School Shootings and Long-Term Consequences

This blog is a part of our series, “Perspectives in Crime” where we explore leading academic studies that touch on crime data. 

The specter of school shootings hang heavy over American life. These incidents dominate media cycles and have negatively impacted communities across the country. Recent studies work to understand the long-term outcomes of students exposed to at-school gun violence and demonstrate the lasting effects of these events.

Researchers Phillip B. Levine and Robin McKnight authored the recent working paper “Exposure to a school shooting and subsequent well-being,” in which they try to identify the short and long-term student outcomes in the wake of “indiscriminate, high victimization incidents” such as the 2012 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, and the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. 

Indiscriminate, high-victimization incidents are incredibly rare, especially at the elementary and middle school level, and so the researchers contended with low statistical power. During the study period, the shooting at Sandy Hook was the only incident that matched this definition at the elementary or middle school level.

Gun violence, victimization, and standardized testing performance

Levine and McKnight utilize standardized test data, from elementary and middle schools (where testing is a national requirement) to analyze district-wide student performances. They found test scores fell considerably among students exposed to the Sandy Hook shooting, particularly boys. In school violence, boys are both more likely to be perpetrators as well as victims. (Read more about the impact of violent crime on students.)

Before the shooting, Sandy Hook was a high-percentile school in standardized testing results. Two years after the shooting, school-wide results were 20 points lower. Researchers found that over time test results recovered as the age cohort of affected students aged out. While this finding demonstrates that the school’s capacity as a learning institution recovered, individual student trajectories were significantly impacted by the tragedy. Figure 1 shows the impact of the Sandy Hook shooting on school and district-wide standardized testing.

In addition to the direct effect on Sandy Hook’s standardized testing performance, Levine and McKnight find district-wide reductions in proficiency rates following the shooting. The Connecticut data also revealed chronic absenteeism (absence for more than 10% of school days) as a mechanism contributing to these test performance deficiencies. The rate of chronic absenteeism more than doubled at Sandy Hook Elementary in the year after the shooting, but it also increased across the district showing that school violence possesses a broad reach and negatively impacts attendance at schools that have not been directly affected. Figure 2 shows the shooting’s impact on rates of Chronic Absenteeism at Sandy Hook Elementary and within the rest of the school district.

In the wake of a shooting, school districts spend more money on support services (i.e., counseling, security, and other services). But based on test score results, this additional spending is unable to offset the detrimental impacts on the student body.

Long-term health outcomes from exposure to school shooting events

Levine and McKnight also investigated the long-term health outcomes impacted by exposure to school shooting incidents. They use the “most extreme-but-objective-measure” of health: mortality. Researchers used county-level data that provided explicit causes of death and sorted deaths into “external causes” such as suicide and drug overdoses and “internal causes” such as cancer and heart disease. Researchers stated that shooting exposure would have no relation to “internal causes” and specifically measured these “external cause” mortalities. In their analysis of survivors of the Columbine High School Shooting, they found an increase in “external cause” mortality rates in the years following the incident. Similar to their analysis of test scores, data showed external cause mortality increases were driven primarily among male shooting survivors. Figure 3 shows the external cause of mortality of individuals affected by the Columbine High School shooting through age 29. 

Levine and McKnight’s research complements a body of work demonstrating that exposure to traumatic events has long-running consequences for the mental health of survivors, leaving significant percentages of post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of terror attacks and mass violence. It also builds off scholarship demonstrating that exposure to violence and natural disaster scenarios bares negative consequences for the educational outcomes of survivors.

Gun violence impacts student achievement and educational attainment

Another paper, “Trauma at School: The Impacts of Shootings on Students’ Human Capital and Economic Outcomes” by Cabral et al. focuses on the impact of lower casualty or no casualty instances of gun violence, over 30 years in the state of Texas, USA. These events occur more frequently than high-fatality incidents, providing a richer dataset of impacted students. Their analysis finds that impacted students exhibit lower levels of educational attainment, a 0.4% increase in the share of school days that a student is absent, a 1.8% percent increase in the likelihood of chronic absenteeism, and a 1.3% increase in the likelihood of grade repetition.

Affected students face lasting impacts on educational attainment and labor market trajectories. Students exposed to shootings in grades 10-11 are 2.9% less likely to graduate high school, 4.4% less likely to enroll in college, and 3.1% less likely to earn a bachelor’s degree by the age of 26. These impacts on educational attainment affect labor market trajectories and lifetime earnings. Cabral et al.’s estimates imply a reduction in lifetime earnings of over $115,000.

Their findings demonstrate that within-school episodes of gun violence produce similar effects as community-level homicides on educational performance and attainment as demonstrated in Patrick Sharkey’s work, which this blog has covered in the past.

Additionally, Cabral et al. determine that school gun violence increases faculty and staff turnover in the years following a shooting incident. This is another mechanism by which school-based gun violence disrupts the continuity of learning environments and can negatively impact learning.

The long-running consequences of school shootings

The results of both studies emphasize an intuitive yet underappreciated dimension of school violence: after the breaking news is over, school shootings leave broken communities. Learning environments made unsafe have long-running consequences on the well-being and achievement of students, and these effects can be seen district-wide. The increases in support services funding that occurs in the wake of these tragedies do not offset their impact. Notorious high-casualty school shootings capture only a small share of these violent disruptions, and smaller incidents with one or no casualties also have noteworthy and long-running negative consequences for affected students.

Pinkerton’s risk professionals work closely community organizations to identify vulnerabilities, design risk mitigation strategies, and maintain a continuity of security to protect students, faculties, and learning environments. Connect with a trusted Pinkerton Risk Advisor to get started.