Preventing School Violence Is a Winnable Exercise

Written in 2021 after a fatal shooting at a middle school in Albuquerque, Franklin Schargel’s article lists 23 steps schools can take to prevent violence, drawing on reports from federal agencies. The section added below sets those steps beside the Secret Service research that most closely studies the question, and looks at what school violence prevention strategies are supported by it.

We cannot think school violence won’t happen here. “Here” is everywhere. 

It was supposed to be a new school year – a fresh start with a new “normal” after being closed for an entire year. Three days into the new school year, school violence occurred in Washington Middle School in Albuquerque, NM (where I live) when a thirteen-year-old middle school student was shot and killed by another thirteen-year-old. This is having a profound and lasting impact on the school, the community, and our nation as a whole.

Schools are dealing with growing numbers of angry, young people who are disconnected from family, school, and society. The effects of Covid-19 and the closing of schools have exacerbated the already existing child anxiety, stress, and trauma. 

Violence is firmly embedded in America; it is also embedded in America’s schools. No school is immune. School violence has taken place in rural towns, cities, suburbs, and on Native American reservations. It has taken place in elementary, middle, high schools and universities.  Some communities were poor, some middle-class or affluent and some were mostly white, others mostly children of color.

Since the school shooting in Columbine, Colorado (April 20, 1999) and continuing through the elementary shooting at Sandy Hook, in Newtown, Connecticut (December 2012) to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida (February 14, 2018), a variety of government agencies (F.B.I., National Threat Assessment Center of the U.S. Secret Service, Homeland Security) have collected data and released a series of reports in an attempt to prevent further violence.

Based on my research and reports of these agencies, there are 23 things that schools can do:

1. Initiate a no-bullying policy
2. Accept “zero tolerance” for threats and violence and provide implementation steps
3. Develop and deploy a school security plan.
4. Implement a conflict resolution curriculum
5. Teach anger management techniques
6. Actively engage all stakeholders (students, teachers, staff, parents, law enforcement, the business community, Chambers of Commerce)
7. Form a Threat Assessment Team.
8. Have a Crisis Management Plan developed with the input of students, parents, law enforcement, and the outside community.
9. Establish fair, equitable rules, and consequences and enforce them.
10. Make the school family-friendly inviting parents and families to get involved.
11. Establish student “ambassadors” in classrooms and in the halls to make the school more inviting to new students.
12. Establish family “ambassadors” making the school more inviting to parents and community members.
13. Establish a school-dedicated website to allow students to anonymously report, signs of bullying, and potential signs of violence, etc.
14. Train staff to identify and address practical steps of potential school violence.
15. Involve the disenfranchised. Provide a voice for everyone.
16. Be proactive without being repressive.
17. Increase supervision in spots that have been identified as potential sources of school violence (lunchroom, bathrooms, gyms, athletic field, perimeter of school).
18. Teach cooperation by assigning projects that require collaboration.
19. Take immediate action when violence is observed. All teachers and staff must let students know they care and will not allow anyone to be mistreated.
20. Confront bullies. Invite parents or guardians of both those accused of violence and the victims to the school and attempt to resolve the issue expeditiously.
21. Invite the school/district experts on possible causes and what the staff can do to deal with the variety of school violence issues. 
22. Provide protection for victims. This can take the form of developing a buddy system. 
23. Develop contingency plans (“If this doesn’t work, we could try….”).

The job of schools is to prevent school violence, not to react to it once it has occurred.

School violence prevention strategies: what the federal research supports

School violence prevention strategies are easiest to judge against the studies of what happened before actual attacks, and the most detailed one is the 2019 report Protecting America’s Schools from the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC). The report examined 41 incidents of targeted violence at K-12 schools from 2008 to 2017. Franklin Schargel’s list above refers to this line of research, and several of the 23 items match what NTAC found. For a wider view of safety planning, see the edCircuit school safety guide, which covers how to prevent school violence across a whole district.

What the 2019 report found

The NTAC report is careful about what it does not show. It found no profile of a student attacker and no profile of a school that is targeted, because attackers varied in age, gender, race, grade level, academic performance and social standing. What the 41 cases shared was behavior. All of the attackers showed concerning behaviors, most drew concern from other people, and most communicated their intent to attack. In many cases someone saw a threatening communication or behavior and did not act, because of fear, doubt that the student meant it, or a belief that the student had been talked out of it.

The report also found that:

• the most common motive was a grievance with classmates, and most attackers had been bullied, over half of them persistently over weeks, months or years;
• nearly all had experienced a stressor in the six months before the attack, and half within two days of it;
• most used firearms, usually obtained from the home of a parent or other close relative, and in several cases the guns had been secured in a locked safe or case;
• half had interests in violent topics, and half had received mental health services before the attack, which the authors present as a reason to include mental health professionals in a team approach, not as a replacement for one;
• many of the schools had cameras, school resource officers and lockdown procedures, yet most attacks ended very quickly, so law enforcement seldom had a chance to step in beforehand.

How the findings line up with the 23 steps

Several of Schargel’s items correspond closely to the report’s conclusions: forming a threat assessment team, training staff to recognize and respond to warning behavior, creating a way for students to report concerns anonymously, a no-bullying policy, and involving parents and the community. NTAC’s own conclusion is that a multidisciplinary threat assessment team, with suitable policies, tools and training, is the best practice, and that the threshold for stepping in should be low so that schools can identify students in distress before safety concerns arise.

One item deserves a closer look. Schargel recommends accepting zero tolerance for threats, with implementation steps. The NTAC report says that punitive measures are not preventative and that removing a student who poses a risk may not always be the safest option, and it recommends fairness, transparency with the student and family, and follow-up. The two positions are compatible if zero tolerance means every threat is taken seriously and assessed, and they diverge if it means automatic removal. A district writing its policy should say which it intends.

School violence warning signs, read the way the research reads them

Because there is no profile, the useful question is what a student is doing and what is happening in the student’s life, not who the student is. Staff and families can watch for threats made in person or online, behavior that draws concern from other students or adults, fixation on violence, talk of suicide, persistent bullying, and access to weapons at home. NTAC’s published guidance has also continued since 2019. Its reports page lists, by title and short description only (the later reports were not read for this section), a 2023 toolkit on strengthening bystander reporting in K-12 schools, a 2025 guide on aligning behavioral threat assessment with a multi-tiered system of support, and a November 2025 report on the state of behavioral threat assessment in K-12 public schools drawn from a 2025 school leader panel survey.

What to decide locally

1. Name the members of the threat assessment team, including a mental health professional, and write down when a concern goes to the team.
2. Make reporting simple, with more than one route, and tell students and families what happens after they report.
3. Ask families about securing firearms at home as part of ordinary safety communication.
4. Fund prevention work alongside physical security and do not rely on the second alone, since the report found that many of the schools attacked already had cameras, school resource officers and lockdown procedures.

A student or staff member in distress can call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Schargel ends the article by saying that the job of schools is to prevent violence rather than react to it, and the research above is the best available guide to how.

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