Project REAL has had the capacity to reach more than 50% of Nevada’s high schools
with our free REALSafe relationship-violence prevention workshop since October 2022.
The workshop only requires one-block or two-standard class periods with each senior,
yet our greatest challenge is simply getting schools to carve out that time and book us.
For October’s Domestic Violence Prevention Month we built a searchable database of how many seniors
at each Nevada high school are projected to experience relationship violence during their lives,
and how many could potentially avoid that future if we’re able to deliver REALSafe.
It’s our hope that this tool makes the scale impossible to ignore and gives administrators & department chairs
a reason to prioritize those one or two periods before the end of the 2026-27 school year.
Two projected rates of anticipated relationship violence victimization are examinable in our tool:
Similarly, the last school year of enrollment data available to us (via the federally operated National Center for Education Statistics) was the 2024-25 school year, and we knowingly employed methods and formulas to project enrollment of high school seniors at each school that would result in projecting lower-than-actual class-sizes in the majority of cases.
Making lower prevalence & enrollment estimates were both intentional choices.
The numbers that appear in the conservative model are already so staggering that it can be hard to believe. We therefore worked to ensure that people new to the issue of relationship violence and its prevalence would have little-to-no room to mistake the database tool as overstating the likely occurrence of the issue among seniors at each high school (without intervention).
In the database, you’ll see the number of anticipated students expected to avoid dangerous relationships as a direct result of Project REAL’s workshop, using a 75% impact rate. That rate was established over 5 years, with more than 6,000 voluntary student survey submissions showing the rate at which students opt in to read the academic content on relationship violence. While longitudinal data is not currently available, we use that impact rate with a high degree of confidence because students are choosing to study the material willingly, without coercive factors such as graded assignments or extra credit: they have opted-in for no other reason than self-defense and self-enrichment. We posit that this voluntary engagement produces lasting knowledge and a newly established vigilance toward relationship violence, helping students avoid future relationships with a high potential for physical violence or coercive control.
The federal enrollment data we used from the National Center for Education Statistics / ELSI to create the tool only listed enrollment by male and female. It did not provide a separate enrollment category for nonbinary, transgender, or other students who fall outside a historical male/female classifications. Those students are not excluded intentionally from our work or service. The limitation reflects the structure of the source data available for this analysis.
Dealing with a sensitive topic like relationship violence requires room for almost no errors. Given that, we’ve produced a report (available below) which details the processes, thinking, strategies, and various methodologies that went into the creation of REALSafe and this year’s database tool.
That being said, we’re well aware we live in an age of ‘I’m not reading all that.’
Understanding that both time and attention is at a premium these days, we’ve provided the following summary with the caveat of a simple request: that if you have a question or critique based on the summary, please know that there is like an answer or defense in the pages of details we’ve provided.
As explained in detail in the full report:
