Despite recent school shootings, safety improving in most U.S. public schools, federal report says

DANBURY - The student-led protests in the wake of last month’s Florida massacre have pushed school safety to the top of the national agenda.

But an annual report released Thursday by the federal Department of Education suggests that in most categories, violence is decreasing and security is getting better in public schools.

Still, as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said Thursday. “While there are positive trends in the annual report on crime and school safety, we know - and have tragically been reminded in recent weeks - that there is much more we must do to keep our nation’s students and teachers safe at school.”

The 2017 report, which includes responses of students, teachers, and administrators to 11 federally funded surveys, tracks indicators of school safety including the incidence of violence, crime, bullying and hate speech, the seizure of weapons or drugs and the level of security measures.

The latest available numbers from 2015-16 show that with the exception of attacks on teachers, incidents such as theft, firearms possession and weapons threats were down compared to a decade ago. At the same time, security measures such as school guards, video cameras and locked doors have increased over the same period in schools across the country.

“It sounds like they are seeing a lowering of incidents and an increase of security staffing,” said Sal Pascarella, the superintendent of Danbury schools. “The nexus might be that by creating these firewalls, our schools are not such soft targets.”

The state education department agrees.

“Our policies on the state level and the district level have a lot to do with family engagement, so that parents are involved more with their children’s education,” said Peter Yazbak, an education department spokesman. “The anti-bullying legislation that Gov. (Dannel P.) Malloy passed at the state level a couple of years ago has obviously helped.”

The statistic from the federal report that is hardest for many to fathom is the 47 school-related deaths due to homicide or suicide from mid-2014 to mid-2015.

The report notes during that period, there were nearly 1,150 homicides of youth aged 5 to 18 away from school, and 1,175 school-aged suicides away from school.

The report can be downloaded at https://bit.ly/2E5aSVz.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal called the report proof that the country has not done enough to safeguard its children and educators.

“One violent death in school is one too many, and 47 in a single year is a stunning indictment of our nation’s abject failure to protect our children and school staff,” Blumenthal said on Thursday. “We need real, common-sense solutions - inspired by the energy and courage of students who have marched in the streets across the country to end the atrocity of school-based carnage.”

Blumenthal was referring to the March for Our Lives event last week that drew 800,000 people to Washington, D.C., and many thousands more to sister marches in 800 cities. The march was led by survivors of the Valentine’s Day massacre of 17 students and staff at a Florida high school, the deadliest school shooting since the 2012 massacre of 26 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook School in Newtown.

The federal report was released one day after DeVos convened a federal school safety panel.

The report includes state statistics that show Connecticut was above the national average in the percentage of high school students who have been threatened or injured with a weapon at school, in the percentage of teachers who were threatened or attacked, and in the percentage of high school students who said they carried a weapon during the past month, among other categories.