Violence in Schools

Massive news media attention to a series of school shootings in the late 1990s radically altered public attitudes toward schools and transformed school safety policies and practices. Each tragic shooting seemed more horrific than the last, beginning in 1997 when a 16-year-old boy in Pearl, Mississippi, shot and killed a former girlfriend and another student while at school. One month later, a 14-year-old boy in Paducah, Kentucky, fired into a morning prayer group at his high school, killing three girls. A few months later in Jonesboro, Arkansas, two boys ages 11 and 13, lured elementary school children outside with a false fire alarm, then opened fire, killing four students and a teacher. Other shootings followed, and their occurrence in small, seemingly nonviolent communities stimulated fears that an epidemic of school violence was sweeping the nation.

Concern reached panic levels in the spring of 1999 when two heavily armed boys at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, systematically executed 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves, as police converged on the scene. Live, nationwide media coverage of the Columbine and other school shootings bombarded the public with powerful images of terrified teenagers fleeing from school, bloody students receiving emergency medical treatment, and anguished parents desperate for information about the fate of their children. Follow-up coverage repeatedly emphasized the brutal, tragic nature of the shootings, the seemingly callous character of the killers, and the great pain and distress experienced by traumatized survivors as well as bereaved classmates and family members of the victims. It is not surprising that a Gallup Poll (1999) taken after the Columbine shooting revealed that 74% of parents in the United States believed that a school shooting was somewhat or very likely to occur in their community.

News attention to school shootings also stimulated many juveniles to engage in copycat behavior such as drawing up hit lists of students they disliked and telephoning schools with false bomb threats. Some students, like the two boys at Columbine High School who recorded their plans and aspirations on videotape before their crime, were stimulated by the news accounts of school shootings to carry out their own acts of violence with hopes of gaining similar publicity. In other cases, law enforcement officials wrestled with the difficult task of distinguishing fanciful talk about committing a school shooting from actual plans made by groups of alienated students.

Ironically, violent crime by juveniles, including shootings at school, actually declined substantially after peaking in the early 1990s, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) annual Uniform Crime Reports (FBI, 1993–2002) and multiple studies summarized in the U.S. Department of Education's annual Indicators of School Crime and Safety. FBI statistics indicated that the number of youths arrested for murder in the United States dropped dramatically each year from more than 3,200 in 1993 to fewer than 900 by 2000 (FBI, 1993–2002). According to the National School Safety Center (2003), student-perpetrated homicides at school dropped from 42 fatalities in 1993 to just 5 in 2000. Among researchers, there was no question that school crime and violence were declining, even at a time when public opinion, news commentaries, and political rhetoric declared otherwise. Moreover, the 2001 report [Page 582]on youth violence by the U.S. Surgeon General observed that students were much less likely to be victims of violence at school than outside of school, and that fewer than 1% of homicides of school-age youths took place at school.

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