As the pandemic spread across the country, schools closed and students were isolated in their homes, raising concern that the instability could result in devastating emotional health implications and widespread learning loss.
But it also came with an unsettling silver lining: a year without a single mass school shooting.
And not just schools. Until this past March, there wasn’t a single mass shooting in a public space during the pandemic, according to data from The Violence Project, a nonprofit research center focused on reducing such tragedies.
Now, in the wake of back-to-back mass shootings during March in Colorado and Georgia as communities reopen, school safety experts said the carnage should serve as a wake-up call for educators, warning about the potential for violent outbursts as students repopulate classrooms.
“We’ve sort of forgotten about it,” Jillian Peterson, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, told public education news site The 74 Million. “There’s such desperation to get back to normal but our normal is, in the United States we have a lot of horrific mass shootings.”
But such violence, she said, is “not inevitable,” adding that school leaders must work proactively to prevent deadly situations. “There are things that we can be doing to cut this off — that hopefully we can really start doing them now.”
According to incident tracking by Education Week Magazine, there have been eight school shootings this year, 67 since 2018. The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have interrupted the trend line. The 2020 figure, with 10 shootings, was significantly lower than 2019, with 25 shootings, and 2018, with 24.
“That fall off in numbers is probably due to the shift to remote learning for nearly all schools for part or all of 2020. But those using this data should note that it should not be interpreted to mean that schools were ‘safer.’ Rather, the definition of school safety has shifted as schooling entered the home in a way it never had before,” EdWeek reported.
The pandemic’s effects on youth mental well-being concerns school safety experts as children return to schools. Active shooters don’t share common traits that could allow officials to identify potential perpetrators based on demographics alone, according to a 2018 report by the FBI.
Consultant Kenneth Trump, who advises school districts on emergency planning, said he’s observed a return to violent incidents in schools as kids return to buildings. Parents and schools doing what they can to monitor students to ensure safety and security is going to be more important than ever before.
As more students return, “confrontations, threats and even violence are going to kick right back in as if they haven’t missed a beat, and so the school staff have to be prepared,” he said. “There’s a greater probability, given the mental health implications of COVID-19, to see some of that manifest itself behaviorally once everybody is back.”