Exploring the Intersectional Impacts of School Shooting Threats on K-12 Education
Image: Moren Hsu for Unsplash
In the wake of the mass shootings at Columbine, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and Robb Elementary, among others, national debate focuses on the devastating outcomes of these events on young Americans’ lives. One of the outcomes least studied, but most prevalent is the shift in students’ experiences of schooling as a result of their perceived possibility. School shooting threats are becoming increasingly familiar in schools nationwide, and so are educators’ preparations for them. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, during the 2021-2022 school year, over 45 percent of US public schools reported at least one threat of an attack at school, and 95 percent had drilled youth on lockdowns. Of course, young people’s awareness of the potential of school shooting threats does not just come from schools. It is deeply shaped by the culture that surrounds them, reinforced through social media, anti-bullying programming, and popular culture. Though mass shootings in schools are statistically rare, our cultural representations of, and securitized response to school shooting threats have dramatically reshaped the experience of U.S. education and intensified inequalities among students.
In this next book project, I’ll document the impacts of this phenomenon. I ask, how are school shooting threats – their actuality, their potentiality, and their presence in U.S. culture– impacting K-12 school communities? How do young people, educators, and administrators make sense of these threats, prepare for, and respond to them? In what ways are these threats and their outcomes racialized, sexualized, classed, and gendered? What implications do they have on the perpetuation of educational inequities and how are young people resisting these outcomes?