School Safety and Security

While school safety experts say school violence and shootings are on the rise, they also noted a pattern of false alarms in 2023.

There have been approximately 30 incidents per week nationwide since at least the start of this academic year, according to news reports compiled by the National Association of School Resource Officers. Around this time last year, there were 34 incidents counted by NASRO during the week of Dec. 5, 2022, Jay Farlow, a spokesperson for the organization, said. 

Different kinds of false alarms are generally referred to as "swatting" or "hoax threats." 

While a generally accepted definition doesn't yet exist, NASRO refers to swatting as a false report of an existing situation so dangerous that it requires a large emergency response. That would include false reports of a shooting, for example.

According to the K-12 School Shooting Database, there have been some 728 swatting incidents in 2023, with a peak of 210 in March.

"Swatting is an enormous waste of resources," said David Riedman, creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database and co-founder of the Homeland Security Advanced Thinking Program. Riedman said he also noticed swatting appear on more headlines in 2023. "They create a huge amount of danger, a huge amount of disruption." 

For example, police officers accidentally fired their weapons inside schools in swatting cases this past spring, said Riedman — such as in one May incident at St. John's Preparatory School in Danvers, Massachusetts. 

On the other hand, hoax calls occur when someone falsely threatens future violence, such as school shootings or bombings. These generally do not require the same kind of large emergency response.

NASRO said that motives behind false alarms can vary from a student wanting to delay an exam to creating chaos. 

"Hoax bomb threats, shooting threats and other empty threats of future school violence are far from harmless," the organization said in guidance released Dec. 21.

Law enforcement involvement and disruptions

While they have separate definitions, both hoaxes and swatting can cause disruptions in school activities to different degrees, including evacuations, police response, school cancellations and early dismissals. 

For example, in the spring, districts nationwide grappled with serial swatting that Riedman said was likely coordinated and "created mass chaos." 

Hoax threats also lead to lost instructional time, emotional trauma and overtime expenses. 

However, the best way to combat hoax threats is to prevent them from disrupting schools as much as possible, according to NASRO's guidance released Dec. 21. 

“When schools close or evacuate for a communicated threat that isn’t credible, the perpetrators get exactly what they want,” said Mo Canady, executive director of NASRO. Canady also warned against evacuations because students may be safer in their classrooms than outside the building. 

"Regardless of motive, the less disruption a school allows, the less perpetrators will be encouraged to send hoax threats.”

NASRO wrote in its guidance that schools with trained school resource officers can help determine if a threat is a hoax, and that administrators should consult with law enforcement agencies — including FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — when developing response plans. 

Riedman said police should also respond differently than they sometimes do. 

"With swatting, a lot of police departments will say, 'Well, we got this 911 call. We have to be better safe than sorry,'" he said. Instead, police departments should verify with the school if there's a credible threat "before sending dozens of officers at 100 miles an hour all racing there.”

School shootings reached yet another unprecedented high in 2023, outpacing the previous year's record for the third year in a row. With a little less than two weeks remaining in the year, some 340 school shootings had been recorded as of Dec. 20 by the K-12 School Shooting Database. 

The database, one of the leading projects tracking gun violence on school grounds, counts any time a gun is fired or brandished with intent, or when a bullet hits school property, regardless of the number of victims, time, day or reason behind the incident. 

Other organizations also track school shootings but use different definitions, depending on factors such as location, time and whether they were intended to cause — or resulted in — injuries or deaths. This mismatch of school shooting datasets and definitions is confusing to the public and can simultaneously elevate fears and mask trends, according to educators, lawmakers and school safety experts.

The confusion can also stymie prevention efforts, they say. However, some say the different collections can benefit stakeholders who have specific questions about gun violence on school campuses. For example, one collection could allow deeper research into what led to the shooting, while another can offer more insight into the details of a shooting. 

The number of school shootings this year seems likely to fall just short of predictions from David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database and co-founder of the Homeland Security Advanced Thinking Program. He had estimated the final number of shootings would land somewhere between 360 and 400 by the end of 2023. 

"Just based on the characteristics of these incidents — and that it's been a growing number the last couple years without any kind of meaningful actions being done to address the root causes — I think that it was foreseeable" that the number of shootings would continue to increase, said Riedman. 

Mass shootings

While school shootings as defined by Riedman have reached new highs in recent years, the active shooter incidents and mass shootings were a small portion of the overall gun activity on K-12 campuses in 2023. 

School shootings may arise from disputes that escalate, while active shooting incidents usually involve intentionally targeting victims on a large scale. By October, there had been a total of seven active shooter incidents on school campuses, said Riedman. 

Although the use and definition of the term “mass shooting" varies, the FBI defines it as any incident in which at least four people are murdered with a gun. 

According to Riedman, there have been five school shootings this year that each had four or more victims. The Covenant School mass shooting in March in Nashville, Tennessee, remains the deadliest this year as of Dec. 20, with six dead.

Deaths from school mass shootings in 2023 did not reach last year's level, when 19 children and 2 teachers were killed by an active shooter in a single tragedy at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. 

So far this year, 227 people have been killed or wounded on school property from school shootings overall as of Dec. 20, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database. That's below last year's level, when 273 were wounded or killed on school property. 

Trends in 2023

Still, many of the trends in K-12 shootings this year followed prior patterns. 

For instance, about a third of shootings in 2023 resulted from disputes that escalated. In total, 831 school shootings recorded since the 1970s began as disagreements, per Riedman's analysis. 

"When there's a dispute, what would have just been an argument or a fight before turns into a shooting," said Riedman. 

Since the 1970s, students have perpetrated some 40% of school shootings, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database's analysis. In 2023, most shootings were carried out by people with a direct connection to the school, such as students, former students and people attending school sporting events.

However, Riedman said he's also seen a new trend emerge this year, with an increase in random school shooters who have no direct connection to the school. 

John McDonald, co-founder and chief operating officer of The Council for School Safety Leadership, said he's seeing school shootings become more aggressive, targeted and intentional. 

There are "more manifestos that I'm seeing lately — that shooter that's put more thought into this," said McDonald. "It's not spontaneous anymore. It's more planned.”

Tracking school shootings

While several organizations track K-12 shootings, they employ different methods for collecting and reporting information. Most have months or years of reporting lag time, making it difficult to spot trends faster.

The FBI tracks active shooting incidents, which the bureau defines as when one or more individuals use a firearm and are actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area. Data for this reporting is sourced through official law enforcement reports and open-source information.

In 2022, four of the 50 active shooting incidents documented in the U.S. occurred at "education" locations including public and private pre-K-12 schools, school administration buildings, and public and private higher education properties, according to an FBI report released in April. 

Those four incidents resulted in the killing of 20 students and three employees. Another 29 people were wounded, the report said.

A database compiled by the Gun Violence Archive shows that 125 shooting incidents led to death or injury at elementary and secondary schools in 2022. That compares to 93 incidents this year as of Dec. 11, according to this database. The Gun Violence Archive considers school shootings as an incident that occurs on the property of the elementary, secondary or college campus where there is a death or injury from gunfire and when students, staff, faculty are present at the facility for school or extracurricular activities. 

The U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics also publishes school shooting data — using information from a variety of sources, including the Center for Homeland Defense and Security's School Shooting Safety Compendium and the FBI.

In a September post, NCES said that since around 2000, these data show "no consistent trend in the number of school-associated violent deaths or in the number of FBI active shooter incidents in educational environments." 

Statistics from the School Shooting Safety Compendium for K-12 schools, a government-funded project that ceased updating its information in July 2022, pointed to an increase in the number of school shootings, NCES said. Indeed, an NCES table published in September 2022, using the compendium as a source, showed 319 school shootings in the 2021-22 school year.

The compendium defined school shootings as every instance a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason. 

The same NCES table shows that between the 2000-01 and 2017-18 school years, the number of schools with a gun brandished or shootings stayed below 100 for each school year. Starting with the 2018-19 school year, schools with shootings climbed into the hundreds before reaching 319 in 2021-22. 

Still, another resource — Everytown for Gun Safety, an organization advocating for reduced gun violence — tracks every time a firearm discharges a live round inside or into a school building or onto a school campus or grounds, as documented by the media, its own sourcing and the K-12 School Shooting Database. As of Dec. 11, it recorded 131 incidents of gunfire on school grounds this year. 

Seeking a federal definition

Legislation introduced in the U.S. House and Senate for the past two sessions seeks to set a federal definition of a school shooting as an event where one or more injury or death occurs on school grounds, or while students were traveling to or from school or a school-sponsored event.

The bill would require the U.S. Department of Education to publish an annual report on school crime and safety that would include the number of school shootings and details from those incidents, as well as the safety measures in place at schools involved.

Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-Connecticut, is one of the bill's co-sponsors. Hayes was a high school history teacher in Waterbury, Connecticut, when, on Dec. 14, 2012, a gunman killed 26 adults and children at nearby Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. When Hayes came to Congress in 2019, she said she was "shocked" to learn there was no federal definition of a school shooting, or a uniform and consistent method for collecting and reporting data.

"If we are to truly address this issue, we have to own the data, we have to collect the data, and there really is no good reason why we don't," Hayes said.

She added, "I just can't imagine how we're going into the 11th year after Sandy Hook that we have not made concrete, tangible nationwide steps to address student safety on campuses, whether it's an elementary school or a college campus. That should be a safe space."

Movement on the bill, however, has been slow due to disagreement on gun violence prevention. Hayes said she and others are prepared to reintroduce the bill in future Congresses if it doesn't pass next year. 

Understanding student shooters

In an effort to prevent future shootings, researchers and school safety experts have studied the available statistics to try to understand why students would shoot other students. A 2020 U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that half of school shootings between the 2009-10 and 2018-19 school years were committed by a student or former student. 

Jerry Sparby was an elementary school principal in 2003 when a then 15-year-old former student of his shot and killed two students at nearby ROCORI High School in Cold Spring, Minnesota. Sparby — who had known the student since preschool — was asked by the teen's family to talk to him while he was at a detention center soon after the shooting. What Sparby remembers most from that conversation was the shooter saying he felt socially isolated at school and how he had craved connections.

Over the past two decades, Sparby, now a wellness and mental health consultant, has traveled the nation at the request of school systems and families to talk with students who have been identified as at risk of causing harm or being a potential shooter. He found the one commonality among all those students is they all felt "invisible" at school. 

"Their peers don't see them. Their peers have nothing to do with them," said Sparby, who has started a nonprofit called HuddLUp to support students' mental well-being and positive peer connections. "They all tell the same story — that 'there wasn't a kid in the classroom who knew I was there, nor did they care.'" 

The COVID-19 pandemic amplified both students' feelings of loneliness and the need to prioritize student mental health services, he said. "What we're hoping for is no invisible kid." 

Preparation and recovery

While COVID-19 has exacerbated students' behavioral issues, school shootings have been around since at least 1996, said McDonald. And they've increased exponentially in recent years.

"And we've got to get pretty real here about what are we going to do," he said. "Otherwise, we're going to find ourselves in a position 25 years from now saying, 'Geez, for 50 years, we still haven't figured this out.' Shame on us." 

McDonald, Riedman and other school shooting experts point to the barriers to solving the problem: inconsistencies in school safety and violence prevention measures, changing school discipline policies, and a lack of resources. Both school violence experts and educators agree that access to guns and an overall increase in community violence is exacerbating the issue. 

However, no matter the preparation and prevention measures, it's not possible to entirely prepare for a shooting — including the emotional toll it takes, said George Sells, spokesperson for St. Louis Public Schools. Sells experienced a school shooting in October 2022, when a 19-year-old former student opened fire on students and staff, killing two and injuring seven. 

On that day, for example, Sells and his team didn't anticipate that traffic and police barricades would keep them from getting to the scene at Central Visual Performing Arts High School . As a result, they had to run about a mile to access the school and the reunification point. 

"It's one of those things that you want to be prepared for, so to speak, but you never are," said Sells. "It's like a slap across the face when you're not expecting it — and boom, there it is." 

Recovery is still a work in progress in the district. Sells calls it "a journey more than it is a task."

A little over a year later, Sells added, he and others can still feel the fallout. 

"But I'll tell you what: Everybody in my office now knows that you keep a comfortable pair of shoes available and handy in case something like that ever happens again." 

Trends for 2024 and beyond

In the meantime, experts expect 2024 to bring more of the same. 

Riedman predicts school shootings to exceed 300 next year, just as they did in 2022 and 2023.

"Unfortunately, this is becoming more and more common," echoed Sells. Sells and others agreed that, since schools are microcosms of broader communities, so too is the problem of increased shootings at schools a microcosm of the gun violence problem nationwide. 

"I think it kind of matches how there's just, there's violent crime, and there's gun crime, and there are more people carrying guns than any other point in history that we know of," said Riedman. "And that's just leading to a lot of incidents happening in schools."

McDonald, the school safety expert who co-founded The Council for School Safety Leadership, said much the same. 

"The threats are not stopping, the shootings aren't slowing down. And I don't see them slowing down," he said. "I think the next five to seven years are going to be pretty tough years.”

Ed tech companies using artificial intelligence-based algorithms to detect risk among students for suicide, self-harm and harm to others via digital monitoring tools can serve as one potentially useful way for schools to prevent suicide, according to a recent RAND Corp. report.   

However, the report found when interviewing parents, advocates and some school staff that concerns persist over the technology’s ability to protect sensitive student data. The study’s respondents also raised flags about the lack of oversight and research regarding the accuracy of AI monitoring tools. 

RAND recommends that school districts engage and get feedback from their communities about the use of AI monitoring tools, inform caregivers and students about any suicide risk surveillance technology in use, and about opt-out policies. Other suggestions for districts include tracking student outcomes following a suicide risk alert and educating students about mental health issues.

Schools are facing mounting pressure to address severe student mental health concerns, just as the AI surveillance technology used by companies like Gaggle, Securly and GoGuardian, continues to grow increasingly popular among districts.

There’s good reason for school leadership concern — in 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that suicide was the second leading cause of death for children ages 10-14 and the third leading cause of death for teens and adults ages 15-24. In February, CDC found that nearly 1 in 3 teenage girls seriously considered attempting suicide, a 60% increase from a decade ago. Among LGBTQ+ students, CDC said over 20% attempted suicide. 

While the risk of student suicide is a real issue schools must grapple with, evidence is still sparse that AI surveillance tools are the best answer to address student safety threats to themselves and others. 

A recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union flagged that school surveillance technologies, including online monitoring tools, foster a false sense of security without much evidence to demonstrate they actually improve school safety. 

The latest RAND report echoes some of that skepticism. Yet researchers also said there are some benefits for AI-based surveillance tools, finding in interviews with school staff and health care providers that there have been actual instances of these tools successfully identifying a student at imminent risk for suicide who would not have been detected through other prevention or mental health programs at the school. 

“Given the extent of the mental health challenges among youth and limited resources available in schools and communities to address them, these alerts might provide new information that can allow proactive response and save lives,” the RAND report said. 

A November study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association also found a direct link to increased youth suicide rates with mental health workforce shortages. 

As schools and their broader communities struggle to find enough mental health supports for students, there are federal resources available to boost funding for these staffing concerns in schools. For instance, the U.S. Department of Education provided $280 million to two grant programs to support school mental health. Funding for those programs comes from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and annual federal appropriations.

When Fred Rundle learned Hamas had attacked Israel on Saturday, Oct. 7, the Washington state school superintendent knew what he had to do. The following Monday morning, he sent a message to staff, students and families in his Mercer Island School District to try to ward against any rise in antisemitic and Islamophobic acts.

“Mercer Island is home to families with cultural ties to Israel, Palestine, and the geopolitical region known as the Middle East,” Rundle wrote. “While we may hold different or congruent opinions about the years of war and conflict, I worry that the escalation this weekend will spark a rise in Antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents in our own community.”

Based on past experiences, Rundle had some reason to worry. In October 2022, a student at the district's Islander Middle School made antisemitic remarks to another student. In 2019, images of students raising a Nazi salute were shared on social media.

A week after his message on Oct. 9, Rundle sent another, in the wake of an Oct. 13 call from Hamas to commit acts of violence against Jewish people globally. Rundle wrote that security would be posted on campuses and said students who were uncomfortable attending school should notify their school. 

The threats from Hamas, he wrote, heightened already growing concerns for both the Jewish and Muslim communities. 

“We have had our challenges with antisemitism,” Rundle said. “And we’ve had a history of being reactive to these things. I’ve worked really hard to be proactive and send a message that we’ll continue to condemn antisemitism and Islamophobia or any other hate speech.”

Mercer Island sits along Lake Washington and is connected by an interstate highway bridge to Seattle. The district serves about 4,000 students. The island is home to one of Seattle’s largest Jewish populations. Antisemitism has been enough of an issue on the island that the city council officially reaffirmed its commitment to reject bias based on religion in a 2021 proclamation.

Nationwide, between Oct. 7, the day Hamas attacked Israel, and Oct. 24 there was an almost 400% increase in incidents of antisemitism year over year, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a leading antisemitism advocacy organization. The 312 incidents include reports of harassment, vandalism and assault.

During the same two-week period, there were 774 complaints of Islamophobia, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights organization. By comparison, CAIR received only 63 complaints in the month of August.

For teachers and administrators, the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas has become another reason to worry about antisemitic and Islamophobic speech, bullying and harassment.  

Here are some ways they are addressing antisemitism and Islamophobia in schools.

Confronting hate through education

Helping students to understand and confront hate in general — and antisemitism and Islamophobia in particular — is at the heart of educational equity, said Julie Goldman, director of equity curriculum and instruction with the San Diego County Office of Education.

The district curates guides with resources, either developed internally or by outside organizations, to help educators counter extremism by allowing students to hear about the experiences of Jewish and Muslim people.

“It’s also preventative,” she said. “Teachers can ask themselves how they are creating schools that are truly inclusive and welcoming.”

Resources to address antisemitism through instruction include, among other things, diversity within Judaism and how anti-Judaism evolved into antisemitism. Resources to address Islamophobia in schools include education for teachers about how to support students during Ramadan and an interactive high school lesson about Islamophobia created by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“I want students to be exposed to many different kinds of families,” Goldman said. “If we do that work, it is going to impact the antisemitism and hate in general.”

Shortly after the ADL released its audit earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Education launched an antisemitism awareness campaign including, among other steps, technical assistance for states and school districts to develop resources like those in San Diego. Early last month, the White House announced plans to develop the nation’s first strategy to counter Islamophobia.

But Goldman said it’s the application of resources, not the resources themselves, that will make the difference.

“It’s not the curriculum that drives the instruction,” she said. “Teachers need to ask, ‘Who are the students that are in my class? How can I help students and their families feel seen, heard and valued?’”

Reach out to partners

ADL state chapters also partner with school districts to create student-led conversations about bullying and discrimination. Called No Place for Hate, the program organizes school-based work around common goals and encourages a commitment to define and achieve goals.

In May, the ADL stepped in to help Cherry Creek School District, located southeast of Denver, when some students at Campus Middle School drew swastikas on their arms and legs after a lesson about the Holocaust. A parent at the school wrote a letter to district Superintendent Christopher Smith to say that antisemitism in the district is so bad that one Jewish family left the district as a result and another told her children not to tell anyone they are Jewish.

According to the ADL, students in Cherry Creek have reported being subjected to taunts, including that they should be thrown into gas chambers.

ADL staff joined district leaders at a May 2023 school board meeting to share ideas about improving campus culture, such as how to support teaching about disrupting bias and antisemitism.

The district acts “swiftly to investigate and students found to be responsible face discipline,” Abbe Smith, chief communications officer for the Cherry Creek district, said in an email.  “We also have several partnerships and programs that we use to engage students in staff in identifying and combating antisemitism and all forms of racism.”

Partnerships are crucial for Mercer Island schools, too. Superintendent Rundle said he consults with the regional ADL, the city’s Jewish Community Center and parents in the school community to address issues that arise and help create clear messaging.

“I had a conversation with parents in the Muslim community as well as a rabbi to convey my original messaging,” Rundle said about the message he sent out in early October. “I asked, ‘Can you help me say this in a different way?’”

The Israel-Hamas war was going to have an impact on the school community, Rundle said. He kept in touch with leadership at the Jewish Community Center to talk about students who were studying abroad in Israel and how to get them home. The students have since returned home safely.

Muslim students need support too, says Farah Afify, Research and Advocacy Coordinator for CAIR. Earlier this month, a 7th-grade Muslim student was attacked by two fellow students on their way home from school in San Francisco. One of the students allegedly used an Islamophobic slur during the attack. In October, a man drove into the parking lot of a Muslim K-12 school in New Jersey and yelled death threats at parents. He came back and repeated the threats the next day.

Afify says that CAIR recommends classroom teachers use available resources  to address Islamophobia.

Muslim students are also bullied at high rates, according to a 2022 report by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. To address these incidents, the Islamic Networks Group in San Jose, California, has developed resources to help educators understand what Islamophobic bullying looks like and what to do about it.

“It is important now more than ever that educators are not only attuned to the potential challenges that these students are experiencing,” she says, “but also that they actively work to identify and address Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias, whether intentional or unintentional.”

Make reporting easy

Social media, as all educators know, has a way of amplifying issues that take place between students. Online hate speech might occur over the weekend. The consequences, however, show up Monday at school.

It’s nearly impossible to keep track of all that is happening online, but educators can use technology to set up ways for students to report disturbing incidents.

Mercer Island schools use the Say Something app, developed as part of the Sandy Hook Promise as a way for students to anonymously report potentially concerning behavior.

Nationally, there are tools for reporting antisemitism and Islamophobia. The Anti-Defamation League offers a process for reporting antisemitism, and CAIR has a portal for reporting incidents of Islamophobia.

“We’re trying to get healthier as a system,” Rundle says. “All students need to belong. All students need to have a voice. All students deserve a safe environment.”

When a mass shooting unfolded at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, 2018, Lisa Wobbe-Veit’s son was on campus in lockdown.

While she waited for the crucial phone call to pick up her son, Wobbe-Veit began emailing school and local government officials. In the following months, Wobbe-Veit, an associate professor of social work practicum education at the University of Southern California, volunteered to facilitate communications between the most- impacted families of the shooting that killed 17 and wounded others. 

Now, Wobbe-Veit works as a trauma and recovery consultant for Broward County Public Schools and as a family liaison at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. 

“My role really began at the day of the tragedy,” Wobbe-Veit said. “As an academic, I wanted to provide the numerous resources that are out there in regards to speaking to children about mass violence.”

Michelle Kefford, meanwhile, took the helm as principal of Marjory Stoneman Douglas in 2019, thereby stepping into a key role to help the school community heal in the aftermath of the tragedy. 

During a virtual K-12 School Safety Summit held by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Nov. 2, Kefford and Wobbe-Veit shared how they combined their expertises in school leadership and mental health to guide the recovery. 

“It was that collaboration and those joint efforts that really helped us to be effective in leading those recovery efforts,” Kefford said. “Lisa had never run a school. I had never been a mental health professional nor had I ever worked through a traumatic event.”

Model approach for navigating mass trauma

Kefford and Wobbe-Veit developed a model that other school leaders can adopt should they find themselves in the unfortunate wake of a mass school tragedy. 

Tapping into their two perspectives helped ensure the model’s success in their school community’s healing process, Kefford said. School leaders looking to implement this approach should assemble a team that includes a mental health professional and a school leader or school business official, she said.

In the ongoing aftermath of that tragic day, Wobbe-Veit focused her attention on providing support plans for the 33 families most affected – those whose children were murdered or injured. Meanwhile, Kefford worked to support the school community, uplift safety on the campus and bring back joy to the school environment.

Overall, their model has three fundamental concepts: facilitating communication, providing psychological first-aid, and using a situational and holistic approach.

Communication needs to be constant, consistent and uniform, Kefford said. That’s why she and Wobbe-Veit collaborate on every piece of communication released to anyone involved in the healing process. 

“When Lisa’s putting something out to the families, we always run through it together just to ensure there’s a consistent message and ensure that we don’t miss anything,” Kefford said. And the same goes the other way when Kefford prepares to communicate with the entire school community. Together, they make sure messages are sensitive, timely and correct. 

School leaders need to be mindful and critically think about the ways they use specific language in school messaging, Wobbe-Veit added. 

“I’m very careful to look at everything through the mental health lens. The word ‘trigger’ for a family member whose loved one was taken by a firearm, might be very distressing,” Wobbe-Veit said. “I never say ‘loved ones who were lost.’ Those families’ loved ones were murdered. When we really are looking to safeguard our language, sometimes we are minimizing someone else’s experience. ”  

Another approach in the model includes psychological first aid, which is an evidence-informed approach that looks to support individuals’ short-term and long-term needs, Wobbe-Veit said. The steps to address people’s needs in the aftermath of a tragedy require leaders “to listen, protect, connect, model and teach,” she said. 

Psychological first aid should also continually assess and evaluate how schools provide individuals with the support that they need now while helping connect them to long-term resources, according to Wobbe-Veit. Psychological first aid is not just a tool used by mental health professionals — school leaders need to inform their staff about the approach as well, so they can provide support to each other as well as individuals most impacted by the tragedy. 

The final aspect of the model requires situational and holistic approaches, Kefford said. That could mean school leaders making modifications to their approach, she said, while also acknowledging that not everyone’s healing process is the same. School leaders should also ensure that everyone’s needs — including those of staff — are met. 

“Every tragedy, every trauma event is very different. The needs are very different. The details are very different,” Kefford said. “So it’s about being flexible and sensitive to the specific situation that is in front of you.”