Kids - How Safe Are Our Schools?

"The best data on the very specific threat of school-associated violent death reveals that children face a one in a million chance of being killed at school." — Justice Policy Institute (JPI; a Washington, D. C. research group)

Who wants to take that one in a million chance? The idea of placing one's child in harm's way by sending her to school must make the blood run cold. How safe are our schools, anyway? That question has been debated for decades. A rash of highly publicized school shootings in the 1990s and the events of September 11, 2001, lend an urgency to the debate. What do the data show about violence in our schools?

There is no national system for reporting injuries or violence in schools. The chart above shows data presented in three annual reports prepared at the request of President Clinton in 1998 in response to the extreme school violence of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In 1999, about 52 million children were enrolled in grades K-12. That year, students aged 12 to 18 were victims of 186,000 non-fatal serious violent crimes and 880,000 non-fatal violent crimes at school.² The chart shows that between 1992 and 1999, schools got safer. The non-fatal victimization rate fell from 144 incidents per 1,000 students to 92. The chart shows that most school crimes involve theft.

The table shows the number of school-shooting deaths over six school years.³ The figures include suicides and killings of adults in schools, some of which occurred at the hands of other adults. The most widely publicized events of the 1990s took place in small-town America: Springfield, Oregon (2 students killed); Jonesboro, Arkansas (4 students killed); Pearl, Mississippi (2 students killed); West Paducah, Kentucky (3 students killed); Littleton, Colorado (14 students killed, including the killers). The Justice Policy Institute points out that 11 children die every two days from family violence (child abuse or neglect, at the hands of their parents or guardians), indicating that children are safer at school than at home. JPI calls school shootings "extremely idiosyncratic events and not part of any discernible trend."

School Year	Shooting Deaths
1992-93	55
1993-94	51
1994-95	20
1995-96	35
1996-97	25
1997-98	40

Of course, school safety is not all about shootings. The University of Michigan's annual violence survey shows that 12th graders were about as likely to report being injured with or without a weapon in school in 1976 as in 1996. Apparently responding to "get tough on crime" sentiments, though, Congress passed legislation to curb an alleged rising tide of school violence, starting with the 1986 Drug Free Schools and Communities Act. The 1994 Gun-Free Schools Act requires that each state receiving federal funds under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act have a state law requiring all local educational agencies in the state to expel from school for at least one year any student found bringing a firearm to school. In school year 1998-99, there were 3,371 expulsions, down 41% from the 5,724 expulsions reported for 1996-97 (the first year totals were reported).⁴ Critics of the reporting system contend there are far more guns in the hands of schoolchildren than have been reported by school principals.

Attempts to legislate school safety continue. One of the mandates of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act calls on states to identify "persistently dangerous" public schools (Unsafe School Choice Option). Students in those schools or any student who is the victim of a violent crime at any public school will be allowed to transfer to a "safe" school within the district or to a charter school, and the home district must pay transportation costs.

Do security devices make schools safer? We look at that issue next.

Sources: U.S. Departments of Education and Justice, Indicators of School Crime and Safety, 2001, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/crime2001/. Primary Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, 1992 to 1999. Mathews, Joe, "In the Classroom: Metal Detectors and a Search for Peace of Mind," Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2001, pB-2. Hayward, Ed, "Police official: Kids want school metal detectors," The Boston Herald, April 3, 2001 p014. Boston Deputy Superintendent's Memorandum, School Year 2002-2003, boston.k12.ma.us/dept/docs/oss_safety7.doc. Elizabeth Donohue, Vincent Schiraldi, and Jason Ziedenberg, School House Hype: School shootings and the real risks kids face in America, Justice Policy Institute, http://www.cjcj.org/jpi/schoolhouse.html. Information retrieved October 8, 2002.