Students' Fear after Sandy Hook: Does a High Profile School Shooting Affect Students' Perceptions of Their Safety at School?

School shootings are a major concern for multiple stakeholders.  One of the sources of concern is the vicarious effect shootings can have on students in other schools, locally or elsewhere.  Research has consistently found that children’s exposure to school and community violence is associated with poor psychological, developmental, and academic outcomes. Presumably, feeling unsafe at school as a result of violence is an important mediator of the relationship between violence exposure and student outcomes. In comparison to their peers, students who feel unsafe have lower academic achievement and are more likely to display problem behaviors.   

However, the relation between school shootings and student fear is unclear.  Following Columbine, for example, Addington (2003) found that students reported few changes in their perceptions of safety at school. However, these measures of fear were limited to questions assessing students’ concern about being attacked at school or while traveling to or from school. Consequently, three hypotheses emerge to explain these findings: 1) The perceived risk associated with school shootings is so remote as to have few effects on students’ feeling of safety, 2) School shootings may have nuanced effects on students’ perceptions that were not captured by the study’s measures, or 3) The effects of the shooting may have been very short-term, and therefore may have been obscured since the post-Columbine data was collected during a 6-7 week sampling frame.  In this study, we test these hypotheses by examining student responses before and after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Columbine and Sandy Hook are similar events in the nature and extent of the trauma and in the subsequent media coverage and public discourse, suggesting that students might have similar levels of exposure to the events.

This study uses 66,543 student responses from 148 secondary schools across a southeastern state. A statewide school climate survey was administered in October 2012 through March 2013; the shooting at Sandy Hook took place after approximately 60% of the data had been collected. The survey included three measures of feelings of safety: a single item about students’ overall feelings of safety at school, a prevalence of verbal victimization scale (α = 0.88), and a physical safety scale (α = 0.90). We measured time relative to Sandy Hook in two different ways: a dichotomous variable indicating whether the response was given before or after Sandy Hook, and a continuous variable indicating the number of days after Sandy Hook that the response was given.

To examine the multiple variables of interest in this study, we ran 12 multilevel regression models to predict each outcome variable. Although six of the models indicated that students’ level of fear either increased (n =4) or decreased (n = 2) significantly (p < 0.01) after Sandy Hook, the coefficients were small—ranging in absolute value from 0.002 to 0.275 on a scale of 1-5—and did not represent meaningful differences in students’ fear. These results closely mirror Addington’s and together suggest that student fear may not be meaningfully affected by high-profile school-based tragedies such as Sandy Hook. Implications for school safety policies will be discussed.