perspective, what does that look like on the ground?" Duffy said. "We're thinking of using some pretty innovative techniques."

Prioritizing student-led and community-based approaches ensures that the firsthand knowledge of students, parents and staff leads the research to solutions that would work locally, based on the issues and concerns presented.

The end goal is to provide a physical solution to mitigate violence. Currently, the plan is to develop an app-based technology for schools.

"At Lourdes High School, I loved that they (said), 'We want to teach our children resilience skills and to be empowered,'" Mejia said. "The methods that we're using are to actually understand where we can find those fountains of resilience within our youth to become more empowered.

"Now, I feel there's a lot of promise. When everybody walked out of school, I'm like, yeah, they're ready. They're ready to go ahead and tell us what is needed."