May 2007 — News
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Long Odds, Short Fuses
On the preK-12 side, the U.S. Department of Education reported 21 cases of homicide from July 1, 2004 to June 30, 2005, including "students, staff members, and others who are not students" and including incidents at school, on the way to school, and returning from school (DoE 2006). Using DoE's most recent projected enrollment figures for preK-12 (54.59 million in the 2004-2005 school year), this amounts to one in 2.6 million. Those are greater odds than death by asteroid strike.
In the same report, the DoE stated that school-aged children were more than 50 times more likely to be the victims of homicide outside a school environment than inside. (It's worth noting that the DoE's homicide figures are actually higher than the FBI's murder and non-negligent manslaughter figures, possibly owing to the DoE's inclusion of incidents that occured outside school campuses.)
A little more perspective. The odds of you killing yourself intentionally over the course of your lifetime are one in 121 (Britt 2005). That means that in any given year, you are about 172 times more likely to kill yourself intentionally than you are to be killed on a college campus by someone else and 358 times more likely to kill yourself than to be killed in the environs of a preK-12 school, assuming an approximate 60-year span in which you might be capable of killing yourself (one in 7,260 on an annual basis).
That one incident at Virginia Tech resulted in more murders than in the entire five-year period from 2000 to 2004 on college campuses. Nevertheless, it amounts to slightly less than two-tenths of a percent of the total number of murders and non-negligent manslaughter incidents in the United States (FBI 2005). And, even accounting for the total number of victims killed in that assault, college campuses are still far safer than the United States as a whole and would continue to be even if "the worst massacre" in U.S. history were to occur every single year on a college campus.
Risk Management
None of that is to say that you ought to throw your hands up in the air and give up. Disasters, even unlikely ones, happen. You plan for earthquakes in California. You plan for hurricanes in Louisiana. You plan for fires, floods, blizzards, bomb threats, and, yes, even acts of deadly violence in schools. You come up with plans for responding to these incidents.
This is all part of risk management, which is at the heart of security planning. We don't plan for asteroid strikes for two very good reasons: They're unlikely in the foreseeable future, and there isn't a whole lot a school's staff can do to stop them.
By the same token, murders in schools are also ridiculously unlikely. (This is one of the few major reasons they receive so much media attention when they do happen, as opposed to the regular hum-drum murders that happen on average around 44 times per day.) But major incidents at schools bring the feeling of vulnerability closer to home and push our "common sense" into believing that schools are terribly dangerous places.
