“It Does Scare Me…I Go to School Anyways”: Youth Resisting the Threat of School Shootings

• In Event: Futures in Flux: How Young People Navigate an Uncertain World

Abstract

In the wake of the increasing number of mass shootings in US schools, national debate focuses on the devastating loss of young people’s lives. One of the outcomes of this trend towards mass school violence least studied, but most prevalent is the shift in students’ social experiences of schooling as a result of its perceived possibility. School shooting threats are becoming increasingly familiar in schools nationwide, and so are educators’ preparations for them. During the 2021-2022 school year, over 45 percent of US public schools reported at least one threat of an attack at school, and 95 percent had drilled youth on lockdowns. Young people’s awareness of the potential of school shooting threats is also reinforced through social media, anti-bullying programming, and popular culture. Though completed mass shootings in schools are still statistically rare, our cultural representations of, and securitized response to their possibility have dramatically reshaped the experience of U.S. education and has the potential to intensify inequalities among students. This paper presents preliminary data from a study that documents the impacts of this phenomenon. I ask, how are school shooting threats – their actuality, their potentiality, and their presence in U.S. culture– impacting K-12 school communities? How do young people make sense of these threats, prepare for, and respond to them? In what ways are these threats and their outcomes racialized, sexualized, classed, and gendered? What implications do they have on the perpetuation of inequities and how are young people resisting these outcomes? To answer them, I draw from digital and live ethnographic data from a rural northeastern high school where multiple school shooting threats took place, as well as interviews with young adults from across the country who experienced active shooter drills, school shooting threats, and/or mass shootings during their K-12 experience.

Author

• Sarah Miller, Boston University