Frank remembers wondering if he would ever see his family again; whether he told them he loved them when he left for Columbine High School that morning. Patricia remembers her staff at Marshall County High School tending to 20 injured students. Greg remembers the piercing shotgun blasts at West-Liberty Salem High School and his kids running through muddy ditches in search of safety. These memories will always haunt us, but they also fuel our determination that no other school should endure what ours have.

When the news crews leave and the attention fades, the real recovery work begins. It’s a long road that we’ve walked ourselves and now guide others down. After a school experiences a shooting — — we call their principals and offer our experience and understanding in the immediate aftermath and beyond. 

After years of talking through tragedies affecting vastly different communities, we know which supports are critical to prevent and recover from shootings, and which fall short. On Sept. 23, we on “The Long-Term Effects of Gun Violence on Schools, Young People and their Communities” and urged members of Congress to significantly increase funding in three critical areas. 

First, they need to expand and extend Project SERV grants. At West-Liberty Salem High School, these funds were a lifeline, allowing Greg to hire Deputy J, a school resource officer, and Mrs. Leichty, a mental health clinician. Deputy J has become the heart of the school community. He coaches high school football, reads to young students at our co-located elementary school and shares lunch with kids in the cafeteria. All the while, he provides a crucial sense of safety and security. 

Mrs. Leichty works alongside the high school counselor helping students grapple with sleepless nights, falling grades and intrusive thoughts in the aftermath of trauma. But SERV grants run out long before the need for these staff members does. Every year, Greg must piece together funds to keep them employed, knowing students still desperately need their support.

Second, Congress must invest in educators through programs like Title II. Teachers are on the front lines — not just for academic growth, but for identifying and addressing students’ emotional needs. They need training and resources to take on this enormous responsibility. Moreover, a staggering 86% of K-12 public schools reported they had challenges in hiring teachers last school year. And Title II, which provides funding for professional development and teacher preparation, is key to making sure each classroom is headed by a talented and caring person. Unfortunately, the House has proposed . The nation is already losing too many excellent educators and can’t afford to leave those who stay behind ill equipped to handle the challenges they face.

Third, Congress must address the critical shortage of mental health staff. Many communities, particularly in rural areas, lack qualified counselors to prevent violence and help in the aftermath of traumatic events, and community mental health providers often have months-long waiting lists. These challenges limit a counselor’s ability to provide student services and leave many children without the support they need. More funding is urgently needed to hire additional counselors and mental health staff to make sure all students get the care they deserve.

Schools are uniquely positioned to provide mental health support, but they need help to meet the growing demand. While the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act infused much-needed resources into an underfunded system, the scale of the crisis demands so much more.

Beyond federal funding, Congress can act on three other critical pieces of legislation. The would establish vital grants and require federal agencies to develop evidence-based practices that promote mental health and resiliency among educators responsible for students’ well-being. The would use competitive grants to bring licensed professionals directly into schools dealing with traumatic experiences, grief, bereavement, risk of suicide and violence.

The third bill, which is being written by Sen. Ron Wyden, is particularly important to schools like Columbine that have become common swatting targets. The act would address the growing crisis of fake threats by requiring the Department of Justice to aid law enforcement agencies in identifying likely swatting calls, creating a national “do not swat” registry modeled after the Seattle police department’s successful and providing grants to 911 services to update their caller ID technology.

These bills represent concrete steps toward creating safer, more resilient school communities. Their implementation, combined with proper funding, would provide schools with the comprehensive support system needed to prevent tragedies and ensure proper care for students and staff alike.

As the budget discussions resume after the election, we call on the nation’s leaders to summon the courage and compassion needed to protect America’s children. Our experiences have shown us the way forward. We ask only that those in power have the strength to follow it.

As a Michigan teen  students in a December 2021 attack, America was learning of yet another school shooting. This time, it was a performance arts high school in St. Louis, where a former student opened fire,  others before dying in a shootout with police.

The fact that yet another school shooting took place within hours of a gunman in a separate case appearing in court underscores how often these events take place in the U.S. As criminologists who have  to log all school shootings in the U.S., we know that deadly school gun violence in America in now a regular occurrence – with incidents only becoming more frequent and deadlier.

Our records show that seven more people died in  between 2018 and 2022 – a total of 52 – than in the previous 18 years combined since the  1999 Columbine High School massacre.

Since the February 2018  in Florida, moreover, more than  at U.S. schools on  and in classrooms, hallways, cafeterias and parking lots.

Many of these shootings were not the mass killing events that schools typically drill for. Rather, they were an extension of .

More frequent and deadlier

There have been shootings at U.S. schools almost , but in 2021 there were a record 250 shooting incidents – including any occurrence of a , be it related to suicides, accidental shootings, gang-related violence or incidents at after-hours school events.

That’s double the annual number of shooting incidents recorded in the previous three years – in both 2018 and 2019, 119 shootings were logged, and there were 114 incidents in 2020.

With more than two months left, 2022 is already the worst year on record. As of Oct. 24, there have been  â€“ passing the 250 total for all of 2021.

Many of these incidents have been simple disputes turned deadly because teenagers came to school angry and armed. At East High in Des Moines, Iowa, in March 2022, for example, six teens allegedly fired 42 shots in an incident that took place during school dismissal time. The  and critically injured two female bystanders. The district attorney described the case as one of the most  their office has ever conducted, partly because six handguns were used.

At Miami Gardens High in Florida that same month, two teens  sprayed more than 100 rounds with a rifle and handgun modified for fully automatic fire. They targeted a student standing in front of the school, but bullets penetrated the building,  sitting inside.

A similar situation  in October. A lunchtime dispute among students allegedly turned into a targeted shooting after a football scrimmage.  are believed to have fired 60 shots at five classmates leaving the game, killing a 15-year-old.

In each of these cases, multiple student shooters fired dozens of shots.

The tally for 2022 also includes incidents involving lone shooters.

In April, a  and six semiautomatic rifles fired from a fifth-floor window overlooking the Edmund Burke School in Washington, D.C. at dismissal. A , parent, school security officer and bystander were wounded before the shooter died by suicide.

Threats, hoaxes and false alarms

The increase in shootings in and around school buildings has many parents, students and teachers on edge. An October 2022 Pew Research survey found that  report being “very worried” or “extremely worried” about a shooting at their child’s school.

Aside from the near daily occurrences of actual school shootings, there are also the near misses and false alarms that only add to the heightened sense of threat.

In September, a potential attack was averted in Houston when police got a tip that a  and shoot students who were trapped inside. The following day near Dallas, another tip sent police scrambling to stop a vehicle on the way to a high school homecoming football game.  and planned to commit a mass shooting at the stadium, it is alleged.

There have also been  of false reports of shootings this year. Hoaxes, , even a viral  have sent schools across the nation into lockdown. Dozens, possibly hundreds, of these threats are , but police have no choice but to respond.

People are so much on edge that a  at one California school in September led to an active shooter response from police. The sound of a  in August caused thousands of people to flee an Arkansas high school football stadium for fear of being shot. A  caused a code red lockdown and parents to rush to a Florida high school.

A better way?

The rising annual tally of school shootings has occurred despite enhanced school security in the . Metal detectors, clear backpacks, bulletproof chalkboards, lockdown apps, automatic door locks and cameras have not stopped the rise in school shootings. In fact, the May 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, provides a case study in  across the school safety enterprise.

Federal  passed in the wake of Uvalde will provide districts with money to hire additional school social workers, or pay for better communication mechanisms in school buildings to address the  of violence missed in .

It is aimed at better identifying and helping at-risk students before they turn to violence. However, another area that needs attention is students’ ready access to firearms.

Some school shooters, , are young adults old enough to get their guns legally from gun stores, prompting questions over whether some states need to reconsider a minimum age for firearms sales.

Meanwhile, most , making safe storage of firearms a public health priority.

But many children get their guns from the streets. Preventing weapons from getting into the hands of potential school shooters will require police and policymakers to devote resources toward cracking down on straw purchasers – those who buy firearms for someone else – and getting stolen weapons,  and guns modified with  to make them fully automatic off the streets.

Such measures could be what it takes to stop the tragic normalization of school shootings.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

“He called me up and said, ‘Frank, you don’t even know what you need, but here’s my number,’” DeAngelis said during an event Monday at the Columbine Memorial in Littleton, Colorado. The road to recovery, DeAngelis would soon learn, isn’t a sprint but a marathon. Help from others who had lived through similar tragedies was instrumental.

DeAngelis hoped he’d never have to make a similar phone call, but in the decades since Columbine, the retired principal has reached out to traumatized educators across the country who similarly became part of “a club in which no one wants to be a member.” 

“Unfortunately, that membership continues to grow,” DeAngelis said. “But we can’t give up hope.”

On Monday, DeAngelis and nearly two dozen school leaders before their schools became crime scenes. While campus shootings remain statistically rare — and no two tragedies are identical — the guide aims to provide practical tips for principals as they begin to lead their communities to recovery. 

The guide was produced by the Principal Recovery Network, a group of current and former school leaders who have experienced school gun violence. “I wish, when that horrific event happened, that we had that recovery guide,” DeAngelis said. “When those events happen, your mind is spinning, and this guide, hopefully, will provide that strength.”

The recovery network was formed by the National Association of Secondary School Principals in 2019, a year after the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, reignited a national conversation on the effects of gun violence. Though the guide was years in the making, its release took on new urgency after the May school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 elementary school students and two teachers were killed. 

Following such tragedies, network members reach out to the affected school leaders to offer advice and a place to vent. After all, nobody knows what’s needed in the aftermath of a campus shooting better than school leaders who’ve survived one, said Ronn Nozoe, the association’s CEO.

“This is something that nobody wants to go through, and there is no step-by-step manual on how to handle it,” said recovery network member Michelle Keford, principal of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. But, “Having their advice, having their input and having their shared experiences really helps me as a leader, and I hope to pass that along.”

The 16-page guide spells out things to consider before reopening a school, the importance of attending to students’ and staff mental health, how to include student input in district plans and practical advice on managing offers of help from outside groups. 

In the immediate aftermath of a tragedy, the guide recommends that school leaders meet with faculty at the school to explain what happened and assess their needs. Principals should quickly provide mental health supports, from trauma-informed counselors to therapy dogs. And they should consider keeping school closed until all funerals have taken place and all physical damage to the building is repaired. 

Among the network’s members is Michael Bennett, superintendent of Greenville Central School District in upstate New York, who was shot in 2004 as an assistant principal wrestled a gun-wielding 16-year-old student to the ground. Shotgun pellets remain lodged in Bennett’s calf. 

“That’s going to be a permanent part of who I am,” Bennett, who was a teacher at Columbia High School at the time, told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. “One of the things you start to learn as you go through this process of recovery is that it’s an ongoing process. It will ebb and flow based on some of your own experiences and how you’re dealing with those.” 

Bennett said he recently offered support to a high school band director in Highland Park, Illinois, who reached out after seven died in a mass shooting at an Independence Day parade. The high school band had marched in the parade, and their teacher was concerned that students’ return to classrooms this fall and their performances at football games could be traumatizing. After getting shot, Bennett said, the sound of fireworks at a homecoming game was alarming. 

In his contributions to the guide, Bennett noted the importance of meeting with staff after a shooting to ensure that everyone is up to speed about what happened and has a chance to ask questions. This is a lesson he learned from personal experience: When Bennett returned to work weeks after the 2004 shooting, some colleagues approached him unsure about what had happened.

“The challenge there for me is that it was reliving the moment again,” he said. “It became a bit of a confusing time for me, and it slowed my process of healing down quite a bit.” 

Following the Uvalde shooting, President Joe Biden signed the most substantive gun-control law in decades. But if history tells us anything, the shootings will continue, the group warned. That’s why it’s so important, DeAngelis said, that educators have each others’ backs. 

“I’ve been doing this for 23 years, and sometimes my wife says, ‘Why do you continue?’ ” he said. “But I made a promise that I was going to do it in memory of our beloved 13.”

It’s a question that has been asked in Columbine, Newtown, Parkland, and elsewhere. And as the number of tragic episodes has climbed in recent decades, it has increasingly drawn the attention of experts studying the effects of trauma on students’ wellbeing. Spanning a variety of settings and drawing from the insights of diverse academic disciplines, their work points to substantial emotional damage trailing students who live through school shootings. The hopes of these children — measured in academic, professional, and psychological terms — are meaningfully diminished, along with the health of their families.

“A growing body of research finds that the costs of gun violence in American schools extend beyond the death toll,” said Maya Rossin-Slater, a professor of health policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine who has carefully observed the aftermath of previous Texas shootings. “The hundreds of thousands of children and educators who experience and survive these tragedies are likely to carry scars for years and decades to come.”

Rossin-Slater is the co-author of looking at the survivors of 33 school shootings in Texas between 1995 and 2016, including those with or without fatalities. Using administrative data from the Texas Education Agency, and measuring the academic participation of individual survivors against students from a control group of demographically similar schools, the research team detected obvious short-term consequences from shootings: Affected students were more likely to be absent and chronically absent, and over 100 percent more likely to repeat a grade (though this probability rose from a relatively low baseline).

The authors next examined college enrollment and workforce records of students at eight Texas high schools that saw shootings between 1998 and 2006, comparing the trends of students enrolled both before and during the shootings against same-age students at control schools. Tenth and eleventh graders who lived through shootings became 3.7 percent less likely to graduate, 9.5 percent less likely to enroll in college, and 15.3 percent less likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree. Freshmen, sophomores, and juniors who experienced shootings were more likely to be unemployed between ages 24 and 26; those working by that age earned, on average, $2,350 less in annual wages than their peers, which implies a $115,000 reduction in lifetime earnings.

Evidence of those long-term ramifications can also be found in other recent studies. A analyzed the impact of violence on a broader sample of individuals who were between the ages of 11 and 17 when a school shooting occurred in their home county. Tracking responses to the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System (a nationwide survey querying the health of Americans in their 20s and early 30s) the authors found that girls who lived in the vicinity of school shootings tended to report a host of risky behaviors in adulthood, from increased drinking to driving without a seatbelt.

Boys also demonstrated clear effects — including a substantial uptick in smoking and the number of days they described themselves as receiving insufficient rest — and were generally less likely to say they were in excellent or very good health. Similar to the findings of the Texas paper, the authors found that girls in counties where school shootings occurred were less likely to be employed in early adulthood, while boys later earned less than their peers from other counties. Both boys and girls were less likely to be obese in later life, and more likely to be underweight. 

More evidence emerges from a study of the 2011 terrorist attack at Utþya, Norway, the deadliest mass killing perpretrated by a single individual in modern history. at a summer camp, the majority under the age of 20; one poll showed that one in four of the country’s residents knew someone touched by the event.

The study, conducted by a team of mostly Norwegian researchers, used academic and medical records to pair children who lived through the attack with similarly aged peers who attended different schools, then divided their findings according to different age groupings. In all, they found that relatively young survivors (either 14 or 15 years old) scored vastly lower on standardized tests, while older survivors (between the ages of 15 and 18) were 20 percentage points less likely to complete high school. Relative to the average for the control group, exposed children of all ages made 60 percent more medical visits and received psychiatric diagnoses nearly five times more frequently in the period immediately following the killings.

Families of the survivors weren’t spared. Siblings also scored lower on state tests by roughly .2 standard deviations (a commonly used measurement illustrating the difference in any population from the statistical mean); a drop of that magnitude is much larger than most effects in education research. Parents were much more likely to visit a doctor, receive a mental health diagnosis, and take sick leave from work (28 percent more likely, in the case of mothers) after the Utþya attack.

Study co-author Prashant Bharadwaj — a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego — wrote in an email that the “big lesson” to be taken from the study was that direct exposure to mass killings can cause enormous ripples even in a Scandinavian setting, where social policy and access to free health care is more generous than in the United States. 

“Norway is a setting with incredible social safety nets: state-provided medical care, high-quality medical care, generous family leave policies, sickness leave, etc.,” Bharadwaj said. “Even within this context, the fact that we find large impacts on mental health for children and sickness absences from work for mothers suggests that in contexts like the U.S., where access to medical care and quality of social safety nets are weaker, the impacts can be much more severe.” 

The medical toll on American children is on display in another study conducted by Stanford’s Rossin-Slater, who measured the impact of 44 school shootings between January 2008 and April 2013. Using information from the IQVIA Xponent panel, which tracks practitioner-level data on medical prescriptions, Rossin-Slater and her colleagues discovered a startling phenomenon: The monthly number of antidepressant medications prescribed to people aged 20 and under increased by over one-fifth in counties that saw school shootings with at least one fatality. The effect continued even three years after the murders occurred. 

Some variety did exist in the effects, however — the spike in antidepressant use was somewhat smaller in areas with higher concentrations of psychologists and social workers, who can offer behavioral treatment outside pharmacological intervention. Rossin-Slater said that this caveat made a case for providing more mental health resources to communities that lack them.

“As we mourn the horrific losses of children and teachers in Uvalde and in many other towns across America, we must ensure that our society provides lasting support and resources to the many survivors who are likely to continue to suffer. This need is especially critical in rural and lower-income areas, such as Uvalde, Texas, which tend to have limited access to mental health professionals and other supports.”

By that point, the 18-year-old perpetrator had already killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers. The decision to wait, state law enforcement officials announced on Friday, was made by the head of the Uvalde school district’s small, six-person police department. Now, as the initial accounting has been retracted and a far more damning narrative has emerged about the officers’ response, they’ve come under fierce criticism for the delay in storming the classroom. 

Squarely in the middle of that is the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Department and its chief, Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, now into their handling of the deadly incident. School district police departments, in particular their training, capabilities and readiness to confront lethal threats, are being scrutinized like never before and a long-running debate about the harms and benefits of campus cops has reignited. 

Schools have bolstered the ranks of armed school officers in the last several decades — largely in response to mass school shootings like the one that unfolded in Uvalde. Police now have a presence in about 43 percent of public K-12 schools and the Texas massacre — despite what appears to be disastrous decision-making on their part — could further accelerate the trend. Just hours after the Uvalde gunman was neutralized, Sen. Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, argued that campus cops are best positioned to stop mass school shootings, stating that “we know from past experiences that the most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus.” 

Yet beyond the anecdotes of heroic cops who successfully saved students from being killed and of officers who failed to live up to their sworn duty to protect innocent lives, research on their efficacy remains mixed. Whether they’re helpful when someone shows up to campus with a gun remains elusive. 

As districts nationwide respond to the Uvalde shooting, they should be cautious when adding new officers to schools to prevent future attacks, said Lucy Sorensen, an assistant professor of public administration and policy at the University of Albany, SUNY, who studies school policing. While school shootings are tragic and politically galvanizing, they remain statistically rare. But officers’ daily presence in schools, she said, could carry negative implications for students — particularly Black youth, who are more likely to be thrust into the school-to-prison pipeline.

“We’ve seen this in response to prior shootings — Columbine, Sandy Hook — where there is this push to harden schools, to add more police officers, add more guns, and the efficacy of these investments is not well established at this point,” Sorensen said, adding that the costs of a full-time police presence in schools could outweigh the advantages. School leaders and lawmakers, she said, “need to think hard about whether this is the right investment or whether it’s a reactionary investment.” 

Last year, Sorensen concluded in a report that having an officer on campus “marginally increases the likelihood of a school shooting,” and suggested that officers failed to prevent school shootings and other gun-related incidents. Yet upon further review of the underlying federal data, she backtracked. In an interview Tuesday with Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, Sorensen said she has now reached a markedly different conclusion. While firearm-related incidents including weapons possession were more frequent in schools with police, the finding could be the result of officers successfully detecting and responding to campus gun incidents. 

“This could be an actual increase in gun violence, but we think it’s more being driven by an increase in the detection and reporting of guns that’s happening from police in schools,” she said. If school-based officers are able to identify and confiscate guns from students that would have otherwise remained in their possession, she said it’s “likely a good thing if it potentially prevents gun violence.” 

Still, a separate report offers caution. Once mass school shootings occur, researchers at the nonprofit Violence Project found that officers may be ineffective at preventing bloodshed. In an analysis of school shootings over four decades — a total 133 incidents —  researchers found that fatalities were three times higher in attacks where an armed guard was present compared to those that unfolded without a security presence. Because the perpetrators of mass shootings are often suicidal, researchers speculate that the perpetrators could even be drawn to places with armed security. 

George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 led some school districts to cut ties with the police before COVID-era student behavioral challenges prompted some to reverse course. Through it all, a , according to a recent Education Week survey. Among them is Jake Heibel, the principal of Great Mills High School in Maryland, which suffered a school shooting in 2018. In that incident, a 17-year-old student shot two classmates, one fatally, before taking his own life. The shooting ended when the gunman fatally shot himself as a school resource officer simultaneously shot him in the hand. 

The school officer’s actions “certainly saved lives that day and we’re eternally grateful,” Heibel said in an interview after the Uvalde shooting. “He did what he needed to do to protect others and he certainly did that day.” 

‘The wrong decision, period’

In the immediate aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, the responding officers as “heroic” and “courageous,” but the tenor shifted after more information became publicly known. Turns out a school-based cop did not engage the shooter before he entered the school, but one was there: He responded to the scene but drove past the gunman as he crouched down next to a car in the parking lot, officials said.

On Friday, that Chief Arredondo, of the Uvalde school district police department, was the incident commander who ordered officers to stand back instead of storming the Robb Elementary School classroom where fourth-graders and educators were locked inside with the gunman. Officials said that Arredondo believed erroneously that the shooter was barricaded inside the classroom and that students’ lives were no longer at risk. Ultimately a tactical team of Border Patrol agents , opened the classroom door using a janitor’s keys and fatally shot the gunman. 

“From the benefit of hindsight, where I’m sitting now, of course it was not the right decision,” Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said during a Friday press conference. “It was the wrong decision, period. There was no excuse for that.” 

Arredondo’s decision to wait has faced similar rebukes from proponents of school-based policing, including school security consultant Kenneth Trump, president of the Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services. Prior to the notorious 1999 school shooting at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, standard law enforcement procedures called on police to secure the scene’s perimeter and call in the SWAT team. But Columbine “completely changed that,” Trump said, and in recent decades officers are trained to respond to the threat immediately, even if they’re alone on the scene. 

After the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which resulted in 17 deaths, the school resource officer stationed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Scot Peterson, was charged with criminal negligence after he failed to engage the gunman. While Trump said that Peterson became Parkland’s “second-biggest villain,” after the shooter, he said the law enforcement response in Uvalde was far worse.

“Here you have numerous people who, it would appear, did not follow the best practice for the last two decades,” Trump said.  

For Blaine Gaskill, the school resource officer who rushed to stop the armed student at Maryland’s Great Mills High School in 2018, the fear of losing his own life didn’t even cross his mind. In fact, he told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, “I didn’t feel anything.” 

“I had a job to do and I did it,” he said in an email Friday.  Though Gaskill declined to comment on the Texas shooting, he expressed support for campus police, saying they “play a big role in preventing any tragedy.” 

“Just our presence alone makes students, parents and staff feel safer,” he said. “We have the ability to respond to any incident very quickly, whether it’s an active threat or a fight in the school. We are seconds away from stopping or intervening in any incident.” 

In fact, instruction on a quick response had been provided to officers at the 4,100-student Uvalde school district, which despite its small size maintains its own police force and an , including “threat assessment” teams, a visitor management system that limits access to school buildings and a digital surveillance tool that sifts through social media posts in search of violent threats. In December, Arredondo completed an active-shooter training course that taught participants how to distinguish an active shooting from “a hostage or barricade crisis.” Just two months ago, on how to respond to an active shooting. The training was based on materials by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, according to The New York Times, which inform officers they may need to put themselves in harm’s way and “display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent.” 

“As first responders we must recognize that innocent life must be defended,” according to the training materials. “A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field.”     

While Arredondo served as the incident commander, Trump questioned whether his small campus police department was equipped for an emergency of this scale. Many school district police departments lack tactical training, he said, and often defer to larger agencies following major incidents.

“When you form an incident command structure, there is nothing that says that the initial incident commander on scene cannot pass that torch to the representative of another agency, a tactical team that may have more expertise, experience and tactical knowledge,” Trump said. “It can be done. You can pass the torch.”

Why that didn’t happen, and which department was responsible for released right after the shooting, remains unclear. 

While Trump maintained support for campus cops, proponents of police-free schools said that police shortcomings in Uvalde speak to the policy arguments they’ve been making for years. Among them is Maria Fernandez, managing director of campaign strategy at the Advancement Project, a racial justice group. A national movement to remove police from schools landed major policy victories after Floyd’s murder, but the political tides shifted back in favor of policing as students returned to schools during the pandemic and educators reported an uptick in classroom disruptions. The Uvalde shooting is proof that the strategy doesn’t work, Fernandez said. 

“The narrative that is so entrenched in our communities is that police equals safety or that they can stop the evil that is moving outside of the school door — and that’s not what happened and they lied about it,” she said. The school district was served by its own police department, “hardened” security measures, a municipal police department that receives about and federal Border Patrol agents. It all failed to save 21 innocent lives. 

“This is our nightmare,” Fernandez said. “We know for a fact that police don’t actually generate safety in the face of incredible violence. It’s just so devastating that this had to happen.”

Shootings bolster school policing

The attack in Uvalde is the deadliest mass school shooting in nearly a decade. In 2012, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, resulted in the deaths of 20 children and six educators. If history tells us anything, the Uvalde shooting will precede a rash of local and federal spending on campus policing. 

In 2013, a noted a limited body of research on the effectiveness of school resource officers, stating flatly that existing reports did “not address whether their presence in schools has deterred mass shootings.” Yet the Sandy Hook tragedy — and the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida — led to an infusion of local and federal money for school-based policing. In the last several decades, the federal government has spent roughly $1 billion to station police in schools. Responding to shootings with school policing and beefed-up security reflects the country’s “neoliberal approach to solving social problems,” said Benjamin Fisher, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Florida State University whose research focuses on campus policing. 

“Rather than talking about the one thing that all school shootings have in common — which is the presence of a gun — we are instead focusing on how to make schools different in some way. We’re putting the problem on schools rather than on gun access and availability.”

Since Sandy Hook, researchers have scrutinized the role that police play in schools, and in some cases have found , including an increase in student discipline for low-level offenses and a drop in high school graduation and college enrollment rates. Research has found that the negative outcomes are particularly dire for Black students, who are disproportionately subjected to campus arrests.

In her more recent research, Sorensen of the University of Albany, SUNY, found that placing officers in schools leads to an increase in campus safety, but at a great cost to students — particularly those who are Black. The research, which relies on figures from , found that officers effectively combat some forms of campus violence including fights, but their presence also correlates with an increase in student suspensions, expulsions and arrests. Students, especially those who are disabled, are chronically absent more when campuses are staffed by cops, she found. 

The research isn’t yet peer-reviewed. In fact, it was during the peer-review process that researchers identified a problem, Sorensen said. The Civil Rights Data Collection relies on every school in the U.S. to self-report data on a range of student outcomes and has long been criticized for including inaccuracies. For example, districts have been accused of underreporting campus arrests and instances of sexual misconduct. 

When researchers triangulated the federal data on school shootings against news reports, they found that the rate of school shootings appeared to have been overreported, which Sorensen said could be the result of an administrative data error. As a result of unreliable data, she said it remains unclear whether campus cops have any effect on the likelihood of a school shooting. 

Still, Sorensen said that the negative outcomes of school policing, like the student suspensions, “aren’t costless.” 

“Every child who gets killed in a school shooting is too much, it’s too many kids,” she said, yet such tragedies remain statistically rare and most communities will never have to experience what Uvalde just endured. “I do think it’s important to weigh more heavily the day-to-day impacts of having police officers in schools and what those costs and benefits are.”

The risk of ‘cherry-picking’ anecdotes 

As the apparent police failures in Uvalde and officers’ delayed response are dissected, Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said in this situation, the officers may have simply been outgunned. 

School resource officers are generally equipped with handguns, while the gunman reportedly carried out the attack with an AR-15-style assault rifle. Campus police should have the same equipment as cops assigned to patrol the streets, Canady said, but added that his group is “not involved in politics around the gun debate.” 

“Here’s what I know: If gun sales stopped today, there are still millions of guns out in our society, that’s just a fact” he said. “So we have to continue to prepare to defend our communities, which for us is our schools, against the potential for these types of attacks and the potential for us to be outgunned.” 

Even as some districts have equipped campuses with rifles and gun safes, he questioned whether that was an effective solution. 

“Here’s the thing, unless you’re sitting in that office or right next to it, you’re not going to waste precious seconds to go get the long gun when there’s someone killing babies,” he said. “That is a dynamic that is very difficult to resolve.” 

To bolster his argument, Canady pointed to multiple tragedies where the responses by school-based police were credited with saving lives. In March, for example, administrators at a Kansas high school called an officer to help them search a . When the officer arrived, the student removed a gun from his bag and shot both the officer and a school administrator. The officer, who has since been described as a hero, returned fire and struck the student. All three survived. 

Meanwhile Trump, the school security expert, said it’s important to consider school shootings that may have been prevented due to a police presence on campus. Despite a lack of research, he pointed to anecdotes where officers identified students with weapons and uncovered concrete plans to kill. Yet anecdotes also exist of officers failing to uphold their duties. 

Fisher, the criminal justice researcher, said there’s reason to be cautious of anecdotal evidence in place of scientific research because it “risks cherry-picking.”

“Anecdotes allow us to craft a narrative because we don’t have to subject our beliefs to systematic and reproducible inquiry,” he said. “We can pick the pieces of evidence that we want — and that’s on both sides of the argument.”

Amid heightened national fear over mass school shootings, a teacher in pink earmuffs unloads a pistol’s clip into the chest of a human-shaped target. The scene in Bulletproof, Chandler’s latest documentary, highlights the lengths some teachers have gone to keep kids safe.

In a troubling juxtaposition, the film contrasts long-established traditions like homecoming parades and classroom lectures against newer realities inside American schools: lockdown drills, metal detectors and campus gun safes stocked with AR-15s.

Chandler, the film’s director/producer and a Brooklyn College professor, said the documentary started as a hard look at the booming school security industry, but morphed into an exploration of routines that often feel surreal.

“I started thinking more about this idea of rituals and how all of these rehearsals and preparations [for a mass shooting] play out across the country, seeing things almost like choreography,” he told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. The film doesn’t aim to offer a complete picture of the debate around school security, he said, but instead offers viewers “fragments of daily life, of what has long been — and what is fast becoming — normal around the country.” 

Bulletproof, which makes its broadcast debut at 10 p.m. ET Monday on PBS, takes viewers to campuses across the country to highlight the fear that gun violence has instilled in America’s school communities while exploring the monetization of solutions that security companies promise will prevent more carnage. The 84-minute film, which will broadcast as part of the network’s documentary series will also be available to stream on the .

Each year, school leaders spend billions of dollars on security to bulletproof campuses. For the entrepreneurs who manufacture bulletproof backpacks and whiteboards, the race to stop the next school shooter has become big business. Whether that spending has helped, however, remains unclear. 

The documentary’s broadcast premiere falls on Valentine’s Day, the same date as the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which left 17 dead and prompted a national debate over gun control and student safety. The film, which was co-produced by Danielle Varga, isn’t a work of blatant advocacy and avoids feeding viewers a perspective on the merits of the high-tech surveillance cameras, active-shooter drills and campus police officers that have proliferated in schools nationwide since Parkland. Yet the film does offer a point of view — one that Chandler described as “dark absurdism.” 

“The hope is that the contrast and the juxtaposition will do their parts to highlight what I think is sad or problematic or a little bit absurd,” he said. “But in ways that are subtle enough that it remains watchable and an invitation to engage.” 

Mass school shootings are statistically rare and campuses have grown safer in recent years, yet a byproduct of high-profile attacks like the one in Parkland is a security industry that banks on an ever-present threat inside schools. Bulletproof features a Las Vegas trade show where salesmen hawk armored whiteboards, while a California-based entrepreneur designs bulletproof hoodies from a Silicon Valley bedroom. In one Texas school, leaders deploy a badge monitoring system that tracks students’ every move. A school leader explains how threats, including violent campus graffitti, necessitate the surveillance response. 

“Some people will say ‘that’s just some kid playing,’” the district security official says. “The problem is we can’t take that risk anymore.”

Many of the security strategies that have grown more prevalent in recent years remain contentious. Active shooter drills have become routine in schools nationwide, for example, but some critics argue they are ineffective and could have a negative effect on children who must weigh their own mortality. Bulletproof explores this tension on several occasions. In one scene, educators barricade a classroom door with chairs and desks during an active-shooter simulation. But one high school student explains how the drills could be counterproductive. 

“I feel as if having to do constant lockdown drills is almost as traumatizing as having an actual situation like that,” the student explains.

The film pivoted to a similar debate about whether should carry guns. The proposal was ultimately rejected. During a public meeting, the district police chief explains that without guns, unarmed officers lack the tools necessary to catch “bad guys.” 

But Harold Jordan, the nationwide education equity coordinator at the ACLU of Pennsylvania, says in the film that officials should focus on the harms that guns present to students inside the schools. Arming officers changes the school environment, he argues, and “sends a very strong and a negative message to students that somehow firearms are needed in terms of dealing with the kinds of everyday things that go on in schools.” 

In an interview with Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, Jordan called the documentary an “anthropological snapshot” that offers viewers an introduction to the “safe schools industrial complex” and the salesmen who “take advantage of peoples’ fears to make a buck.” 

Yet he said that he wished that Chandler had offered a deeper look at the efficacy of the school security solutions on display and offered a greater focus on the opinions of students who must attend schools alongside them. But ultimately, he hopes the film creates greater skepticism of companies that he sees as seeking to cash in on fears of mass violence. 

“The film is going to perhaps spark a conversation about these things,” he said, “but I think that people viewing the film should really take it further and ask deeper questions — and to ask young people about their perceptions of safety and violence.” 

Chandler said that was his precise goal. Rather than forcing a clear agenda, he hopes the film becomes a conversation starter for people who may not typically engage in debates about campus security and strategies to prevent school shootings. 

“A film that takes a direct position is going to be less successful in catalyzing dialogue because it’s immediately going to alienate a certain number of people and it’s going to unite another population of people,” Chandler said. “And then we’re sort of exactly where we were.”

We’ve tried hiding from the monsters. We’ve tried running from the monsters. We’ve tried barricading the doors so they can’t come in, and locking them up so they can’t get out. And yet, they keep creeping into our lives — more so than ever before.

The monsters are mass shooters, including those who unleash hell on schools. But metal detectors, active-shooter drills and school-based police are not a sufficient antidote, a duo of criminologists argue in their forthcoming book “.”

The first step in violence prevention, Jillian Peterson and James Densley write in the book released Sept. 7, is to recognize that mass shooters are far more complex than ghoulish caricatures. And stopping them will take more than one simple solution.

“We’ve been treating this all wrong,” said Densley, a sociologist and criminal justice professor at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. “We are expecting these individuals to just be outsiders beyond the reach of help, beyond the scope of our control. And instead, they are our children, they are our neighbors, they are our work colleagues.”

The book’s conclusions were gleaned from a massive undertaking that’s been years in the making. Peterson and Densley, co-founders of The Violence Project, a nonprofit research center, built what they believe is that spans back to 1966, involving about 180 attacks with more than 1,200 fatalities. Backed by funding from the National Institute of Justice, the U.S. Department of Justice’s research arm, they compared mass shooters’ life experiences across more than 150 variables, like childhood trauma, to identify commonalities. Under the Violence Project’s definition, mass shootings include tragedies that unfold in public locations with four or more victims excluding the shooter and do not stem from domestic violence, gangs, drugs or organized crimes.

They also trekked across the country for interviews with incarcerated killers, their parents and survivors, offering a new window into the lives of shooters and the impulses that make them tick.

Among the book’s key takeaways, the researchers found that more than 80 percent of the youngest mass shooters leaked their plans before the killings and, among those who inflicted mayhem on schools, 70 percent had previously experienced childhood trauma. And perhaps counterintuitively, fatalities were higher in school shootings where armed security was present on campus.

Based on what they uncovered, the book offers a detailed policy roadmap that Densley and Peterson believe could save lives.

The data highlight the critical role of schools, said Peterson, a forensic psychologist and criminology professor at Hamline University in Saint Paul. In many instances, shooters faced significant childhood trauma, stemming from issues like physical or sexual abuse and neglect. Just three months before a suspected school shooter killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, his mother and sole parent died of pneumonia. Shooters often lacked supportive family connections, but their schools were often ill-equipped to confront those challenges.

“Schools aren’t necessarily resourced to be screening for trauma and providing in-depth mental health resources and working with families on coping mechanisms and teaching social-emotional learning,” she said. “Right now, so many schools are stretched so thin, but as we think about ‘How do we provide resources to prevent violence,’ I think that’s where they should be going.”

Though school shootings remain statistically rare and federal data suggest that in the last few decades, The Violence Project’s data reveal that mass shootings have become both more frequent and deadlier in recent years. More than half of the country’s mass shootings have occurred since 2000, the researchers found, and 16 of the 20 deadliest tragedies in modern history unfolded during that time. Of the country’s 20 deadliest mass shootings, three occurred in schools.

Though mass shootings happen elsewhere, the U.S. is a clear outlier. After controlling for population, researchers found the U.S. has six times more mass shootings compared to the rest of the world.

Yet as politicians offer “thoughts and prayers” to victims and stand their ground in a gun-control debate caught in a feedback loop, Peterson said that tangible steps can be taken right now to prevent more carnage. In fact, the pandemic offers lessons for prevention. When people stopped gathering en masse in public places like schools and offices, these rampages stopped as the opportunities for mass casualties dried up. Other mechanisms exist to limit opportunities outside a global pandemic. For example, 80 percent of school shooters obtained guns from family members, but no federal law and few state rules require parents to store weapons out of the reach of children. Such laws exist in six states including California, where parents can face arrest for keeping unlocked guns at home. Public information campaigns that promote safe storage could save lives, the book concludes.

“I want people to read this book and feel hopeful, which is not necessarily what you think when you pick up a book about mass shootings,” she said. “There are things that each of us can do.”

The voices of the perpetrators

To understand the motives of mass killers, Peterson and Densley approached the work with a strong dose of empathy. They didn’t lose sight of the reality that the perpetrators had committed horrendous crimes, but their harsh life experiences added context. Understanding the root causes of violent behaviors, they argued, is critical.

Peterson came to that realization on Rikers Island, the notorious jail complex in New York City where she worked early in her career. As a special investigator for the city’s public defender’s office working death penalty cases, she soon recognized: “The worse the crime, the worse the story.”

Densley had a similar experience inside New York City’s public school system, where he worked as a special education teacher before pivoting to researching youth gang violence. The system treated many disabled children as though they were disposable and could never succeed, he said. But Densley wasn’t buying it.

The duo applies a similar framing to mass shooting prevention and as they compared the shootings, clear patterns emerged.

For many, issues began with childhood trauma. Of the shooters where such data was available, 55 percent had experienced significant childhood trauma, compared to roughly 15 percent in the general population. The trend was even higher among school shooters, about 70 percent of whom had experienced adverse childhood experiences. To understand the role these traumas played, interviews with incarcerated gunmen were especially illuminating, Peterson said.

“They have so much knowledge in terms of how they got to this point,” she said. “We can build datasets and do all this data analysis but, at the end of the day, it’s the voices of these perpetrators saying ‘Here’s how I got here,’ that I think I learned the most from.”

The book intentionally excludes the shooters’ names as part of an effort to deprive them of notoriety, and Peterson declined to disclose their identities due to confidentiality agreements. One in 10 mass shooters sought fame from their attacks, they found, and often idolized other gunmen. For example, at least 20 school shootings have been inspired, at least in part, by the infamous 1999 attack on Columbine High School in suburban Denver. Among them is the 2012 mass school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 26 people, including 20 first-graders, were killed.

Among those interviewed for the book was “Perpetrator B,” a school shooter who recalled how his father would sometimes hit his mother, telling the researchers he developed depression in elementary school and became suicidal by 17. People knew he was struggling, he said, “but they never knew how bad it was.” A caring relationship between the perpetrator and an adult mentor could have put him on a different path, the book concludes. Instead, he became obsessed with studying other shooters, including a visit to Columbine High School. He attempted to die by suicide before attacking his former high school.

More than three-quarters of shooters were in a state of crisis before their attacks and left signs that could’ve been identified by those around them. In fact, 86 percent of mass shooters 20 years old and younger leaked their intentions, including in chat rooms and on social media.

The most profound discovery, both researchers agreed, was a significant connection to suicide. Though mass shooters made meticulous plans about their attacks, escape was never part of the equation. A third of mass shooters were actively suicidal prior to their attacks and 40 percent specifically planned to die in the act, they found. Those who were suicidal were more likely to telegraph their plot, suggesting that they may have been crying out for help. Both the shooters at Columbine and Sandy Hook died by suicide after the attacks.

Following the shooting in Newtown, the parents of two victims founded , which trains students and educators to recognize signs that someone could hurt themselves or others and offers a tip line that allows youth to intervene anonymously.

The reality that many shooters are suicidal “just opened up a whole different line of thinking” Peterson said. For decades, efforts to stop school shootings have centered largely on hardening schools with security. “But if some is actively suicidal, a lot of that stuff doesn’t work.”

The Violence Project’s conclusions are not universally accepted within the community of school-shooting researchers, and Jaclyn Schildkraut, an associate professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Oswego, is among the group’s critics. She argued that some of the Violence Project’s findings aren’t sufficiently backed up by research and some of their recommendations “are very dangerous,” including those that critique school security measures.

Schildkraut said that social-emotional learning is important, but the group’s focus on shooters’ traumatic experiences “comes across as, ‘Well, we’re not nice enough to these shooters,’ or ‘We’re not giving them the attention that they need in a more emotional way.’” The data also rely heavily on media reports rather than mental health records, which she said makes it impossible to reach definitive conclusions.

A roadmap to safety

The Violence Project adds a major wrinkle in a violence prevention strategy long employed in schools — an approach Densley called “security theater.” School-based police have grown exponentially in the last several decades, but in measuring their effects on mass school shootings, researchers reached a counterintuitive conclusion.

Of 133 mass school shootings in their data, armed guards were on the scene in 24 percent when the shooting began. In shootings where guards were present, fatalities were three times higher. Because gunmen are often suicidal, the authors speculate that perpetrators could even be drawn to places with armed security.

Schools spend nearly $3 billion on security each year, but the data suggest a softer approach that focuses on addressing the root causes, like adverse childhood experiences, Densley said. Specifically, the book calls for a heightened focus on trauma screenings in schools and doctor’s offices that identify people who are struggling and get them help while avoiding punitive consequences like arrests.

“Instead of spending billions of dollars on all of that unproven technology, let’s hire school counselors,” he said. “Violence prevention is not just building metal detectors. Violence prevention is also crisis intervention in our schools and mental health support in our schools.”

Civil rights groups have long called on schools to hire additional counselors in place of physical security measures like school-based police, a concept that gained momentum after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.

But Schildkraut isn’t convinced by the Violence Project’s takeaways on school-based police, arguing that a host of factors contribute to the number of fatalities during an attack. Similarly, while the Violence Project has highlighted the potential harms of lockdown drills, that they are key to “fostering a culture of preparedness in schools.” It’s important to explore the root causes that motivate people to become violent, she said, but prevention is only part of the solution and shouldn’t come at the expense of emergency response and preparation.

“My concern is that their claims are made from personal perspectives and not evidence-based perspectives because the evidence that’s out there on lockdown drills doesn’t say, ‘These are bad,’” she said. “I would love to live in a world where we don’t need active-shooter drills and contingency plans and everything, but that’s not the society we live in.”

Mental health services are just one part of a multi-pronged approach to violence prevention highlighted in the book, which calls for changes at the individual, cultural and political levels. Individually, for example, people must become more willing to speak up when they believe someone close to them is in crisis, including through anonymous tip lines, and gun owners should lock firearms out of young people’s reach. At a systems level, government programs could expand the social safety net to promote community health by addressing issues like educational inequality, hunger and homelessness.

The authors don’t shy away from what may be the hardest sell: gun control. Specifically, they call for universal background checks and wait times on firearm purchases that “are the functional equivalent of counting to 10 before doing something impulsive,” and “red flag” laws that remove weapons from people who pose a threat to themselves or others.

Densley is acutely aware that his book asks a lot from society. But if everybody plays a small role, the authors believe, we can beat back the ever-recurring “monsters.”

“We can’t just be helpless, we can’t just wait,” he said. “A lot of other books, the final chapter, the conclusion, is ‘Well, all we need is a mighty act of Congress to shut down the gun lobby and we’ll live happily ever after.’ It’s like, ‘Well OK, what do we do between now and never?’”

Lead video by Joe Raedle / Getty Images

For more than a decade after the 1999 school shooting at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, Frank DeAngelis held a simple promise: He’d stay on as principal until every student class enrolled in the district during the attack reached the graduation stage.

Despite the community upheaval and media frenzy that followed the notorious massacre, DeAngelis kept his word, remaining as principal until his retirement in 2014. But new research suggests that many families take an opposite approach after a shooting tears apart a school community.

Instead, they flee.

After districts suffer school shootings, student enrollment plummets over the long term as wealthy families move away, . The shift carries significant implications for schools and the communities they serve as districts become more socioeconomically segregated. The enrollment declines persisted even as districts shelled out millions of dollars on physical security and student supports like counselors and as educators assured families that the schools remained safe places to learn.

School shootings have a profound impact on the national political discourse and on the by gun violence at schools since Columbine. Previous studies have found that school shootings are detrimental to students’ mental health and academic performance. The negative effects of school shootings are particularly acute in less affluent schools that serve large numbers of students of color and those from low-income households, where such tragedies are also more prevalent.

Gun violence at schools remains statistically rare and campuses have actually over the last several decades. Yet they drive policy debates around campus security, student mental health and gun control.

As better-off families flee, their departures could have a detrimental effect on the lower-income community members who are left behind, said report co-author Lang (Kate) Yang, assistant professor of public policy and public administration at The George Washington University. In the short term, students who experienced the tragedies are “going to lose some peer support,” as their classmates move away which could contribute to “the psychological stress the shootings have already caused,” she said. Since student test scores are strongly tied to family income, districts’ loss of well-off students could also hurt their performance on standardized tests, the report noted.

The enrollment dips could also be felt over time as the areas’ median household income declines and the communities’ socioeconomic profiles are altered. The findings highlight a need for policymakers and administrators to focus on improving the perceptions of campus safety and quality “to avoid the pitfalls of yet another round of middle-class flight away from these schools.”

“It’s a stigma that needs to be countered,” Yang told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. Even though districts increase spending on physical security and mental health care, she said those efforts aren’t enough to dispel the bad rap, “which suggests that either the resources are not enough or they’re not used correctly. Maybe there is not an effort, or a coordinated effort, to show people that the school is still safe,” despite the isolated shooting.

To conduct the study, researchers analyzed a database of 210 school shootings between 1999 and 2018, and compared them against district enrollment and Census data. In total, campuses that experienced shootings saw a 5 percent enrollment drop compared to those that weren’t victimized. Enrollment at nearby private schools also dipped, suggesting that shootings “reduce the desirability of the community and carry negative implications beyond the public schools where shootings occur.”

To understand the demographics of students moving elsewhere, researchers analyzed enrollment changes between students who were eligible for free and reduced-price lunch and those who were not. The enrollment declines were driven “almost entirely” by students who did not qualify for subsidized school meals, a common proxy for student poverty.

Researchers also analyzed educational spending in the wake of school shootings, finding that spending on security and student supports doesn’t crowd out instructional resources primarily due to an influx of federal money. That could also suggest that taxpayers nationwide may have a vested interest in prevention efforts, the report says.

On average, campus shootings are associated with a $129, or a 19 percent, increase in per-pupil federal funding. While per-pupil spending on student supports like counselors increased by $22 following shootings, such tragedies led to a $107 per-pupil spike in capital spending driven by construction costs to repair buildings and upgrade security. After shootings, districts increased spending by $248 per pupil, indicating that school systems took on debt to pay for the response measures.

Anecdotal evidence previously suggested that families fled their communities after school shootings, including an , where a 17-year-old is accused of killing 10 people at a high school there in 2018. Earlier that year, the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, to new homes on the West Coast, away from the politics, trauma and fear that lingered after the attack that left 17 high school students and faculty members dead.

After the 1999 Columbine shooting, DeAngelis said his school became “probably one of the safest high schools in the world,” as officials ramped up security. Yet, some students chose to enroll in other nearby schools or left the district entirely. Part of the problem, he said, is that the school was thrust under the media microscope, which likely contributed to some families leaving.

Yet for some families that departed after the shooting, he said the decision may have been a mistake.

“All of a sudden, they return the following year because they didn’t have the support at the other schools that they went to,” including a network of peers who went through similar experiences, he said.

But the researchers found the decline in students wasn’t immediate but developed over time and wasn’t limited to those who were enrolled at the time of the tragedy.

For report co-author Maithreyi Gopalan, an assistant education professor at Pennsylvania State University, the results indicate that long-term efforts to combat the effects of campus shootings is paramount, especially as enrollment is depleted over several years.

Such shootings require more response than addressing the immediate effects and providing “counselors for one or two years and then it’s gone because the funding dries up,” she said. “We want to think about having a sustained impact” through policy so mitigation efforts aren’t short lived.