In early January, Education Week closed out its count for 2025. 18 school shootings with injuries or deaths. 7 people killed. The fewest incidents and the fewest deaths in 5 years.
I remember the reaction. It was relief, and a little bit of hope, and a lot of people saying out loud that maybe something was finally working.
I understood the relief. I felt it too. But I have been doing this long enough to know what one good year usually means, and I kept quiet and watched.
It is late September. The 2026-27 school year is only a few weeks old. There are more than 3 months left on the calendar. And 2026 has already passed all of 2025.
These come straight from Education Week's tracker, which counts shootings on K-12 school property or a school bus, while school is in session or at a school event, where someone other than the shooter was hit. It is one of the most conservative counts in the country, which is exactly why I trust it.
| Calendar 2025 Jan 1 to Dec 31 | Calendar 2026 Jan 1 to Sept 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Shootings with injuries or deaths | 18 | 19 |
| People killed | 7 | 12 |
| Children killed | 4 | 5 |
| Adults killed | 3 | 7 |
Source: Education Week school shooting trackers for 2025 and 2026. Both count by calendar year, not school year. The 2026 tracker was last updated September 3.
Read the last row again.
This year, more adults than children have been killed in school shootings.
7 school employees and other adults killed, more than double last year. And adults keep ending up in the line of fire. The most recent case on the list was September 2 in Waynesboro, Virginia, when a 19 year old forced his way into an elementary school and wounded a staff member.
I have written here about staff being assaulted at work, and about how little we do to protect the adults we send into these buildings. This is that story in its most final form. We talk about school shootings as something that happens to children. This year, most of the people killed were the adults standing in front of them.
If you are a parent or an educator, you probably think in school years. This is the start of 2026-27. Last year was 2025-26. So it is fair to ask how "2026" can already be worse than a whole year when the new school year just started.
The answer is that the trackers do not count in seasons the way schools do.
Education Week counts by calendar year. January 1 to December 31. That means the 2026 count covers two different school years at once: the spring semester of 2025-26, from January through June, and the first weeks of 2026-27, from August until now.
At least 2 of the 19 happened after the new school year began: a shooting at a high school football game in Bakersfield, California on August 21, and the Waynesboro attack on September 2. The school year is barely a month old and it is already on the board.
Some researchers also count by school year. David Riedman's K-12 School Shooting Database reports both ways. Last summer, it reported that school shootings dropped 23% in the 2024-25 school year. Both ways are legitimate. They just slice the same months differently, and they can point in different directions at the same time.
Here is a simple way to see it. The Annunciation attack in Minneapolis happened in August 2025. On Education Week's calendar, it belongs to 2025. On a school year count, it belongs to 2025-26, the same school year as this past spring. Same event, different bucket.
I am comparing calendar years here because that is the count most people quoted when they called 2025 a turning point. If we are going to celebrate a number, we have to keep watching it.
Now I have to do the part that makes this newsletter worth reading, which is tell you where my own argument is weak.
These are small numbers. 18 versus 19 is 1 incident. When a count is this small, a single terrible afternoon can move it more than any real trend. One bad year does not make a pattern, and anybody who uses this to sell panic, or a product, is doing something I will not do.
Injuries are actually down. 44 people were injured in 2025 school shootings. So far in 2026, 15. Most of that difference comes from one event, the attack on Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis in August 2025, which alone wounded at least 17 people. That is more than have been hurt in all of 2026 so far. If I only showed you the rows that went up, I would be cherry picking, and you would be right to stop trusting me.
Other trackers count differently. Riedman's database counts far more broadly, including any time a gun is fired or brandished on school property, even if nobody is hit. Broad counts and narrow counts do not always move together. Different definitions, different calendars, different answers. Both are honest. Neither is the whole truth.
The count is not finished. Education Week last updated its tracker on September 3. Anything since then is not in these numbers yet.
So here is what I will actually claim, and nothing more. 2025 was widely read as a sign that things were getting better. On the one measure that most people cite, that improvement did not hold. That is worth saying out loud, even though the honest version of it is less dramatic than the headline.
Even the most careful tracker has edges, and real children fall off them.
On the morning of August 12 in Gaffney, South Carolina, a 17 year old student was shot and killed at his school bus stop, on the third day of the school year. Because it happened at a bus stop rather than on the bus or on school property, I cannot confirm he is part of anyone's 19. He was a student on his way to school. He is part of this school year whether a spreadsheet counts him or not.
That is not a criticism of Education Week. Every tracker has to draw a line somewhere. It is a reminder that a number is a tool for seeing, and every tool has a blind spot.
Here is what I actually want you to take from this, because it is the part no chart will ever show you.
In a single week this month, in the first weeks of the new school year, 3 weapons were found on or around school campuses before anybody got hurt. 2 were loaded handguns. The third was a loaded BB gun that, according to the sheriff, closely resembled a real one.
On September 11 in Nashville, teachers spotted an expelled student walking through the school parking lot. Police recovered a loaded handgun from his bag.
On September 15 in Tampa, an anonymous tip went to the school resource officer at Robinson High School. He found a student with a loaded handgun.
On September 18 in Lake Orion, Michigan, a report of a possible handgun on campus sent a school resource officer to a classroom. He removed the student and secured a backpack holding the BB gun.
None of those 3 will show up in the numbers people quote. Nothing happened. That is the point.
The count goes up when prevention fails. Nobody counts the days it works.
Look at how those 3 were stopped. Not by a scanner. Not by a camera. By teachers who looked twice at a parking lot, and by people who spoke up. The same thing the Secret Service found when it studied 67 school attack plots that were stopped before anyone was hurt. Someone noticed, and someone said something.
If the only number your district tracks is incidents, then prevention is invisible by design. Every tip that led somewhere, every threat assessment that got a kid help, every gun found in a backpack before first period, disappears from the record. And when budgets get tight, invisible things are the first to go.
I have spent 8 years arguing that what gets counted gets fixed. The corollary is just as true. What does not get counted gets cut.
A district that can say "we received 214 tips last year, 31 went to threat assessment, and 4 led to weapons being recovered" has an argument for keeping its counselors and its tip line and its SRO. A district that can only say "we had no shootings" has nothing, because a quiet year looks exactly the same whether prevention worked or nobody was trying.
Ask your district one question: do we count the attacks that did not happen? How many safety tips did we receive last year. How many went to a threat assessment team. How many led to a weapon being found or a student getting help. If nobody can answer, your district is measuring its failures and throwing away the evidence of its successes. Ask them to start keeping that number, and to report it publicly.
Somewhere this week a teacher is going to look twice at something that does not feel right. I hope she picks up the phone. I hope nobody ever writes about it. That is what winning looks like in this work, and it never makes the news.
For Alex. And for all of them.
Max Schachter
Students involved in these incidents are not named here. Learn more at schoolsafetydashboard.org.