Overview and Summary

As a national non-profit, the Educator’s School Safety Network (ESSN) has gathered data on violent threats and incidents using the same methodology and analysis since 2016. After a multiple year hiatus during the Covid-19 pandemic when schools in the United States were not consistently in session, research in this area resumed in the 2022-2023 school year. This year’s 2023-2024 data, establishes two years of post-pandemic research. ESSN’s five school years of data and two years of post-pandemic research provides a unique opportunity to compare violent threats and incidents in schools both longitudinally over time, as well as before and after the pandemic itself.

The alarming trends noted in this report highlight the critical need to move beyond speculation and anecdotes about school safety to a data-based analysis of the threats and incidents of violence that have occurred in K-12 United States schools in the 2023-2024 school year as well as in the recent past.

While there are several critical findings for the past school year as well as longitudinally, perhaps the most troubling is the clear indication that although threats of violence in schools fluctuate from year to year, the number of actual violent incidents that occur continues to be on the rise.

Key Findings

The number of threats in a given school year has decreased longitudinally, however the rate of violent incidents has increased during that same time period.

When comparing the five school years of data, the rate of threats of violence in 2023-2024 has returned to essentially the same number of threats as the first year of data collection (2016-2017) after several years of significant increases. There are a number of factors that may have contributed to this decline such as the implementation of more severe consequences for those making threats or improved investigation and response to the threats received.

Unfortunately, it is much more likely that the number of threats received has not actually declined, but rather that threats are considered commonplace and therefore less likely to be reported in the media, which means they would not be included in the research totals.
Of greater concern is the longitudinal data related to actual violent incidents in schools. Over the course of the data collection period, the number of violent incidents has increased more than 300% from the first year of data collection in 2016-2017 to the most recent school year 2023-2024. Unlike threats, actual incidents of violence have increased 83% when comparing pre and post pandemic school years.

2. Violent incidents in schools appear to have declined from 2022-2023 to 2023-2024, however when false reports such as swatting are removed from the calculations, there is an actual increase of 49% in the number of violent incidents in 2023-2024 when compared to the previous year.

In 2022-2023 there were 699 violent incidents in schools compared to 536 incidents in the 2023-2024 school year, which is a 23% decrease. This is largely because of a significant decline in swatting or false reports of an active shooter from the previous year. In 2023-2024, there were 158 swatting incidents, down 64% from the 446 swatting incidents recorded in the 2022-2023 school year.

When swatting or false reports are removed from the incident totals, the comparison between 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 looks quite different. Violent incidents other than swatting increased 49% from the 2022-2023 to the 2023-2024 school year. In other words, while swatting and false reports have dramatically decreased, the trend line over time indicates that violent incidents in schools continue to increase year to year at a significant rate.

It is difficult to determine exactly why swatting incidents have decreased so rapidly. Factors such as increased prosecution of offenders along with more stringent penalties are certainly a factor.

3. Gun violence remains a concern, however the majority of incidents that occur in a school continue to be not gun related.

In the first two years of data collection, the majority of violent incidents were gun related - either a gun on campus, shots fired, or an actual shooting. Starting just before the pandemic in 2018-2019 and the two subsequent school years after, the vast majority of violent incidents experienced in schools did not in fact involve a gun in any fashion.

Schools faced a wide array of violence including false reports (29.5% of incidents), outside violence coming into the school (10% of incidents), possible explosive devices and detonations (6.7% of incidents), fights that required law enforcement intervention (6.5% of incidents), intruders in the school (5.6% of incidents) and knives found and/or stabbings (3.9% of incidents).

This reality illustrates the need for a more comprehensive, all hazards approach to school safety. The rate of incidents involving a shooting on school grounds is clearly unacceptable, but comparatively speaking, is relatively low at 9.3% of all violent incidents in the 2023-2024 school year. Nearly 92% of the time schools were experiencing something other than an active shooter situation, and 72.4% of the time the incident did not involve a gun in any fashion. It is also important to note that this number refers only to man-made violent incidents and doesn’t account for the number of times schools experienced crisis events that were not violent in nature such as accidents, medical emergencies, or weather events.