US schools step up security measures

The superintendent of public schools in Newport News, Virginia, said the district will increase its use of metal detectors after a 6-year-old boy shot a teacher in her classroom. The district has detectors, but they haven't been used daily.

On Thursday, new federal data showed random metal-detector use was reported in 9 percent of the nation's schools, with daily use at 6 percent.

The data was part of a report that shows how US public schools have increased security over the past five years. It was released by the National Center for Education Statistics, a research arm of the US Education Department. The data was collected in a survey of more than 1,000 public schools in November.

About two-thirds of the public schools surveyed now control access to school buildings and grounds, up from about half in the 2017-18 school year., according to the report.

"Panic buttons'' or silent alarms are being used by an estimated 43 percent of schools to connect directly with police in case of an emergency, up from 29 percent five years ago.

Some 78 percent equip classrooms with locks, up from 65 percent.

Nearly a third of public schools reported holding evacuation drills nine or more times a year.

Just 3 percent of public schools reported arming teachers or other non-security employees.

In 2021, schools and colleges in the United States spent an estimated $3.1 billion on security products and services, compared with $2.7 billion in 2017, according to Omdia, a market-research company. Despite the expenditures, the number of gun incidents at schools has grown.

The shooting on Jan 6 in Newport News, Virginia, was the first school shooting this year. Police said the first grader brought a gun from home and used it to seriously injure his teacher.

Last year broke the record for the most school shootings in more than four decades and marked one of the most violent years for youth ages 12-17, according to various unofficial counts.

More than 330 people were fatally shot or wounded last year on school grounds, up from 218 in 2018, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, which tracks instances in which a gun is fired or brandished on school property.

The overall number of incidents — which can include cases where no one was injured — also increased to more than 300, up from about 120 in 2018, and as few as 22 in 1999, the year of the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, when two teenagers killed 13 people.

The counts include any acts of gun violence on K-12 public, private and charter school campuses, including mass shootings, gang shootings, domestic violence, shootings at sports games and after-hours school events, suicides and other incidents.

School shootings are "very, very rare'', David Riedman, the founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database, told The New York Times.

His tracker identified 300 schools out of nearly 130,000 public schools with gun incidents last year.

"The most common occurrence — throughout history and throughout the last couple of years as things have dramatically increased — is there are fights that escalate into shootings," said Riedman. He said the data suggests that there are simply more people, even adults, bringing guns to school campuses.

Overall, shootings accounted for less than 1 percent of the total gun deaths for American children in 2021: 3,597 children died by gunfire, according to provisional statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.