Schools safe as ever despite spate of shootings, scares

Greg Toppo | USA TODAY

In the 11 months since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., another school attack or safety scare seems to unfold almost weekly.

Three students -- two 17-year-olds and a 16-year-old -- were shot and wounded Wednesday near a Pittsburgh high school as they walked to their car after classes. A 20-year-old man armed with an AK-47-style rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition entered an elementary school in Decatur, Ga., on Aug. 20 and fired a few rounds but surrendered before anyone was injured. A 45-year-old teacher was shot to death, allegedly by a 12-year-old student, at Nevada's Sparks Middle School on Oct. 21. The next day, a Massachusetts high school math teacher was stabbed to death with a box cutter, allegedly by a 14-year-old student.

It'd be easy to conclude that school has never been a more dangerous place, but for the USA's 55 million K-12 students and 3.7 million teachers, statistics tell another story: Despite two decades of high-profile shootings, school increasingly has become a safer place.

The trend is playing out against a backdrop of jitters over school security that have accumulated since Newtown. Schools in some states are urged to issue concealed handgun permits to teachers and buy them bulletproof whiteboards and desk calendars. An Ohio company sells a $100 Kevlar insert it says will make any backpack bulletproof. Educators attend training sessions in which they're advised to charge armed attackers.

"I think (the concern) has to do with the psychological impact of some of these incidents," says David Esquith, director of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Safe and Healthy Students, which oversees school security. "(The shootings) are so upsetting and traumatic, it reinforces a perception that schools are experiencing a spike in violence and victimization, when in fact they're not."

By nearly every measure, safety has improved and violence has dropped for students and teachers, according to recent findings issued jointly by the Justice Department and Education Department:

•Since 1992, the rate of "victimization," which includes violent crimes such as assault and rape as well as non-violent crimes such as robbery, purse-snatching and pickpocketing, has plummeted, from 181.5 incidents per 1,000 students to 49.2 per 1,000 in 2011, the latest complete year for which statistics are available.

•Overall, the number of reported "non-fatal victimizations" has dropped by 71%, from 4.3 million in 1992 to 1.2 million in 2011.

•During the 2009-2010 school year, researchers found 1,396 homicides with victims ages 5 to 18. Of those, only 19 took place at school. During the 2010 calendar year, only three of the reported 1,456 youth suicides took place at school.

•Though rare, homicides, suicides and deaths involving intervention by police at school or on the way to or from school dropped 46%, from 57 in the 1992-1993 school year to 31 in the 2010-2011 school year. Over 19 years, researchers counted 863 deaths, or about 45 per year.

Federal data don't yet include 2011-2012 or 2012-13, when 27 died in the Sandy Hook shooting, including gunman Adam Lanza.



"Things are better, but they're not fine," Esquith says. "The level of violence and victimization that we're seeing is unacceptable."

Researchers attribute the decline in school violence to a handful of measures:

•Heightened awareness of a school's culture, including how safe students feel there and how well they get along with teachers and classmates.

•A renewed focus on bullying and mental health issues, with teachers trained to spot troubled kids and intervene before bullying incidents get out of hand.

•Simple security steps such as locking exterior school doors, requiring all visitors to check in at the front office and offering students easy, anonymous ways to report classmates' threats.

"What we're learning is (that) what works is multifaceted," Esquith says. "You have to address things at both the organizational level and the individual level."

Deadly shootings such as Sandy Hook are "extremely rare," says Jean Ajamie, director of school safety and prevention for the Arizona Department of Education.

Sandy Hook intensified a national debate about arming educators that continues in several states. Last month, a rural school district in Weld County, Colo., said it would allow teachers at an isolated school to carry concealed weapons. Superintendent Rick Mondt says first-responders are a 20-minute drive from Briggsdale School. "Twenty minutes is a long time," he told KUSA-TV. Four of 18 teachers plan to carry the weapons.

Ajamie says that's an overreaction that threatens to ruin the "welcoming nature of school," a key to kids' well-being. "We can't make our schools into fortresses — they can't be prisons. If you look at the frequency of these (shootings), it's not what we need to do."

Esquith says the Obama administration believes arming teachers is "not a good idea, not something we support."

Ken Trump, a longtime school safety consultant based in Cleveland, says many solutions that pop up in the wake of attacks such as Sandy Hook turn out to be costly and dangerous. "People are looking for the 'wow,' but they're not looking at the 'how,' " he says.

Trump recalls hearing from a Wisconsin police officer last spring that teachers there were being trained to urge kids to keep a can of soup in their desks to throw at a gunman who might enter their classroom. Elsewhere, Trump said, a principal told him he'd been advised to play loud music over the school's public address system to distract a gunman.

"It's a huge struggle trying to bring people's focus back from emotion," he says.

Ajamie says the enduring lesson of Sandy Hook may be the importance of having a well-conceived — and well-rehearsed — emergency response plan. "Sandy Hook really reinforced that," she says. "By all accounts, the staff really responded well, and they really saved lives."

Though 20 children and six school staff died in the attacks, she says, "over 500 lives were saved. If there had been chaos and they didn't' have the capability of locking down their classrooms, more lives would have been lost."

Nicole Hockley, whose son Dylan was one of the 26 victims at the hands of onetime Sandy Hook student Lanza, says she's pleased that many of the people who have come forward in a search for solutions have put aside their strong opinions about gun rights and gun control.

"If you start off from a position that you have to be on one side or the other, then you're not open to that common ground," Hockley says. "But if you open up and say, 'It doesn't matter what that position is, if I'm putting my child first, their safety first, whether it's at their school or in their community,' then you can find that common ground."

Though much attention since last December has focused on ways to keep random intruders out of schools, the ultimate legacy of Sandy Hook could be this: Its parents are pushing to expand mental health and wellness services for troubled or isolated kids who show up for class every day.

"We're much more focused on, 'Let's reach out to the kids who are inside the school and prevent the violence from ever happening in the first place,' " Hockley says.