Title: Making Schools Safe for Students | National Institute of Justice
Headings: Making Schools Safe for Students
Making Schools Safe for Students
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Historical School Safety Efforts
Mass Shooting Research
Evaluating School Safety Technology
Comprehensive School Safety Initiative
Moving Forward
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Content: Historical School Safety Efforts
Although federal programs and policies related to school safety can be traced to the early 1970s, the United States did not begin collecting national data on school violence until 1989, [2] when the School Crime Supplement was added to the National Crime Victimization Survey. The School Crime Supplement was conducted for a second time in 1995 and then became a biannual survey starting in 1999. Mass Shooting Research
Mass murder and shooting sprees are tragic and traumatizing events. When they occur in school settings with child victims, they are particularly shocking. NIJ-supported research seeks to improve our understanding of mass shooters and mass shooting incidents to inform efforts to prevent and deter future attacks. Ongoing projects supported by NIJ include the creation of a mass shooter database with events dating back to 1966, a study on the pathways and trajectories of school shooting perpetrators, and an examination of the short- and long-term impact school shootings have on communities. A series of school shootings in the late 1990s, including the one that occurred at Columbine High School, led to new programs that examined the thinking, planning, and other pre-attack behaviors of school shooters. One such program was the Safe School Initiative led by the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Secret Service. As part of this initiative, NIJ supported a 2002 study that explored the behavior of student-attackers in an effort to identify information that could help communities prevent future attacks. [ 3] The study evaluated 37 incidents of targeted school violence in the United States between December 1974 and May 2000.