Most school shootings happen outside school walls

“Pure chaos” is how students at Garfield High School in Seattle described the shooting scene they encountered when they returned to campus from lunch in June. 17-year-old Amarr Murphy-Paine died after he was shot while trying to break up a fight near the school steps.

“I mean, people were running that way, this way,” Nate Cook recalled.

Garfield High School has been the scene of five shootings since 2021. It’s the most at any single U.S. school in the last 20 years, according to a Business City News data analysis.

“It’s something that we have to live with every day, especially being students here, and yeah, I’d say it’s pretty scary, to be honest,” Jackson Hatch said.

Jackson’s parents, Alicia and Michael Hatch, worry about safety when their four children are in school.

“You hope your kid can go to school and be safe and just focus on learning, but it does seem to be everywhere,” Alicia Hatch said. “It’s in the schools. It’s out of the schools. Crime is increasing. Gun violence is increasing and it’s a scary thought.”

Last school year, two students were shot in different incidents at Garfield High School. But unless you live in the community near the school, you likely didn’t hear about those shootings.

A Business City News analysis of the K-12 School Shooting Database shows these “smaller” shootings are more frequent than mass shootings, like the Apalachee High School shooting in Georgia on Sept. 4, in which two students and two teachers were killed. Taken together, those incidents are also killing more kids than gun violence that does make national news, such as the mass shootings at Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde and now, Apalachee.

In each of the last three academic years, according to the analysis, there have been at least triple the number of school shootings compared to any single previous school year dating back to 1966.

Alicia and Michael Hatch want administrators to pay more attention to what data show are leading causes of gun violence in and around schools.

“We want all the children at Garfield High and throughout the public school system here in Seattle to feel safe,” Michael Hatch said. “I hope that we will mobilize as parents, as a community, to call upon our leaders, call upon administration to do some very, very concrete things to create safety and calm.”

Business City News Most school shootings happen outside

Researchers like David Riedman, who created the K-12 School Shooting Database, said often, school administrators don’t learn lessons from past school shootings. Riedman believes they adopt policies and technological solutions, which don’t address the reality of what’s happening.

When violence does occur, Business City News found it’s more often not inside the school but outside on school grounds such as parking lots, football fields and in front of buildings.

A Business City News analysis of all school shootings nationwide revealed since 2018, 84% of deadly shootings happened outside school walls. The investigation also shows nearly 95% of deadly school shootings in the 2023-2024 school year happened outside on school campus.

Last academic year, more than one-third of shootings at U.S. schools happened in parking lots, where often there is little security or attention from school administrators.

Business City News Learn from the data

“Most of the incidents were not planned attacks,” said Riedman. “They were fights that were escalating into shootings, domestic violence on campus, accidents, suicides, and when you look at the characteristics of those incidents, they are things that stem from conflict.”

Security consultant Michael Matranga, a former Secret Service agent, believes that’s why school administrators need to understand what past school shootings can tell us about how to stop future gun violence on campus. Matranga trains and advises school districts around the country how to better prepare for incidents on their campuses.

“I don’t think that the majority of people (school administrators) are prepared for a school shooting,” said Matranga, who now serves as CEO of M6 Global Defense Group. “You can’t refute facts.”

The National Council of School Safety Directors, which Matranga vice-chairs, urges all schools to hire a trained, experienced professional whose only job is to oversee security at the district level. Business City News found out of thousands of school districts across the nation, less than 200 have a full-time district safety director.

“We have to stay on top of what the threats are,” Jason Stoddard, chair of the National Council of School Safety Directors and district safety director at Charles County Public Schools in Maryland, said. “We have to be flexible enough and be knowledgeable enough to make sure that we’re anticipating what’s going to happen.”

Stoddard said too many schools spend money on “solutions” to school gun violence that have not been proven by the data to work. Experts explained items like special door locks on classrooms and rolling bulletproof blackboards don’t address the majority of the gun violence on school grounds across the country.

“When we start parsing through the data, we have to look at all the variables and come up with any solutions from that information,” Stoddard said.

He showed Business City News some solutions he’s implemented in Maryland. He said many of the items cost little to no money, but most schools around the country haven’t implemented them yet.  

Examples include:

• Staff patrolling parking lots
• Mandatory ID’s worn by everyone (students, staff and visitors) all the time
• Doors locked to the outside
• Room lettering or numbering on paper placed in windows so emergency responders can see from outside the school
• Radios on which administrators can talk immediately with local police, not just among themselves
• Camera systems that allow security professions to see all of the campus, not just hallways and classrooms

“There’s no one-size-fits-all solution,” Stoddard said. “We know that if we concentrate on those fundamentals of school safety, that we reduce the risk.”

Business City News “This community has had enough”

Seattle Public Schools administration is focusing on what it can do to reduce the risk at its schools, including Garfield High School. Superintendent Dr. Brent Jones held a press conference with safety advocates, community groups and stakeholders before the current school year began.

“I believe that this community has had enough,” Jones said. “Our schools are safer now internally than they are externally.”

Business City News pressed for details about how the new plans address the shootings outside school buildings.

“We need cameras,” Jones said. “We need police presence, but we also need to balance that with counselors and social workers and care coordinators and community violence interrupters.  

Business City News Student develops his own safety app for schools

Jackson Hatch didn’t wait on school administrators. The rising senior at Garfield High developed his own push alert app for iPhones and Android devices. The app is designed to prevent what happened to him when he drove up on the active shooting scene with no warning as he returned to school from lunch.

The app will alert students, teachers and parents about emergencies on campus. Jackson even raised money through a GoFundMe account to pay for any costs associated with the app, so it will be free to anyone who wants to use it. Garfield High School’s principal has agreed to work with Jackson to distribute the app. A Seattle Public Schools spokeswoman told Business City News a district representative plans to meet with Jackson, as well.

Jackson hopes to share the app with schools nationwide.

“The whole idea is that everyone has access to the information immediately,” Jackson Hatch said. “It’s going to have a feature with a map and identify hotspots and be a great source for data.”

Jackson’s parents said they’re frustrated it takes a student to come up with solutions because school leaders don’t seem to be able to respond effectively and efficiently, and the same type of shootings seem to keep happening around the country.

“I think that we should be doing more,” Michael Hatch said. “This is a moment for everybody to lean in and not lean out and not point fingers, but everybody needs to do more and do better. What is it going to take until we find a solution, until there’s a breaking point, until we address this?”

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• School Shootings
• Gun Violence
• School Shooting