2024, These shootings reflect a gun violence crisis increasingly impacting American youth: In 2020, gun violence overtook infectious disease and car accidents as the No. 1 cause of death for U.S. children and teens.
In response to these disturbing realities, the NEA partnered with the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund to release the NEA School Gun Violence Prevention and Response Guide.
Released in June, the guide gives educators, elected state and local leaders, and staff and worksite leaders digestible and easy-to-use information “to prevent, prepare for, respond to, and facilitate recovery from gun violence in all education settings.”
NEA delegates at the organization’s 2022 Representative Assembly, alarmed by the national gun violence epidemic, urged NEA leaders “to issue a national call to action to help ensure that all students, educators, schools, campuses, and communities are safe from the epidemic of gun violence.” The guide represents one answer by the NEA – among many – to this “call to action.”
In partnering with the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund to produce the guide, NEA enlisted the expertise of researchers from the education, research, and litigation arm of Everytown for Gun Safety, the nation’s largest gun violence prevention organization comprised of more than 10 million members and over 700,000 individual donors.
To assist educators in both preventing and responding to future instances of gun violence, the NEA School Gun Violence Prevention and Response Guide is broken into four sections: “Prevention,” “Preparation,” “Response,” and “Recovery.” Each section presents data and recommended practices that NEA members can use to assist their own efforts in addressing the issue of gun violence in their respective educational settings.
As educators know well, building authentic relationships with students in the first days and weeks of the school year is often the key to preventing issues with classroom management later in the year. This same principle also applies to preventing gun violence. It should come as no surprise, then, that the largest section in the NEA School Gun Violence Prevention and Response Guide focuses on prevention.
Prevention
The “Prevention” section also includes prevention strategies at both the education setting level and policy level, including advocating for common-sense gun laws. The guide provides examples of
The guide as a whole – and the “Prevention” section in particular – also addresses the inordinate impact of gun violence on students of color. As Pringle explains, “While the picture most people have in their minds about schools and guns involves young white male shooters and white victims, the truth is that our students of color are disproportionately affected by gun violence. According to Everytown, “2 in 3 incidents of gunfire on school grounds from 2013 to 2021 occurred in schools where one or more racial and/or ethnic minorities constituted a majority of the student population.”
In each section of the guide, care is also taken to emphasize the harm of overly punitive approaches to gun violence prevention, and the importance of eliminating racial bias in gun violence prevention efforts, so as not to exacerbate the that pushes Black students out of school at a rate far higher than their peers.
