Nearly 44% of public K-12 schools were staffed with school resource officers at least once a week during the 2021-22 school year, by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics. Between Floyd’s murder in May 2020 and June 2022, ended their school resource officer programs or cut their budgets following widespread Black Lives Matter protests and concerns that campus policing has detrimental effects on students — and Black youth in particular. 

The data reflect an 11% decrease in school policing from the 2019-20 school year, when more than 49% of schools had a regular police presence, according to the nationally representative federal survey. That year, schools underwent an increase in campus policing after the 2018 mass school shootings in Parkland, Florida, and Santa Fe, Texas, prompted a surge in new security funding and mandates, a pattern that could repeat itself when future federal numbers capture the nation’s reaction to the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

“This is the George Floyd effect,” said criminal justice researcher Shawn Bushway, who pulled up a calculator during a telephone interview with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ and crunched the federal survey data against that removed cops from their buildings, which collectively served more than 1.7 million students. 

“It’s not seismic, but I think what’s most interesting about it is that it’s the reversal of a trend in a fairly dramatic way,” said Bushway, a University at Albany in New York professor. “It’s been going up quite a bit and now it’s dropped.”

The new federal data were published the same week as Thursday’s release of a damning U.S. Department of Justice report that cited “critical failures” by police during the May 2022 mass shooting at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School in which 19 students and two teachers were killed. During the shooting, 376 law enforcement officers responded to the scene but waited more than an hour to confront the 18-year-old shooter, a botched reaction that disregarded established police protocols and, investigators said, cost lives.

“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in an active shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in Uvalde.

“Their loved ones deserved better,” he said. 

Chris Chapman, the associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said on a press call Tuesday that the survey data didn’t make clear a definitive reason for the decline in school-based officers. Experts said that several other factors, including campus closures during the pandemic, budget constraints and a national police officer shortage, may have also contributed. 

Either way, the downward trend may be short-lived. 

Multiple districts that cut their school resource officer programs after Floyd’s murder, including those in Denver, Colorado, and Arlington, Virginia, reversed course after educators reported an uptick in classroom disorder after COVID-era remote learning. Mass school shootings have long driven efforts to bolster campus policing, a reality that has played out in the last several years as the nation experienced an unprecedented number of such attacks. 

Despite officers’ grievously mishandled response in Uvalde, the shooting led to renewed efforts in Texas and elsewhere to strengthen police presence in schools. A similar situation played out after the mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Federal data show national growth in campus policing even after the school resource officer assigned to the Broward County campus failed to confront the gunman, who killed 17 people. 

The now-former officer, Scot Peterson, was acquitted of criminal negligence and perjury charges but faces a new trial in a civil lawsuit by shooting victims’ families, who allege his failure to intervene during the six-minute attack displayed a “wanton and willful disregard” for students’ and teachers’ safety. Qualified immunity generally protects officers from liability for mistakes made on the job. 

After Parkland, a new Florida law required an armed security presence on every K-12 campus. The Uvalde shooting led to similar . In both states, a police officer labor shortage, which experts said may have contributed to the 2021-22 decline in schools, has hindered officials’ efforts to comply. In Kentucky, more than 40% of schools lack school resource officers, a reality that school officials have blamed on a lack of funding and a depleted applicant pool. 

“It wouldn’t surprise me if, when that data comes back out, we see that spike go back up,” said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, which offers a training program for campus cops. “It’s not the way I want to gain business, but some of the busiest years we’ve had training wise are 18 months after a school massacre. I can tell you that 2019 was the biggest year in our association’s history by far — and that’s coming right off the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre.”

Advocates for police-free schools recognize the headwinds they face. Tyler Whittenberg, the deputy director of the Advancement Project’s Opportunity to Learn initiative, said that while advocates “are proud of the victories that were won” after George Floyd’s murder, educators who removed police from schools “are fighting really hard to hold onto those gains,” some of which face in districts that don’t want them. 

“We’re not really rushing to a conclusion that this represents an overall reduction in police in schools, especially because for many of our partners on the ground this is not their day-to-day experience,” he said. “They’re having to fight back — especially at the state level — against efforts to increase the number of police in their schools.” 

Safety threats on the decline

In the 1970s, just 1% of schools were staffed by police. Decades of efforts since then to swell their ranks have coincided with a marked improvement in campus safety. 

During the 2021-22 school year, 67% of schools reported at least one violent crime on campus, totaling some 857,500 violent incidents. Federal data show the nation’s schools experienced a violent crime rate of 18 incidents per 1,000 students in 2021-22. That’s a steep decline from 1999-00, when schools recorded a violent crime rate of 32 incidents per 1,000, and 2009-10, when the violent crime rate was 25 per 1,000. 

Police officers’ contributions to making schools safer over the past two decades, however, remain the subject of ongoing research and heated debate. In a study last year, which was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Bushway and his colleagues found that placing . And although researchers were unable to analyze officers’ effects on mass school shootings because such tragedies are statistically rare, they were associated with an uptick in reported firearm offenses — suggesting an increased detection of guns. The officers were also associated with a stark uptick in student disciplinary actions, including suspensions and arrests, particularly among Black students and those with disabilities. 

“There’s a cost-benefit here and everybody’s calculus on how you weigh these different things is going to be different,” Bushway said. “There’s no pure answer to that question, different people are going to answer that question differently.”

Previous research suggests that suspensions or improve school safety, but have detrimental effects on punished students’ academic performance, attendance and behavior. Their effects on non-misbehaving students remain unclear. 

Other researchers have reached a much more critical conclusion about the effects of school-based police on students. In in November on the existing literature into school officers’ efficacy, researchers failed to identify evidence that school-based law enforcement promoted safety in schools but reinforced concerns that their presence “criminalizes students and schools.” 

“I think the evidence is increasingly supporting the notion that police don’t belong in schools,” report author Ben Fisher, an associate professor of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. Removing officers who have been there for years, he said, may cause problems of its own. “If we’re going to get police out of schools, which I think is the right long-term vision and short-term vision, I think we need to do it thoughtfully with plans in place to make schools welcoming and supportive.” 

The federal survey, which was conducted between Feb. 15 and July 19, 2022, also found large geographical differences in the types of tools that school-based police use on the job. Across the board, officers in urban areas were less likely than their rural and suburban counterparts to carry guns and pepper spray or to be equipped with body-worn cameras. 

Beyond data on campus policing, the new federal survey offers a comprehensive look at the state of campus safety and security, reflecting school leaders’ responses to the pandemic and record numbers of mass school shootings. Other findings include: 

• In 2021-22, about 49% of schools provided diagnostic mental health assessments to evaluate students for mental health disorders. This is a decline from 2019-20, when 55% conducted assessments. Meanwhile, 38% provided students with treatments for mental health disorders in 2021-22, down from 42% in 2019-20. 

• Restorative justice, a conflict resolution technique, was used in 59% of schools in 2021-22, which was similar to 2019-20 but an increase from the 42% that used the approach in 2017-18. 

• The latest data indicate a decline in campus drug and alcohol incidents. In 2021-22, 71% of schools reported at least one incident involving the distribution, possession or use of illegal drugs, down from 77% in 2019-20. Meanwhile, 34% reported at least one alcohol-related incident in 2021-22, down from 41% in 2019-20. 

A state Senate committee agreed Monday to support a nearly $9 million plan to help Louisiana public schools better prepare for mass shootings.

The idea for the legislation came from a panel of students who told lawmakers current emergency drills don’t account for incidents that happen when they’re not inside a classroom.

Sen. Barry Milligan, R-Shreveport, said he crafted with input from the , a panel of 31 Louisiana high school students who share policy suggestions with legislators. The council requested improvements to school mass shooting response, including a request for “stop the bleed” kits with tourniquets for every campus.

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Three members of the student panel testified before the Senate Finance Committee, which must review all spending requests, to share how they feel current emergency plans are inadequate.

“This country has truly become numb to school shootings, and sadly there are not many options to create long-term solutions to this crisis,” said Clayton Baden, a senior at Buckeye High School in Pineville, adding that Millgan’s bill offered a short-term answer.

Holly Phan, a junior at Baton Rouge Magnet High School, stressed better communication was needed between school administrators and teachers for mass shooting drills. She recounted an incident in which her sister was outside of the classroom and wasn’t aware a drill was being conducted. Her fears worsened when a nearby electrical transformer exploded during the drill.

“All she could do was sit and hide in the dark, exposed gym with her scared classmates, hoping for signs of safety,” Phan said.

Daniel Price, a senior at McKinley High in Baton Rouge, said he now fears the time between classes because mass shooter drills don’t cover what students should do in that situation. He stayed home the day after a gun was rumored to have been brought to campus, he said.

The current version of the state budget for fiscal year 2023, which starts July 1, includes $8.9 million for enhanced school safety measures related to school shootings. The largest portion, $5 million, would pay for security equipment, such as surveillance cameras, safety training and expanded drills. A $1.6 million portion is set aside to provide teachers with “panic buttons” to signal an emergency.

The plan also calls for $1 million to help expand a CrimeStoppers-manned smartphone application that’s already in place for some 500 schools in 40 parishes around the state. Students can use the app anonymously to report safety concerns. Darlene Cusanza, CrimeStoppers president and CEO, said her group has worked with the state since 2020 and has received some 1,200 tips through the Safe Schools Louisiana app.

A third of the tips have been about bullying, 13% involved mental health matters and 5% were regarding planned school shootings, Cusanza said.

“It’s important because students are talking about their friends who are suffering, and that information isn’t being compiled anywhere,” she told the committee.

Tips from students have led to arrests and information regarding crimes off campus, according to Cusanza.

Milligan has also proposed $1.1 million for 11 employees who will comprise the Louisiana Center for Safe Schools, an offshoot of the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP). Another $256,000 will fund the salaries of two new State Police employees who will be part of coordinating school mass shooting response with law enforcement.

CrimeStoppers launched its Safe Schools app three years ago under a contract with the State Police, and the Milligan proposal would move the arrangement over to GOHSEP.  Cusanza said another 123 schools will be added to the app over the summer, bringing it to roughly half of Louisiana’s junior and high school campuses.

Senate committee hearings on next year’s state budget are taking place this week. The House version of the spending plan removed $2,000 annual teacher raises Gov. John Bel Edwards had inserted and that Senate leaders have said they will restore.

Members of the Senate Finance Committee gave the impression the money Milligan wants for his bill wouldn’t be at risk to fund the teacher raises.

There have been no mass shootings at Louisiana schools, but the state regularly ranks high in both total mass shootings and mass shootings per capita.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on and .

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 Utøya, 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 Utøya 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.”

What do you say now? I think you must — we must — try to remind ourselves of the depth of the loss. To insist that we not lose sight of the stakes involved at Robb Elementary School.

When each of my children was born, I sat up late in the hospital, feeling the rushing currents of reality. It was as if the elemental aspects of life were magnified, every emotion twice as strong, gravity enhanced to make motion seem impossible, my leg muscles inexplicably strong enough to spring up whenever the baby cried out. Each time, I wrote it all down, trying to capture the feelings in the halo of that moment. “[Humans] are best when we are creators…” . “From time to time we produce such shining potential that the daily grind of human life becomes not just tolerable, but comprehensible. From time to time, we produce miracles.” 

That’s the real reason for doing right by kids. We talk, particularly in education policy, about the demographic imperative of preparing kids for the jobs of the future or of raising standards and achievement for participating in a global workforce. It’s not that those things are unimportant. It’s just that children already warrant our love, protection, and investment simply because they are children. They are uncertain promises made to a hazy future — we owe them the very best we can offer because children are the acme of human creativity, the greatest thing humans can make.

So: what do we do for them now? How do we escape this pattern before the next tragedy sounds? And why is it so hard? 

You should know by now, but just in case, it bears insisting: the United States is the only place in the developed world where events like these regularly happen. As part of a sobering analysis of gun violence data, The Washington Post’s , “In 2019, there were 29 kids under 5 shot and killed in the United States for every kid under 5 shot and killed in other high-income countries globally.” — more than car crashes, drug-related issues, illness, drowning or anything else. 

In the wake of the tragedy in Uvalde, as has become macabre custom, we are hearing some politicians suggest that the real American problem is that we lack sufficient weaponry to deter mass shooters, including those targeting schools. And yet, . What’s more, the United States is already awash in guns. . By far. 

Guns are barbarically easy to access in our country. That appears to be the key variable — that’s why your American child is more likely to die from a bullet than anything else. That’s the cause of this uniquely depraved, repetitive tide of violence in the United States. That’s why there will be another shooting in another school that is at least as bad as Uvalde’s, at least as bad as the horrific massacre of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. If more — and more readily accessible — guns were going to solve the problem, it already would have happened. 

What are we going to do? What are we willing to do differently? 

A parable about American democracy and its recent past: my scientist father introduced me to politics and public policy through climate change. Throughout the 1990s, he got involved in various forms of local environmental activism and dashed off letters to our congressman. “The climate science is settled,” he’d tell me. “It’s now just a question of whether we humans want to actually run the global experiment [keeping emitting higher and higher levels of carbon] and test whether the science is right.” 

U.S. Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) would send back form letters explaining that the congressman cared deeply about the environment, that he understood that there were strong views on this issue, but that he also believed it was important to “have the debate” about whether climate change was a real problem. 

My dad would shake his head as he read this to us. “We’ve already had the debate,” he’d exhale. “The science has been conclusive for years.”

This was the 1990s. It was right around the time that conservatives began lampooning Al Gore as “Ozone Man.” It was a solid 20 years before Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) of Congress to “prove” that climate change wasn’t a concern. More people and more politicians are paying attention now. But mostly, the country is floating along, some of us hoping that the data are wrong, others , and most of us acting as though somehow things will get better without us doing particularly much. 

The problem goes well beyond climate change.

I’ve written a few times in recent years that education reform’s receding political tide has left education policy adrift. Conservative politicians have largely retreated to a world where evolving versions of “school choice” are their only policy tool, even as . Liberals have coalesced around various proposals to invest more in public education, albeit usually without meaningful efforts to reform the inequities inherent in education systems. 

First: The point is not to equate the two positions like some . The point is that everyone in public education has on making the system fairer. There is little appetite for overhauling how schools are measured or run or improved. At this point, we’re acknowledging that our schools are fundamentally unfair but mostly just hoping that this will resolve itself without requiring any substantive, controversial effort from the rest of us. 

The flattening of education policy thinking is emblematic of our national governing sclerosis. Pick a major issue — climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, mass shootings, et al. The standard American response now is to muddle through, incapable of mounting a sustained push to overhaul our public policies. When was the last time the country faced a major social challenge and collectively acted to address it? . 

It’s fashionable to blame this on a dearth of civic education and correspondingly waning public spiritedness. Conservatives have an idea here: They are exploring whether faith in American representative government can be revived by banning books and instruction that teach children about the past sins of American representative government. The last Republican presidential administration converted this instinct into — censorship in the name of inculcating children with “patriotic history.”

And indeed, the flagging of faith in our democracy does stem from the presence of evidence, but it’s not the historical record that’s to blame. Americans feel as though nothing can be done because we have grown accustomed to nothing being done. We have learned that our social problems are insuperable. Never mind that other countries — essentially all of them — have solved the problem of mass shootings. Our public institutions keep teaching us that we must simply accept these crises, that their worsening is inevitable. So far, as with climate change, conservatives seem unwilling to do anything serious to address this problem. 

So perhaps conservatives can now expand their efforts to defend American children from information about American shortcomings — by banning any discussion of recent massacres in school. If this sounds far-fetched, note that, , the country prevented the federally funded National Center for Injury Prevention and Control from researching gun violence. 

But it is hard to produce patriotic love for a country by hiding facts about it. Mass shootings keep happening. keep becoming inconveniently more common. Hyper unequal schools keep producing unfair opportunities and unequal outcomes for American children. All of this is hard to hide. At some point, our collective failure to do anything to change the rhythm of our social problems becomes a norm too obvious to deny. 

How does representative government fail? One way is when it repeatedly proves to the public that it cannot adequately represent their preferences and address their common problems. 

What are we going to do? Will we really just meander on, aimlessly trudging towards — and through — our next collective failure?

We won’t make it harder to get access to guns. Not for young adults, not for people who can’t pass a background check, not for anyone. We won’t impose limits on who has access to guns designed specifically for massacring humans. We won’t impose new limits on where people can legally carry guns. We’ll just float along, hoping that this was the last time that this pattern will repeat, that the drumbeat will stop in this latest bloodstained classroom. 

To bring a child into this world is to celebrate the full promise of human possibility. But it is also to accept a host of duties — to be vulnerable enough to take charge of a lived project that is not your own, even if it is in your care for a while. For this project requires you to risk your future comfort, happiness and safety by placing some piece of it in your child’s hands. Sometimes their lives will validate all of your work and suffering and love, but other times, they will hurt and you will be powerless to protect them — or you — from that pain. 

It’s beyond tragic that we have failed to protect families from these crushing losses in Uvalde and before them, Oxford Township in Michigan and Parkland, Florida and Newtown, Connecticut (and, and, and). But it’s somehow even worse that we appear willing to keep adding to our tally, waiting for the next time, accepting that nothing is the very best we can do.