As the school year wound down this week at St. Cornelius Catholic School in Chadds Ford, Pa., eighth-grade students were handed a gift meant to prepare them for their transition to high school — a bullet-resistant shield that can fit in their backpacks.

“It is their life now, which is very sad,” Barbara Rosini, the school principal, said in an interview on Tuesday. “But if it is something that will help keep our kids, or any child or any adult, safe, that is unfortunately where we are now.”

“I never thought I would need this,” Jacob Nicosia, one of the students graduating on Tuesday, told a local television station during the distribution event on Monday.

The small private school in a small semirural community west of Philadelphia, with several hundred students from prekindergarten through middle school, is not alone in its attempt to address the multiple school shootings over the years.