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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 2024-2025 data, establishes three years of post-pandemic research. ESSN’s five school years of data and three 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 2024-2025 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 is still higher than in the pre-pandemic years.

When comparing the six school years of data, the rate of threats of violence in 2024-2025 have increased slightly from the previous year, returning 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.

2. Violent incidents in schools appear to have continued their decline from 2022-2023 to 2024-2025, however when false reports such as swatting are removed from the calculations, there is only a slight decrease in the number of violent incidents in 2024-2025 when compared to the previous year.

In 2022-2023 there were 699 violent incidents in schools compared to 490 incidents in the 2024-2025 school year, which is a 29.8% decrease. This is largely because of a significant decline in swatting or false reports of an active shooter reported in the 2022-2023 school year. In 2024-2025, there were 124 swatting incidents, down 72% 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 2024-2025 looks quite different. Violent incidents other than swatting increased 44% from the 2022-2023 to the 2024-2025 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 three subsequent school years after, the vast majority of violent incidents experienced in schools did not in fact involve a gun in any fashion.

During the 2024-2025 school year, schools faced a wide array of violence including false reports (25.3% of incidents), incidents of violence not involving a firearm (11.4% of incidents), outside violence coming into the school (9.6% of incidents), possible explosive devices and detonations (6.1% of incidents), and fights that required law enforcement intervention (5.1% of incidents). The rate of these non-gun related violence incidents has remained largely consistent from 2023 through 2025.

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 7.6% of all violent incidents in the 2023-2024 school year, down 26% from the previous year. Nearly 92% of the time schools were experiencing something other than an active shooter situation, and almost 70% 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.

4. The most commonly occurring incidents in 2024-2025 continue to increase over time.

In the 2024-2025 school year, the four most common incidents of violence were: (1) a false report of an active shooter , (2) a gun found on campus, (3) a non-gun related violent incident (such as violent and aggressive behavior), and (4) outside violence spilling into the school.

While this ranking was nearly the same as the previous year, for the first time in the data collection, other incidents of violence were more common than outside violence or actual shootings.

When examined over time, these four types of incidents have not always been the most common. In fact, the rate of outside violence coming into the school was barely measurable in the 2016-2017 school year, yet it has increased at a rapid rate during the past three school years.