How shootings are upsetting American schools, even where there are no gunshots

Michael Bennett was at Scott M. Ellis Elementary School in Greenville, a rural community a half-hour from the New York state capital, on Sept. 5. The principal greeted students with clenched fists and a reassuring smile.

He was there, in part, because it was the first day of school. But there was another reason, too: a tragedy in another small town a thousand miles away had prompted him to make his presence known.

A day before school was set to begin in Bennett’s district, something all too familiar in the United States happened again: another incident involving semi-automatic weapons fire on a school campus. Two students and two teachers were fatally shot at a high school in a leafy Georgia suburb. Nine other people, mostly students, were injured. Law enforcement arrested a 14-year-old boy who is now charged with four counts of murder.

The incident reminded Bennett of a moment that defined his decades-long teaching career. In February 2004, he was preparing to teach a social studies class at a high school in another small New York city when a student pointed the barrel of a shotgun at his chest. As the student pulled the trigger, the assistant principal knocked the gun away, and Bennett was shot in the leg. Fortunately, no one else was injured. (The student pleaded guilty, served years in prison, and was released.)

Twenty years later, the New York superintendent was among many district leaders across the United States struggling to deal with the recent impact of gun violence on students, families and staff. Longtime school administrators like Bennett have repeatedly seen shootings disrupt the American education system — even in classrooms thousands of miles and multiple time zones away from the shootings.

In the days and weeks since the Georgia shooting, other schools have seen a wave of threats and incidents, a pattern that often follows incidents of gun violence. The tragedy in early September had another important factor: It disrupted the start of the school year in schools across the country.

Students have been arrested in several states. Administrators have stepped up security protocols. One district just a few dozen miles from Bennett’s campus canceled classes and extracurricular activities and closed buildings after receiving threatening phone messages.

These events are not uncommon. Everytown for Gun Safety, a group that advocates for the prevention of gun violence, recorded 139 incidents of shootings in schools in the United States in 2024.

Far from these shootings, schools are feeling the effects. Assessing the credibility of threats, especially those that spread online, has become an increasingly common — and difficult — part of the daily lives of principals and superintendents.

This distracts from the main reason students and teachers are in school, Bennett said.

“It’s hard to learn when you’re worried about threats,” he said. “And it’s hard to teach.”

Learn more: 6 Years After Parkland Shooting, School Librarian Works Hard to Make Her Space as Safe as Possible

“Tough times” for school leaders

A week after the Georgia shootings, another superintendent, Aaron Spence, was juggling a crisis: a barrage of threats against the schools he oversees in suburban Virginia.

Law enforcement in his city spent days “relentlessly” following leads, tracing them and speaking to witnesses. Even though none of the potential dangers were ultimately deemed credible, Spence knew that Loudoun County Public Schools parents needed two things: First, to hear directly from the superintendent. In an email to families, he acknowledged the “senseless violence” happening at other schools across the United States. They also needed to know that any threats, even those made by children and intended as a joke, would be taken seriously and investigated.

Above a box of eyeglass wipes in Spence’s office, a note taped to a cabinet reads: “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” The message was a pandemic-era gift, he said in an interview last week, from a school board member in his old school district.

“Even when you face difficult times, you can learn from them and grow,” he said, recalling how difficult it was to keep the coronavirus out of the classroom.

Crisis management is part of the superintendent’s job. In addition to the threats of retaliation that have flooded Spence’s district this month, the issue of opioid use has also loomed over his tenure. A year ago, nearly a dozen students at one of his schools overdosed in a span of weeks. The district’s delay in notifying parents of those cases drew criticism from the state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, who issued an executive order requiring Virginia schools to notify parents of a school-related overdose within 24 hours.

Spence wrote in an August post before the start of the school year that the district “remains committed to working closely with students, families, staff and the community to combat” the opioid epidemic. A student suffered another nonfatal overdose outside of school before the start of the year.

But as threats circulated in the wake of the Georgia shootings, Spence had to focus on educating students and families about violence prevention.

“Just like when we were kids and were taught that you couldn’t yell ‘fire’ or ‘bomb’ in a movie theater, in today’s world, they simply cannot post or say things that even suggest violence because the consequences could be serious,” Spence, along with local police chiefs and the sheriff, wrote in a Sept. 12 message to parents.

Experts estimate that school districts receive tens of thousands of threats each year. The proliferation of social media has only made that problem worse: Posts on TikTok and Instagram have landed several students in the United States in detention in recent weeks.

Michele Gay doesn’t hide the importance of schools playing an active role in reducing risk. Her daughter was among 26 people killed in 2012 by a shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. She said the most important thing school leaders can do in the wake of gun violence, no matter how remote it is, is to communicate. Parents need to know there’s a plan in place, she said.

“Avoiding talking about it only increases anxiety,” she said. “After a situation like this happens, we need to hear from our leaders.”

Future school principals are not discouraged

Kevin Lein was teaching class when his phone lit up with news of the shooting in Georgia.

Many of the messages came from the Principal Recovery Network, launched in 2019 for principals who have been directly affected by gun violence. Lein was a school principal in Harrisburg, South Dakota, in 2015 when he was shot in the arm by a 16-year-old student who brought a gun to campus.

Lein never lost his enthusiasm for education, however, and today works as a professor at a university in Nebraska, where he mentors future principals. When news of the Georgia shootings in early September leaked out, Lein talked to his students about it. While some were worried about one day facing gun violence on campus, fear didn’t stop any of them from wanting to become principals. It gave him hope.

“They’re not afraid for their lives,” he said. “They’re afraid not to move forward and do something about it.”

Zachary Schermele covers education and current affairs for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How shootings shake schools, even where there are no gunshots