Improving School Safety: What the Evidence Says

Deanna Lee

Hi, Deanna here. Today's episode is on school safety. Before we get into the discussion, I wanted to let you know that we recorded this before the shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis late last month. As always, thanks for listening. Here's the episode.

You're listening to Policy Minded, a podcast from RAND. I'm Deanna Lee. School is back in session. And safety is top of mind for educators, families, and communities. RAND has extensive research exploring how to make schools safer. And today, we'll be diving into some of our findings on preventing school violence, addressing the risks posed by social media, enhancing physical security, and more.

Deanna Lee

Today I'm joined by Brian Jackson and Pauline Moore. Brian is a senior physical scientist and Paulene is a senior political scientist. Brian, thanks for being here.

Brian Jackson

Thanks so much, happy to be here.

Deanna Lee

And Pauline, welcome.

Pauline Moore

Thanks, great to be here.

Deanna Lee

OK, before we kind of get into your research and the actual topic for today, can each of you just give me a brief story of your background, maybe how you came to study this topic, a little bit about yourselves?

Pauline Moore

I can go first. So I'm Pauline Moore, political scientist at RAND. I came to study this topic kind of unorthodoxically and Brian might say the same thing, but my training is in political science and I studied insurgencies and terrorist groups as part of my PhD program and I do some of that still at RAND, which might seem a little bit alarming maybe that I'm now focused on, in large part, on school safety issues, but it actually makes sense. I think the draw has been essentially studying kind of like the micro dynamics of violence and how to prevent violence. And that has obviously been relevant to keeping our schools safe in this country. So it might be a circuitous route, but that's how I got here.

Brian Jackson

Well, I've been at RAND for a very long time, almost 25 years. I started in 2000. And although I'm a chemist by training, I don't do much chemistry at RAND. And since the beginning, I have been working on security-related issues and often issues that involve technology. And so after 9-11, that included thinking about a lot of physical security issues, aviation security, understanding when security measures worked and when they didn't. And adding to that some other work on terrorism, some other work on evaluating new technologies, thinking about how information technology and certain kinds of surveillance worked or didn't work to protect targets, to protect people, meant that... when the Department of Homeland Security was interested in RAND helping them in their school safety effort, I came to that effort at the beginning thinking about physical security measures and since have broadened out with Pauline to think about school safety in a holistic way and how physical security measures and other security efforts can work together to try to keep kids safe at school.

Deanna Lee

So we're talking about school safety today. I'm sure that when many of our listeners hear school safety, they're immediately thinking about preventing school shootings, sort of the highest profile incidents of violence, which is, of course, a very important part of this issue. In fact, rates of gun violence in schools actually reached an all time high in 2023. And we're going to talk about that aspect of this for sure. But there's so much more that schools are grappling with in the day to day. Can you give us an overview of the range of threats and risks that schools face today?

Pauline Moore

You're right that I think a lot of people, when they think about school safety and efforts to keep schools safe, first thing that comes to mind is these active shooter incidents that we hear about in the news because they're terrible and they obviously garner significant media coverage, but they're still rare. In fact, what we've heard from educators, whether we're talking about principals or teachers in surveys that we've fielded over the last few years is that they're actually a lot, they are a lot more concerned about the more day-to-day school safety issues that are impacting them. So that includes, you know, at the top of the list is bullying, for example, has been at the of the top list for the last few years. And they, you now, they think about student fights, they think drug issues in schools, they think issues related to self-harm and other types of crimes. And actually, concerns among educators about active shooter incidents are actually at the bottom of the list when we ask them about what their main school safety concerns are. So yeah, school safety certainly does encompass preventing and responding to active shooter incidents, but it also deals with a lot of these more day-to-day issues, whether we're talking about bullying or student fights.

Brian Jackson

Yeah, I mean, just to add to that a little bit, I mean, it all the interpersonal stuff that happens in schools is is sort of a big part of school safety. But of course, we also have to remember that that these sort of incidents are one part of what a principal or a school district planner has to think about, too. They also have to prepare for the other kinds of hazards that they need to protect our kids from. Whether that's the fire drills that there are requirements that they do every year. And we'll talk about drills later, I'm sure. But other kinds of things like extreme weather and tornadoes and sort of other activities and things that can happen at indoor school events versus outdoor school events and sporting. So school planners and school leaders sort of face kind of a really broad set of challenges and a really broad set of problems. And have to make sure that the way that we approach one doesn't get in the way of our ability to protect kids from everything else too.

Deanna Lee

Absolutely. Before we get into the details of some of these different aspects of school safety, I want to ask you a broad question. It might be difficult to answer, but I think it will also help us understand how two experts are thinking about the evidence on this topic and maybe be revealing in terms of how we're navigating data versus perception. So are America's schools safe?

Brian Jackson

Well, you're right. That is a very challenging question. And it depends whether you approach it in an absolute scale way or a comparative scale way. So going back to the high profile school shootings, the United States stands out among countries in the world about the number of school shootings that we have. Although, unfortunately, in recent years, some other countries have been starting to have more of them as well. That said, as sort of Pauline mentioned, on an absolute basis, they're not that frequent, which explains why educators are much more worried about things like bullying. So on balance, yes, schools are safe places. But that still means that we want to take prudent steps and reasonable steps to protect and prevent the incidents that do happen since for the schools where a shooting occurs, even if it's not one of the incidents of mass violence, that shooting has a very long-term effect on all the kids that are there, not just the kids directly affected by the shooting, by the staff that are there, and by the community, you know, in the community around that school. So that's... it's sort of the trade-off between, yes, schools overall are quite safe places, but there's still a focus on trying to prevent the incidents that do happen because of the way their impact spreads.

Pauline Moore

I'll add also, since we're talking less about perceptions here and more about the absolute, but as far as the data goes, the federal data actually shows that there's been a drop in school violence and school crime over a couple of decades now, and that is continuing today. So schools are seeing less victimization, fewer student fights, fewer thefts, things like that. I think drops in rates of bullying, but there are certain types of violence, certain types of concerns that are growing, right? Like rates of gun violence at schools reached all-time high in 2023, those are growing. Actually, this year, I think the current data shows that there have been about 100 incidents, which is probably going to make this year fall well below 2023 levels, which was good news. And then there are some elements of, for example, bullying that are growing, like cyberbullying, is becoming more common relative to, say, 10 years ago.

Deanna Lee

Good news there. Let's talk about what schools are doing to identify potential threats and also student behaviors that might lead to safety issues.

Pauline Moore

I think one of the most important things that schools have been focusing on and that we've also touched on in our work at RAND is this notion of making students, and actually the broader school community, comfortable with coming forward with safety-related concerns. Whether they hear a peer say something concerning, whether they see something, and that goes for teachers, too, whether they identify something in student writing, for example, that might cause concern. The idea is to build a climate, a culture within a school that is trusting, that is positive, and that is inclusive so that kids and teachers feel comfortable coming forward with their concerns and err on the side, err on the site of caution in terms of, I heard something, I'm not sure, should I bring this up? Yes, let's do it. Like that's what I'm being encouraged to do and I have this, you know, trusted adult in the case of a student that I can go to with that information. So that's really been a key point of focus, I think, for schools over the last few years and perhaps longer. And we're seeing schools rely more on things like anonymous tip lines as well, which if somebody is not comfortable going to a teacher directly, they can report something that way.

Brian Jackson

I mean, and to kind of jump in on that, I mean some examinations of past incidents of school violence have often found that someone knew something and what they knew might have seemed like a threat of violence, but they discounted it thinking that the kid wasn't serious or it might've been something that was more ambiguous or it might've just been an indication that there was a kid who was in trouble. And was going through a really rough time. And for whatever reason, the peer or the teacher or the staff member didn't think that what they had found or what they knew sort of rose to the level that they should tell somebody about it. And those kinds of missed signals are always something that you look at in past incidents as kind of the missed opportunity. Because what schools intend to do when somebody comes forward and whether it's a threat, whether it's kid in trouble, is to figure out the right way to respond to that. And that's not always getting the kid in a trouble, frequently it's not. And, you know, for the kid who's going through a rough time, it may be... figuring out what kinds of counseling or what kinds support that kid needs to get back on the right track and find their feet again. In some cases when there's an absolute, a clear threat and a kid who has the capacity to carry it out it does sometimes involve law enforcement intervention and criminal justice intervention. But the goal is always the school finding out about a problem as early as possible to be able to take the most productive and ideally sort of least intensive or least invasive kind of response to get a kid back on a path where they can learn and they can form good relationships with their peers and adults at school and get what they're supposed to get out of the education system.

Pauline Moore

One of the ways that I think schools have tried to make students feel more comfortable reporting is through this access to anonymous tip lines that are also going to be readily available to kids, so it's going to something that they can access on their cell phones and there's going be constant reminders of it, whether that's posters and QR codes around the school as well. That kind of really, I think, tries to address this fear of being seen as a so-called snitch, for example, or tattletaling on their friends. There's an anonymous way to do that.

Deanna Lee

Have you found that there are any specific things that schools or maybe this even extends to communities, what they can do to build this strong reporting culture and, you know, encourage kids and teachers to to speak up when they think that there there might be a threat?

Brian Jackson

Yeah, I mean, sort of the other pieces are trying to make clear to folks what to report, to sort of get away from the, oh, well, I see this. I don't know what it means. I'm not going to bother somebody reporting. But the more clarity that sort of you could give staff and students about the sorts of things that might be important for somebody to know about is a big, big part the puzzle. But the other, interestingly enough, is feedback to the school community, to individuals who report about what happens, to the extent that privacy requirements allow that. One of the barriers to folks making these kind of reports is fearing that they're going to get a kid in trouble for something that isn't that important or wasn't real. So, suddenly, the fact that I was concerned and picked up the phone or... submit it through a tip line, gets a kid who was fine into a situation where they have a long-term effect on them. Being able to provide feedback that a lot of what happens as a result of these kind of reports are positive. It's getting a kid counseling they need. It is getting a kid academic supports they need because their aberrant behavior was because they had run into problem at school, you know, and being as transparent as possible. You know, to really make it, you know sort of a community-based, you know, effort to kind of keep the school safe together.

Deanna Lee

And I'm curious, maybe this isn't something we have a lot of evidence on, but what do we know about how effective these tip lines and other reporting resources are? Have they effectively stopped incidents from happening that we know of?

Brian Jackson

Well, measuring prevention is always hard. That's probably a line that I have used in my work for 25 years. Because certainly, you can never know for certain whether somebody who said something in anger and got intervention as a result of somebody throwing a flag that they had said something in anger would have carried through on that or not. The ideal, though, is that what happened as a result of that was positive for the kid and had a benefit even if it was sort of a transient or an impulsive threat that the kid didn't really mean. That said, there are certainly cases where information provided by folks who had observed kids who were fixated about past incidents of school violence, who idealized some of the individuals who had carried out those kind of incidents, turned up later information that really did suggest that they were going to go through with it. And so it is one of those things where, you know, overall, you can't, there's no scoreboard that says definitively these kind of interventions have prevented X hundred or X thousand incidents that would have occurred otherwise. But we do know that they have prevented some and when done right, they also serve as an entry point for services and supports that are designed to help the kids that get them. You know, whether or not the threat itself was serious.

Pauline Moore

One thing I'll add to that also is, you know, this is by no means a concrete measure of effectiveness, but I think it does speak to at least the impact and the role that these tip lines are playing in schools and that in our conversations with, uh, with, you know, principals, school counselors, and others, we've heard that what a lot of schools actually get through these tiplines are, you know, kind of cries for help from students who are considering contemplating self-harm. I think that those are a lot of the tips that these anonymous lines are receiving. So, you know, they probably are preventing violence. Again, like Brian said, that's hard to measure, but what they're also doing, I think, is making schools more aware of some of the stressors and difficulties that some of the students might be experiencing, the emotional distress that students might be experiencing. And it's just a, you now, a way, I guess, that some kids are crying out for help, reaching out for help. And that is certainly, I would say, a positive impact that they're probably having, even if schools might feel overwhelmed by the number of tips that they might be receiving through these tip lines.

Deanna Lee

Let's talk about a specific type of threat that you've studied, and that's direct threats of violence that come from social media. This is a growing concern. Most of these threats are anonymous, and many of them aren't legitimate, right? Between January 2023 and January 2024, schools across the country experienced more than 750 distinct swatting incidents, where someone calls the police making a false report of violence. Triggering a disruptive police response, causing havoc. Can you talk about the unique challenge that this presents for schools?

Pauline Moore

Sure, I think you touched on a lot of the unique challenges or maybe one of the main ones, and that's that schools are receiving a lot from them. They don't know where they're coming from. And what's also unique about these is that they also tend to follow, at least they have in the past, actual incidents of mass violence at school. So for example, if there's an active shooting incident in one school in Florida, let's say, schools all of a sudden all around the country are going to be receiving these copycat threats. So they're already, these schools are already on edge, you know, have maybe implemented heightened security measures in anticipation of a copycat shooting. And then they're also receiving all of these anonymous threats that even though, you know they probably know that most are hoaxes, they most likely still have to run every one of them down to make sure that they actually are. So it's hugely time consuming. It's stressing obviously for the community and schools need to also figure out how to respond in a way that is not going to add stress to their own school community, right? So is, is calling in a SWAT team the right answer? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe there are other things, lower level, smaller scale security measures that they can take prior to, you know, more overwhelming response that might add undue stress to an already stressed out community.

Brian Jackson

Yeah, I mean, the swatting incidents are like the most extreme example here. I mean so this is someone who is calling the police, potentially with an audio track behind them of gunfire or explosions and trying to prompt the police to send their SWAT team essentially, or send, you know, an overwhelming officer response to a school that they think has a shooting going on right then. And their goal in doing this is to cause disruption. But sitting in the chair of the decisionmaker, who's receiving that call at the police department, it's a heartbreaking or sort of a wrenching decision is probably the word because if an actual incident is going on, you don't wanna delay a moment. Past incidents, many of them are over in minutes. So the difference between police responding immediately and effectively versus a more deliberate kind of response, if it's a real incident could be the difference between some lives and some deaths. On the other hand, Going through an elementary school with a SWAT team in full battle rattle, if you will, guns out and body armor on, will definitely traumatize an entire school of elementary school students, which may also have its own long-term effects. And so, you know, figuring out how to sort of strike that balance, to come up with ... a sort of a way to graduate response or to make it more flexible really is a necessity for schools. And this was something actually where we learned a lot from talking to school administrators and some law enforcement folks across the country who had had to deal with this. And some of the folks who'd really thought it through sort of talked about almost a stair step of response or a ladder of response where they might immediately send a couple of plain clothes officers to the school. Is that the level of response that you'd really want if there was truly a high-end school shooting? No, probably not. It's also a level of response that's probably able to deal with a lot of the shootings that happen. And it's a level response that when they get on scene, they're not going to be obvious to the children. They're not gonna be traumatizing to the children. They're just another guy or gal in a suit or business attire who happens to have a gun under the jacket walking through the school. But if they get there and they see something's going on, having a higher stair steps of response queued up so they can come in quickly is one way that folks told us they tried to have the best of both worlds or to minimize the worst of both worlds is probably a better way of doing that.

Pauline Moore

I'd add, can I just add one more thing about, you know, these responding to, whether it's a swatting incident or a social media threat that's maybe spreading like wildfire on kids' phones, for example. A huge challenge is also managing the fear and the spread of fear and what happens when these kids, you now, have their cell phones in school, reach out to their parents who all flock to the school and complicate that response even more and research on this particular topic and talking to school administrators and their law enforcement partners and others who are involved in responding to these types of situations. What is really critical also is what the school is doing to communicate out to its community about the steps that they're taking to, first and foremost, keep their communities safe. We found that schools have done it really right in that way, many have, some have not, but when they do it right in terms of consistently and pretty frequently communicating, massly communicating with parents, for example, about this ongoing situation, what they're doing, how they're working with law enforcement, et cetera, I think that's really helped temper reactions and fear in response to these types of situations as well, which is really, really important.

Deanna Lee

Right, so open and consistent communication between schools and parents is really important. And it sounds like close coordination and communication between schools, and community police departments is also a really important aspect of that. I'm thinking about a few moments ago, we were discussing the importance of building a strong reporting culture and giving kids avenues to report threats. Now we're talking about these hoax threats and how much of a problem they've come to be. Are these two minimizing hoax threads and building a strong reporting culture? In any way, are those two goals working against each other? Or are the hoax threat a byproduct of encouraging kids to report threats?

Pauline Moore

I don't think that's something that we've seen directly. I could see how you'd make the connection. So there's this slogan that I can't remember if the FBI came up with it or something, but it basically goes something like, report, don't repost or something like that. So if a kid sees something on their social media account, a threat, it could be a picture of a kid with a gun or something that saying, I'm gonna come shoot up the school and they think that the right way to report that is by, you know, posting it to their social media account in a way that would help that spread, I could see the connection there. And that actually is a campaign that law enforcement agencies have taken on to try to halt the spread of these types of things across various platforms.

Brian Jackson

Yeah. Of course, to build that, that's another way to try to minimize the benefit of making hoax threats. If the goal of the hoax threat is fear and disruption, then a part of responding to it is responding in a way that tries to minimize the fear and the disruption that the response causes. To hopefully make it less attractive to make hoax threats like that in the future. And so providing good ways for kids to report, providing ways that they become comfortable with and become trusted to them is a way to try to avoid that sort of more viral spread of these kinds of things outward.

Deanna Lee

Okay, let's move on to physical security. What schools are doing to keep the buildings and everyone inside safe. Are there best practices that all schools should be implementing?

Brian Jackson

So one of the challenges in the physical security realm is that there isn't a very deep evaluation literature on really determining what works and what doesn't. So RAND did a study now a decade ago where we dug through the literature to try to find as much as we could on evaluation of actual physical security measures. And there really wasn't much there. And it hasn't gotten a whole lot better since. That said, there are some very good logical best practices and some sort of important lessons about implementing those, given the complexities of a school environment. After incidents, you often hear that a door that was supposed to be locked was not or it was propped open because that's where students went to smoke or, you know, etc. So, keeping a perimeter around the school to provide only one way or a few ways in that can be managed by folks monitoring them is sort of one best practice. The ability to do that is hindered by a youth population, but it can also be hindered by the practicalities that schools are very, very different. So the situation for an urban school potentially in a building where they're not even the only tenants of the building, versus a open campus, multi-building, suburban school that's spread over a much larger area. What keeping a perimeter means in each of those cases is very, very different and is difficult in different ways for each of them. But certainly, keeping a perimeter, monitoring folks coming in and out to make it less, less easy for someone to be able to bring weapons into a school. The sort of things that are logical but not always as easy to implement, as they are to say.

Pauline Moore

I think the other half of the story here is that while, like Brian said, there's certainly not a robust literature by any means about the effectiveness of different types of measures. What folks have studied a lot more of is the impact of various types of measures on student perceptions of safety, for example. Things like cameras and metal detectors and stuff like that is actually making them feel safer or is it making them less safe? And I think that one finding that kind of sticks out for me in that literature is that the less visible types of security measures, so the locks that Brian was just talking about, visitor access, things like that, badges, these types of measures are less likely to make kids feel uncomfortable at school, whereas if you have cameras all over the place, metal detectors at every entrance. Those types of very visible measures, at least certain studies have found that they might have a less desirable effect on how students feel at school.

Deanna Lee

That's a really good segue into the next topic I want to discuss, which is how students and teachers feel about safety in their schools. You both have mentioned some survey findings throughout our discussion today. So we've touched on this a little bit about teachers' perceptions. Pauline, you just mentioned students' perceptions of safety. Overall, do teachers and students feel safe at school? And what are they most concerned about?

Brian Jackson

Our surveys have let us kind of take the temperature of teachers over multiple years, and more recently, principals, to sort of ask them a couple of questions about their personal feelings of safety at school. These are part of the RAND American Educator Panels, which have been great for us as safety researchers to be able to let us get kind of snapshots of different issues and different questions. And the answer to that is that there's actually a reasonable amount of fear out there among education professionals. So I jotted down a couple of the numbers, but you know recently about 20% of teachers, So, one in five have said that they are personally afraid of being the victim of violence at school. Our recent measure from principals was a little bit lower than that, so 15%. And that may not sound high, but when you think about people who being afraid to go to work every day, that one in five teachers is concerned that they're going to be hurt because of what they do for a living is really pretty notable. Our follow-up question to them, though, is whether they were concerned about their students being victims of violence at school. And there, the numbers are much higher. Across our survey is about 45% of teachers and principals. So almost half said that they were afraid that their students were going to be the victim of violence at school. And so that's a pretty notable measure. And at least for me, bringing in some of the things that Pauline talked about, about the effect of different security measures on feelings of safety, about how school climate can affect how kids feel safe at school that really sort of flags for me that fear of school violence is in some ways sort of its own policy problem that we really need to wrestle with along with trying to prevent the violent incidents that do occur, because they're both impactful.

Deanna Lee

So you you asked teachers specifically about lockdowns and active shooter drills, correct? Can you tell us what you learned from them?

Pauline Moore

Yeah, I can't remember the exact percentage, but it is certainly an overwhelming majority of teachers go through these drills every school year. So they have experience with them. And we asked them about things like, you know, the different types of elements that are included in these drills. A major concern is that the more realistic elements like sounds of live gunfire, things like fake blood, victims, can be pretty traumatic, unsurprisingly, to kids. So excluding realistic elements and avoiding highly sensorial drills is kind of a best practice and that's been emphasized by major organizations like the National Association of School Psychologists, the National Association of School Resource Officers. We asked teachers about their experience with these types of sensorial drills, it sounds like schools are largely not doing these kinds of things, which is good news. We know from the literature and press reports, the Washington Post had a big piece a few years ago on active shooter drills, we know that these types of drills can be stressful for students and they probably can be for teachers also. So we asked about whether teachers had experienced students being stressed or traumatized from these types of activities from participating in drills. We asked about the types of supports that their schools are putting in place. Before, during, and after drills to try to minimize some of that stress for students. We asked about things like whether schools are notifying parents in advance and students in advance of these types of drills, and whether there's an option to opt out. And then we also asked about whether these drills actually make teachers feel more prepared to respond to these types of incidents. And we ask them whether they make them feel safter at school. And we also asked what their perceptions were of students feeling more prepared and students feeling safer as a result of participation. And the answers to those questions weren't necessarily encouraging. There wasn't an overwhelming finding that teachers were all of a sudden feeling very prepared after having participated in these types of drills. I think about half of teachers felt neither more nor less prepared having participated in them. And only 20% of teachers felt safer at school as a result of participating in these drills. And unfortunately, we also found out that most schools are unfortunately not providing the types of mental health supports either before, during, or after drills that these big national organizations that I mentioned are really encouraging schools to do so that it minimizes stress. And we're not, unfortunately, given the reality of of school safety in the U.S., we're not going to be doing away with active shooter drills anytime soon, nor should we necessarily be trying to do that. We should be trying to accommodate students, identify and address their needs, and figuring out what alternative things they can do to prepare themselves to respond to an emergency of this nature if they were to experience one based on their disability or other needs, whether they're emotional or other types of needs.

Deanna Lee

Anything to add, Brian?

Brian Jackson

I guess the only sort of small thing I would add is also figuring out how to make them better at reducing fear. You know, again, it's sort of, fortunately, the chance of a shooting at any specific school is very small. Having a prepared student body at the schools where they happen is important, but we would like the drills and the preparation to be something that reinforced feelings of safety, that reinforced kids' perceptions that there were things that they could do to protect themselves and others in the event that something happened. I think that in some ways as an opportunity, you know, sort of figuring out, you know, not just how we run these drills the way that we always have, but figure out how we can make them sort of a more effective intervention for reducing fear and increasing perceptions of safety, because that's something that would benefit every kid that goes through an active shooter drill, not just the kids at schools who unfortunately had an incident that the drill was intending to prepare them for.

Deanna Lee

Okay, we've covered a lot of ground today. Based on everything we discussed, but also your broader expertise in this area, what do you think should be schools' top priorities when it comes to safety?

Pauline Moore

I always come back to school climate, honestly, which I know is such a big, broad answer. I really believe having talked to teachers and principals and others at schools and law enforcement partners who work with schools, I really believe that fostering a trusting climate at schools where people feel included, it's a kind of a, there's just a positive vibe all around. Kids have connections to adults at their school, they trust them. I really think that that is what can most help promote a safe school climate, whether we're talking about identifying concerns early to be able to respond before something happens, or even just, you know, making kids feel safe. Avoiding or minimizing emotional distress that might lead to, you know, acts of violence that might be cries for help.

Brian Jackson

Yeah, I mean, the thing that I would say is that sort of the fortunate thing is that a lot of the tools that are used to intervene for the day-to-day things like bullying are the same tools that help intervene for somebody who looks like they're going down a path towards violence. It's counseling, it's intervention to support academics, et cetera. And so responding to the day-to-day priorities that teachers and principals have told us are their priorities because they're affecting a lot of kids constantly provides a toolbox that can be applied to dealing with a lot of the risk of high consequence school violence incidents. So it's figuring out how to make those investments. We're in a resource constrained environment, you know, I'm not sure that there were you know even over the last decade there were too many schools that you know felt they had too much money and couldn't figure out what to do with it. And so that's a challenge. I mean it costs money to be able to provide counseling particularly to a student whose family might not be in a position to pay for that or might not have insurance that would be willing, you know, or able to pay that. It costs money to have community connections to other sorts of care for substance abuse, connections and the ability to deliver academic interventions that might be sort of out of the ordinary for the standard school curriculum to get a kid back on the right path. And so that's sort of the top priority is, you know, figuring out, you know, how to build the biggest and most effective toolbox that can help the most kids in these schools given the resource constraints that are faced by everybody and how to supplement that to be able to hedge against the high-end risks but benefit by trying to manage the low-end violence risks at the same time.

Deanna Lee

Can you talk a little bit about how you approach studying this topic?

Brian Jackson

So the thing about working on school safety is that there are so many places we can get good ingredients for our work. There is academic literature of folks who have tried to do evaluations of different interventions. There is security literature, not just a security literature about schools, but a security literature about protecting all sorts of different targets. There's, you know, the media reports that are often the source that we have about what happened when things went wrong. And in fact, in some of our past work, it's the media reports that have let us track out, you, know, sort of the way that threats appear after large-scale incidents. But it's also trying to get as much information as we can from the school practitioners themselves, both through the RAND American Educator Panels, but I think our total of folks we've interviewed through much of our work is now significantly over 100, talking to people in urban districts, rural districts, suburban districts all over country. And we have learned amazing things from the folks who work in schools, run schools, teach kids every day that has affected the way that we think about it.

Deanna Lee

Finally, I'm sure we have a lot of listeners in our audience who have school-aged children. Do you have any advice for parents who might be concerned about school safety?

Brian Jackson

As a parent of a high schooler right now, what I would say is for starters, go back to what we said at the very beginning, schools overall are quite safe places, but the advice is to engage with the school, support the efforts that they're doing, know your kids, know their friends. You are part of the community that is sort of paying attention for kids who are potentially in trouble, for kids that are potentially going down a path that could end up bad for both them and others. Talking to principals, we sort of asked, what's one of your big roadblocks to doing some of these kinds of interventions. And in fact, some of them said parents not being willing to participate and not being willing to play their part either for their kid, but I would argue for the kids of the community is a challenge for them in a lot of places. That's really my advice is that this is one where parents are part of the solution. And engaging and being on board with doing that is important.

Pauline Moore

Yeah, I'm not sure that I have a particularly different answer. I think one of the most important things that parents can do is talk to their kids, stay connected with your kid and the school as well. Like Brian said, this notion of parent engagement is critical to keeping our schools safe, which is unsurprising, right? Kids go from school to home and back every day, so they're very enmeshed in both of those environments. So keeping the home and the school connected is obviously critically important. And if we're talking about perceptions, schools are safe places. They're probably safer than I can think of a few other places that kids could be during the day. I think that that's really important to recognize and also tell your kids that school is a safe place to be.

Deanna Lee

That's a great note to end on. I think that's all the time we have for today. I want to thank Brian and Pauline for being here. We really appreciate your time. Thank you both. Thank you. Thank you, it was a great discussion.

Deanna Lee

Thanks again to Pauline Moore and Brian Jackson. And of course, thanks to our listeners. You can learn more about the research we discussed on this episode at rand.org/policyminded. This episode was produced by me, Deanna Lee. I recorded it along with Pauline Moore and Evan Banks. Evan Banks also edited today's episode. RAND's director of digital outreach is Pete Wilmoth. We'll see you next time on Policy Minded. RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis.