High School Students With Emotional and Behavioral Disorders Perceptions of School Climate

Students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBDs), particularly those in high school, present myriad challenges for educators. Although research suggests that students with EBDs experience schooling differently than their peers, few studies have examined differences in perceptions of school climate. School climate is a multidimensional construct consisting of students’ perceptions of physical and social school environments. To address this gap, we leveraged school climate data from more than 350,000 high school students, including more than 5,000 with or at risk for EBDs, in Georgia. We estimated a series of multilevel models and found that students with or at risk for EBDs consistently report more negative perceptions of school climate than their peers across all school climate domains. We also examined whether individualized education program (IEP) services affected perceptions for students with EBDs, finding more positive perceptions for some domains for students with IEP services for EBDs compared with students with EBDs, but no IEP services. Implications and limitations are then discussed.