The issue of school safety has been interrogated as school shootings have occurred multiple times each year in the United States. This devastating reality has captured the attention of many throughout the United States. School leaders have implemented strategies to increase school safety, including the creation of practices to deter shooting…

Colleges are charged with providing safe and secure campus environments, which are conducive to learning for all students. It is the duty of the college leadership to ensure that their campuses are not only visually appealing, but also that they ensure the safety of all. Recent events have shown that efforts to protect our campuses and…

School security is an issue faced by all school districts. Some school districts in the state of Missouri made the decision to arm members of their staff to provide an additional layer of defense. This qualitative study looks at the lived experiences of PK-12 school staff members who carry a concealed weapon for Shield Solutions. The participants…

An ultimate goal of American universities is to provide a safe and secure environment for all who attend and operate there, but what safety looks and feels like to the individual can vary to a great degree. There are many factors that campus safety departments consider when designing their campus safety policies and regulations. One way…

This resource includes state statutes and regulations that explicitly allow concealed firearms on campus, explicitly prohibit firearm possession on campus, and statute or regulations that allow guns in locked vehicles on college campuses. In some states, court cases have overturned or altered statewide or systemwide policies related to guns on…

The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological case study was to investigate how school safety protocols have changed in a suburban county since the Sandy Hook Elementary 2012 school shooting. Through interviews of district safety directors and school resource officers and analyzing district school safety documents, this study showed how…

This 50-state comparison assesses the K-12 school safety policies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The information presented in this interactive resource gives an overview of relevant laws in each state and does not reflect how these laws may interact with other state or federal policies. The interactive resource does not include…

This report provides the most recent national indicators on school crime and safety. The information presented in this report serves as a reference for policymakers and practitioners so that they can develop effective programs and policies aimed at violence and school crime prevention. Accurate information about the nature, extent, and scope of…

Our nation's postsecondary institutions are entrusted to provide a safe and healthy learning environment for the students, faculty, and staff who live, work, and study on campus. Planning for emergencies may be challenging for institutions of higher education (IHEs) because of geography, environment, governance, around-the clock-operations, and…

Nearly every school year there is another mass shooting or tragic violent act that is being reported by news stations throughout the United States. Every time this occurs our community members, educational leaders, teachers and politicians vow to stop these heinous acts of violence. Recently, there have been programs developed at the state level…

Ensuring the safety and security of students is vital to creating a positive learning environment. Active shooter situations at postsecondary institutions resulted in about 150 casualties between 2000 and 2017. This prevalence of gun violence at postsecondary institutions, which is often viewed in the context of larger conversations around gun…

Scholars have explored ways in which school shooting events have impacted students' perception of safety. However, less is known on whether the effects of school shootings are stable across time and event. This study uses data collected through the Delaware School Survey before and after three school shootings, Columbine (1999), Virginia Tech…

In this essay, Drew Chambers argues that the implementation of modern security technology in American schools (also known as target hardening) may do more harm than good, especially when such technologies represent the primary mode of risk responsiveness. In using technological measures to reduce risk, schools may inadvertently undermine both…

A joint report from the National Center for Education Statistics and the U.S. Department of Education concluded that children and youth were 87 times more likely to die by murder or suicide outside of school than in it. How does the country weigh their awareness of the overall safe character of U.S. schools against the compelling desire to prevent…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore school personnel's perceptions of school safety and security in order to better understand the lived experience of three distinct personnel groupings: Office personnel serve as gate keepers to the school building, teachers spend the majority of the day with students, and administrators serve as…