Were schools ever “safe”?

by Dr. Christine Smith

Merriam-Webster defines the word “safe” as: secure from threat of danger, harm, or loss. With what appears to be an increase of gun violence on school property across the US, “school safety” is high on the priority list of school and public officials. And rightfully so. In the fall 2019, the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) reported that almost 51 million children were enrolled in a US public elementary or secondary school and an additional 4.7 million were enrolled in private schools. How do we make schools a safe place for the almost 56 million students? The bigger question is: were schools ever safe?

In the United States, the incidents of school shootings are very alarming. However, this is unfortunately not a recent issue. According to the School Shooting Safety Compendium by the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS), there were 2,069 incidents of school shootings from January 1, 1970-June 20, 2022. The CHDS database “documents when a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time of day, or day of week”. Where exactly the 2,069 incidents occurred varies and doesn’t point to a specific trend. In the 70s and 80s, a majority of school shootings occurred inside a school. The next decade saw a shift and incidents outside on school property became more common with the 2010s experiencing more than double outside events than inside. Once students leave school property, they are still susceptible to school-related shootings. During the entire reporting period, 101 incidents happened on a school bus with most occurring 2019-2022.

Further examination of the CHDS data shows that fatalities from school shootings have increased since 1970. The fatalities are any death that occurs on property as a result of the school shooting incident and is not limited to students or staff. In the 1970s there were 60 fatalities, 73 in the 1980s, and 174 in the 1990s. The 2000s saw a decrease in fatalities from the previous decade with CDHS reporting 96, but the subsequent decade of the 2010s saw 162 deaths. Disturbingly, CDHS reports 119 fatalities in only two and half years into the current decade. When compared to the FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted Annual Report, the number of school shooting fatalities seems even more worrisome. In 2018, 52 officers were killed by a firearm and there were 51 fatalities related to a school incident.

The number of students and school staff far surpasses that of police officers (665,380 in May 2021 as per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics) and not all school fatalities are of students or staff. Thus, the fatality rate is not comparable. Yet, one would expect the difference between the two to be much larger as one group are highly trained police personnel out in the field that most likely were carrying weapons and the other are individuals in a place where children learn.

Not all school shootings end in death. The CHDS database indicates that over 2,600 individuals were wounded or received minor injuries with the 1980s having more in these categories than the 1990s and 2000s (298 and 276 respectively). Even the 207 reports of bodily harm in the 1970s is concerning despite it being the lowest decade of the database. Beyond school shootings, there is a plethora of other activities that make schools “unsafe”. NCES reports that from 1992- 2019, the rate of nonfatal victimization in a school building, on school property, on a school bus, and going to or from school went from 181.5 per 1,000 students ages 12-18 in 1992 down to 30 in 2019. “Nonfatal victimizations” includes, but is not limited to rape, theft, robbery, sexual, simple and aggravated assaults. Although a decrease in these areas is a positive trend, there were 764,600 total nonfatal victimizations “in schools” in 2019 which includes 525,300 classified as violent.

It is important to recognize that not all intended unsafe acts come to fruition. In 2014, the National Police Foundation (now known as the National Policing Institute– NPI) began collecting information for the Averted School Violence (ASV) database. A 2021 report drawing from this database indicated that from 1999-2021, 171 averted school violence incidents were found by this project. Even with school violence incidents being averted, not all are and the data make it impossible to say with confidence that in any decade from 1970 until 2020, schools were “secure from threat of danger, harm, or loss”. One cannot guarantee that a tornado will not cause a tree to fall on power lines cutting access to a school with sheltering students or that a norovirus outbreak will occur sickening staff and students. We should hope that one day, we can say schools in the US are “secure from threat of danger, harm, or loss”. Until that day, we all must work together to make schools safer environments for all that learn and work there. As such, we should not be having discussions about how to make schools safe as that is not plausible. The question that must be asked is: how do we make schools safer?

Stay tuned for other blogs on this topic at https://ny-kids.org/blog

Dr. Christine Smith is the Assistant Dean for Academic Programs, Partnerships and Accreditation, Executive Director for Student Success, University Certification Officer and Assistant Service Professor at the School of Education, University at Albany-SUNY.