Once again, the unthinkable has happened: A 14-year-old student opened fire at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, just one month into the new school year, killing two students and two teachers. Even though gun violence in K-12 schools isn’t new, it’s become far more common in recent years. Since the 1999 Columbine tragedy — which, at the time, was the deadliest school shooting in history — there have been 417 shootings on school grounds, according to the Washington Post’s school shootings database, affecting 383,000 students.

Mass shootings tend to dominate media coverage of school violence, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Isolated incidents of gun violence, usually stemming from personal conflicts, rarely make it past the local news despite occurring more frequently. For instance, just one day after the shooting in Georgia, a student fatally shot his classmate during an altercation in the restroom at Joppatowne High School in Maryland. And days after that, a teenaged boy was critically injured in a shooting at Omaha Northwest High School in Nebraska.

Beyond headline-generating and lower-profile school shootings, bullying and gang violence in and around schools remain a concern in many communities. All this has created intense focus among parents, teachers, education leaders, and elected officials on the best ways to keep kids safe at school. It’s a particularly urgent question for Hispanic and Black students, who are twice and three times as likely, respectively, to experience gun violence at school, and who are also more likely to live in overpoliced communities outside of school. 

Current efforts like school resource officers, metal detectors, locked doors, and security cameras may provide a sense of security, but it’s unclear whether these efforts are effective. A more nuanced examination of school safety measures is necessary to understand which students are being protected and from what specific threats. Here’s what we know about the efficacy of the most common school safety measures — and the questions that remain.

School Resource Officers: A Popular Measure With Limited Data

School resource officers (SROs) are specially trained sworn law enforcement officers assigned to schools for safety and crisis response. The idea of deploying SROs is popular among parents, with 58% strongly supporting armed police in schools. And they are popular in practice: National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) nationwide survey data of public school leaders suggests that as recently as the 2017-18 school year, nearly half (47%) of schools had an armed sworn law enforcement officer present at least once a week, including at 75% of high schools, 68% of middle schools, and 36% of elementary schools. However, the exact number of SROs in schools is unknown due to the lack of a national database and reporting requirements.

Following nationwide protests against police violence in the summer of 2020, at least 50 school districts committed to removing SROs from their campuses. But as incidents of school violence and shootings spiked in recent years, several districts have reopened the debate and even reinstated SROs in schools.

Little is known about the efficacy of SROs. Emerging research suggests that they can reduce some forms of violence in schools, but are not as effective at preventing gun violence. SROs can also lead to an increase in school suspensions and expulsions, police referrals, and student arrests. Critics of SROs have long argued that they contribute to the school-to-prison-pipeline. Black and Hispanic students, who are more likely to live in overpoliced communities, are more likely to attend schools with SROs. A 2016 White House report found that although Black students represent just 15% of the overall U.S. K-12 student population, they comprise 26% of students referred to law enforcement and 34% of students subjected to school-related arrests.

These data point to the need for more research to determine whether SROs really lead to safer schools for all students.

Secure Building Measures: Common Efforts That Require More Scrutiny

High-profile school safety incidents often create pressure to improve the physical security of school buildings. Secure building measures — sometimes referred to as “controlled access” measures — may include locking school doors to outsiders and requiring key fobs and/or ID cards for entry; staff members from inside the building often need to admit visitors. Security cameras and metal detectors may also be used.

In a 2016 NCES survey of K-12 public school administrators (the most recent year of available data), nearly all respondents reported that their school buildings had controlled access, half reported having controlled access to school grounds, and 80% reported having security cameras in place. Metal detectors were less common (5% of respondents), but their popularity is growing. For example, the Newport News Public Schools in Virginia announced it would install metal detectors in every school after a first grader shot and wounded his teacher in January 2023.

Similar to SROs, little is known about the effectiveness of secure building measures in reducing incidents of gun violence in schools, however, the increase in school shootings over the past decade suggests these measures may not have actually made schools safer. In fact, many students attending schools with secure building measures describe the effect as “security theater” and creating a “prison-like” environment. 

Key Questions Remain

Regardless of effectiveness, real or perceived, visible and familiar symbols of protection can provide some measure of comfort to parents concerned about their child’s safety at school. However, efforts to “harden” schools may cause unintended harm to students. For example, active shooter drills, where teachers lock doors and students hide in designated areas in the classroom, may help prepare kids for the worst, but research finds they can also increase stress and anxiety and potentially induce trauma. Any of these unintended consequences would disproportionately affect Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous students who are more likely to attend schools with secure building measures in place. These findings raise important questions about how best to balance physical safety preparedness with students’ psychological well-being — and more research is needed to determine the full effects of common security measures.

Critics of SROs and secure building measures argue that stronger gun policies and investments in mental health and violence prevention programs are better solutions. Many schools have invested in mental health recently, along with efforts to improve social-emotional learning and create positive school cultures and climates. Congress bolstered these efforts in 2022, passing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act which invested millions of dollars towards these initiatives that research suggests can significantly reduce school violence and improve school climates.

While investments in mental health and social-emotional learning represent meaningful progress, the debate over the most effective methods to ensure school safety continues to raise pressing questions about the long-term impact of current measures. What are the long-term effects of current school safety measures? How can we create sustainably safe K-12 schools? And how do these measures affect all students, especially those who are mostly likely to experience violence at school? Now is the time to invest in more and better research on these questions — to break through the often hyper-partisan noise on school safety and help policymakers find actionable solutions. Our kids’ future quite literally depends on it.