UROP Research Mentor Project Submission Portal: Submission #1186

Overall Research Project Description This research investigates how institutional policies and practices in K–12 schools shape hate-motivated incidents, with an emphasis on their unequal influence on Black, Latinx, Asian American, Native American, gender non-conforming, and LGBTQ+ students. We assess how school, district, and state-level policies and institutional responses affect bias-motivated behaviors as they influence racial, ethnic, and gender minority students. Our overarching goal is to generate actionable knowledge to reduce intergroup conflict and lessen inequality in the academic and social outcomes of students. Two questions frame this work: (1) How do institutional factors—including anti-discrimination policies, civic inclusion, educational opportunities, and structural factors—shape patterns of bias-motivated victimization? (2) Do policies and institutional responses mitigate disparities in victimization and related outcomes? By merging a restricted version of the School Crime Supplement of the National Crime Victimization Survey with external data, this study will quantitatively examine how structural and legislative inequalities at school, district, and state levels predict students’ experiences of hate and its consequences. In other words, this research examines how hate crimes, bias-motivated harassment, and identity-based bullying in U.S. K–12 schools reflect and reproduce broader forms of social, political, and economic inequality—particularly with respect to civic inclusion, policy protections and enforcement, educational opportunity, and the structural environment. This research will also incorporate qualitative data through interviews with school officials. This mixed-methods approach will provide a more comprehensive understanding by pairing quantitative trends with qualitative insight into how personnel respond to anti-discrimination efforts—revealing barriers, contextual nuances, and challenges not yet captured in existing datasets.