School Performance - Death At School

Homicides/Suicides of Students at School: 1992-1999

Columbine, Littleton: Who will ever forget the name of this high school in this once obscure Colorado town? It was there, on April 20, 1999, that two heavily armed boys massacred 12 students and a teacher and wounded 23 others before killing themselves. There had been other school shootings, but this one was the bloodiest. The call for gun control legislation became urgent.

There is no national system for reporting on injuries or violence associated with schools. The chart shows data presented in three annual reports on school crime and safety. President Clinton requested the reports in 1998 in response to the extreme school violence of the late 1990s.

The chart shows numbers of homicides and suicides involving students that took place at school. The first report to the president combined numbers for 1992 through 1994, for a total of 76. From July 1, 1997, through June 30, 1998, of 60 school-associated violent deaths, 47 were homicides, 12 were suicides, and 1 involved a student killed by a police officer. In the next July-June period, of 47 school-associated violent deaths, 38 were homicides, 6 suicides, 2 were killed by police officers, and 1 death was unintentional.

After a rash of school shootings in the 1997-98 school year, the school violence rate went down the next year. This good news came during a decade when the male population aged 10-19 increased by 12% and experts predicted a wave of violent crimes committed by a new generation of youthful "super-predators." Youth homicide arrests actually fell to fewer than 1,000 in 1999 from more than 3,000 in 1993. The number of all homicides with child victims also declined between 1992 and 1999. The government data indicate that about 2% of child and adolescent homicides and suicides were school-associated

Characteristics of Student Deaths at School: 1994-1999

JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, published an independent study of school-related violence that used information collected from newspaper clipping services and police reports. The table shows some of the findings. Of a total of 253 people killed while attending or traveling to and from school between 1994 and 1999, 68% were students.

JAMA found that the average annual rate of school-associated violent deaths was 0.068 per 100,000 students, that multiple-victim events were more common in the late 1990s, and that fewer than 1% of homicides and suicides among school-aged children were school associated. Firearms were the chosen weapons in the majority of incidents. A homicidal event was most likely to involve an African-American male in a senior high school or a combined school in an urban area.

JAMA found a strong link between bullying and violent behavior. Perpetrators were more likely than their victims to have been bullied or to have been suicidal. We will look at bullying later in this discussion.

In the same issue of JAMA, Stevens et al. conclude: "Violence among adolescents and children remains an important problem in US schools. Although the rate of single-victim homicides (murders) in schools went down between 1994 and 1999, the number of events in which more than 1 victim was killed increased. Teenagers are 2 1/2 times more likely than adults to be victims of violence." Still, according to the U.S. Department of Education, school is one of the safest places that children can be.

The Secret Service has prepared a report for school officials in an effort to prevent Columbine-style violence at schools. Using the same methods they use to identify potential assassins, they report that the typical school shooter is neither spontaneous nor impulsive but has typically spent at least two days planning the event. Many shooters communicated their plan to others beforehand — as a result, students are being encouraged to report such threats. School violence is not a new phenomenon. The earliest incident examined by the Secret Service took place in 1974. In more than half of the cases studied, the target was someone other than a student.

Sources: Chart: U.S. Departments of Education and Justice. Indicators of School Crime and Safety, 2000. Online. Available: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/ April 24, 2002. Anderson, Mark, Joanne Kaufman et al. "School-Associated Violent Deaths in the United States, 1994-1999. JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association. 5 December 2001, p. 2695. "U.S.S.S. Safe School Initiative: An Interim Report on the Prevention of Targeted Violence in Schools." Online. Available: http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/. April 25, 2002.