Parents’ school safety concerns have dipped slightly in the past year, though concern still remains higher when compared to years past, according to a new poll.
The survey results, published Thursday by Gallup, found 38 percent of parents fear for their child’s safety while at school, down slightly from the 44 percent measured last year after the deadly school shooting in Uvalde, Texas that killed 19 children and two adults.
While it is slightly lower, the new data exceeds Gallup’s measurements after the 2006 Amish schoolhouse shooting in Pennsylvania, the 2021 Sandy Hook massacre in Connecticut and the 2018 Parkland High School shooting in Florida.
Gallup noted that Thursday’s results mark one of the highest’s percentages since the organization began tracking the measurement in 1977. The historical high is 55 percent, which was measured immediately after the 1999 Columbine High School shooting where two students shot and killed 12 students before committing suicide. After a dip in 2000 to 26 percent, fear spiked back up to 45 percent following a March 2001 school shooting in Santee, California.
The organization added that its’ measurements have shown parental concern has typically risen following a “prominent mass shooting.”
Parents were separately asked about their children’s safety worries, with one in seven — or 14 percent — of parents saying their child expressed fear about school safety, which Gallup said is higher than the historical average, which is 12 percent. The statistic, however, is down from last year’s 20 percent, which was one of the highest percentages since Gallup tracked the trend to 1999.
“Though memories of the tragic Uvalde shooting have faded somewhat, parents are still more likely to be concerned about their children’s safety than before the attack,” Gallup’s analysis wrote. “Moreover, perhaps indicating these events are having a cumulative effect, parents are more concerned now than they were in the aftermath of other high-profile school shooting tragedies.”
The results are from the annual Work and Education survey conducted Aug. 1-23, which randomly sampled 219 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. States and the District of Columbia who have a child attending grades Kindergarten through 12. The margin of sampling error is 8 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
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