The number of guns found in schools -- hidden in backpacks, waistbands and lockers -- has spiked in recent years, impacting hundreds of thousands of students.
Nationwide, 1 in 47 school-aged children attended a school where at least one gun was found and reported on by the media in the 2022-2023 school year. Jaden Wood didn’t know about the gun brought to school on the fourth day of his junior year until he got home and the news spread on social media. An assistant principal at Rome High in northwest Georgia had gotten a tip and confronted a ninth-grader, police would later say.
Fifty-one districts provided data for the 2022-2023 school year, including six of the seven largest school systems in the country; 47 districts gave a full five years of data. Some districts wanted hundreds of dollars to compile the records, while others said they did not track such information.But the true number is almost certainly far higher.
His best friend, Markevis Watkins, lives in a neighborhood afflicted with gun violence. He’s heard shots at night and lost a cousin in a shooting a few years earlier. School had always felt like a refuge. Now, in just 24 hours, that sense of security had been stripped away. Some local news outlets are stretched too thin to learn about gun seizures in schools, especially if administrators aim to keep incidents quiet, experts said. Other communities experience so much violence that the confiscation of an unfired weapon from a school building filled with children doesn’t rate as news.
Though many students brought firearms that they found unlocked in their own homes, The Post’s findings also illustrate the sprawling nature of the illegal gun trade in the United States. The vast majority of campus gun seizures reported by news organizations involved high-schoolers — the median age was 16, according to The Post’s survey. But authorities found guns on at least 31 students age 10 or younger during the 2022-2023 academic year, the news stories said. As is the case in most school shootings, the majority of those guns were brought to campus by children who could not legally purchase a firearm on their own.
On Feb. 2, a student brought a weapon to the school, then-Principal Janett Skinner said, according to a copy of the recording shared with The Post. She didn’t elaborate on the type of weapon, instead saying that neither students nor staff were ever in “direct danger” and the student with the weapon had been apprehended.
Was the principal lying, or did she not know the truth? How many other times had there been a gun at school, later described as a “weapon,” with no additional details? “They will put out a letter that’s very ambiguous. They won’t use the word ‘gun,’” Trump said. “And all that does is create more ambiguity, because parents are going, 'Okay, what type of weapon? Was it an AK-47? Was it an explosive device?’ ”School officials in San Jose came under heavy criticism in the spring when loaded guns were seized from students in a middle school and a high school a few weeks apart.
Over the next several weeks, Neely helped organize a group of teachers and parents demanding more communication and better training in the event of a shooting threat. But Mahnke’s son had already given a witness statement to administrators before leaving the school in a daze. School officials never updated their initial assessment of the incident publicly, the Mahnkes said. No administrator or counselor checked on their son.
As the family explored that option, Katie felt the need to go public with what had happened. At a March school board meeting, she questioned Skinner’s description of events, asked why she wasn’t notified before her son was interviewed and called for the school to develop a better security plan.“People are just accustomed to it now — guns,” Jeremy said. “There was a gun and yeah, it was taken care of and nobody got hurt. If somebody got shot, that’s a different story.
“While any weapon found in our schools is not a positive thing, we expect — and we’re communicating with our families — that we will see more weapons found in our schools because we’re building this culture that it’s okay to report it,” said Bernard Watson, the school system’s director of media and community relations. “We would much rather catch it on the front end than have to investigate after something bad happens.
In Washington and Chicago, school officials say they’ve had success with low-tech safe-passage programs, in which unarmed adult safety monitors stand along popular routes to school to bear witness and discourage violence as children walk by. In the districts they’ve trained, about 3 percent of students and staff, on average, continue to submit tips, Thunberg said, although some school systems see higher participation rates, up to 5 percent. Most tips concern suicidal behavior and drug use.But the system has averted at least 143 acts of violence with a weapon, including at least 15 planned school shootings, since 2018, Thunberg said.
Young asked the secretary to look up the 13-year-old’s schedule, planning to meet him in his next class. He didn’t want to initiate a lockdown in between class periods.
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