This Will Not Be the Last School Shooting: The Urgency of a Collective Response to School-Based Gun Violence

On September 4, 2024, a 14-year-old student at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, opened fire on his classmates, killing two teachers and two students with a semiautomatic rifle. This abhorrent act of violence prompted a national outpouring of sympathy, including from the National Association of Social Workers (NASW). In a message of support to the Apalachee High School community, School Social Work Association of America (SSWAA) president Terriyln Rivers-Cannon extended condolences and emphasized the essential role that school social workers (hereafter SSWs) play in providing trauma-focused services and promoting healing in the wake of unspeakable tragedy. These are crucial aspects of our professional obligations and capacities, particularly in situations when student and staff mental health is so grievously imperiled. However, responding to school violence is no longer an isolated aspect of our role as SSWs, as such “crises” have become a developmental hallmark of American childhood. Since the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, more than 383,000 students have experienced gun violence at school (Cox et al., 2024). Immediately following the Apalachee shooting, threats or actual incidents of school violence were reported in Florida, Tennessee, Nebraska, and Iowa (Everytown for Gun Safety, 2024a).

Impact of School Shootings on Youth

At their best, schools serve as laboratories of human development. In schools that are welcoming, accepting, and safe, students can engage in essential tasks of childhood, including exploring facets of their emerging identities, practicing social interactions, developing critical thinking skills, and becoming intellectually curious. As trauma-informed practitioners, however, we know that a sense of relational and physical safety is the bedrock on which these developmental milestones are achieved. With the absence of physical safety, growth and development are stymied. Both our practice knowledge and empirical research confirm that experiences of childhood trauma profoundly impact the developing brain, ultimately shaping student health, well-being, and educational outcomes (Lecy & Osteen, 2022).

Exposure to Gun Violence

Mass shootings cause significant adverse mental health outcomes and long-lasting trauma, as does the prevalence of gun violence in the United States outside of school-specific shootings. Disrupted social development, interrupted cognition, memory, impaired learning, and unresolved trauma perpetuate a cycle of community violence and negative outcomes for all involved (Bancalari et al., 2022). Moreover, gun violence disproportionately impacts individuals from historically minoritized communities who have experienced decades of systemic racism and oppression. Even though most perpetrators of mass gun violence are White (Everytown for Gun Safety, 2024b), Black youth are more than 17 times more likely to die of gun violence than their White counterparts (Gramlich, 2023).

The negative effects of the United States’ overwhelming pro-gun culture goes beyond those who have had direct exposure to gun violence. Preparation for school shootings (i.e., lockdown drills) may cause students—and adult members of the educational community—to experience a myriad of trauma-related symptomatology, including hypervigilance. Exposure to information and accounts of gun violence, such as through news media coverage, may also cause those receiving the information to experience vicarious psychological effects (Cimolai et al., 2021), creating ever-widening circles of negative influence of gun permissiveness and related violence (Bancalari et al., 2022).

Social and Emotional Learning and School Climate Initiatives

In 2002, a report from the Safe Schools Initiative, a collaboration between the U.S. Department of Education and the Secret Service, found that in most cases of school shootings, students had shared concerns with someone about a possible risk of violence before the shooting (Vossekuil et al., 2002). This finding was replicated in the 2019 report Protecting America’s Schools: A U.S. Secret Service Analysis of Targeted School Violence (National Threat Assessment Center, 2019). Both reports found that school connectedness is essential in reducing school violence, and that school shooters frequently experienced social isolation, felt disconnected from their school communities, experienced bullying, and exhibited poor social skills. We owe it to our students to create a welcoming and safe environment where social skills such as empathy; healthy decision makin; and creative, collaborative problem-solving are taught and modeled through robust socioemotional learning (SEL) programming. Worryingly, however, policymakers have explicitly targeted for reduction or elimination SEL programs in at least eight states (Abrams, 2023). We—individually as practitioners and collectively as a profession—need to be the voice for SEL programs. If a school’s climate is characterized by social exclusion, as well as pervasive fear in the ability of school professionals to keep children safe, the emotional well-being and psychological health of all school community members, especially students, is at risk.

Impact of School Shootings on SSWs

In 2021, in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic and against a backdrop of societal upheaval, the prevalence of experiences of burnout appeared to be at an all-time high among SSWs (Carnes, 2023). Across the nation, SSWs described common themes: trauma-saturated caseloads, the failure of administrators to understand our role and ethical commitments, and elevated student mental health needs due to the pandemic. However, when those same indicators of burnout were explored in 2024, SSWs reported a new contributor: feeling unable to uphold ethical commitments to those we serve due to evolving national sociopolitical dynamics, such as anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant legislation; policies prohibiting the development of SEL initiatives; and, of course, the failure to enact strong legislation to keep schools safe from gun violence. Instead of engaging in proactive service delivery to optimize academic outcomes and psychological well-being, SSWs are consumed by threat assessments and crisis response. While the experiences of practitioners are nuanced and multilayered, the lack of physical safety for SSWs, combined with the toll that school shootings exact on student mental health, cannot be overlooked as a primary driver of SSW burnout. In the post-COVID landscape, it is abundantly clear that school social work as a profession cannot afford to lose people, as schools are the most common provider of children’s mental health services (DeLuca-Acconi et al., 2022; Stephan et al., 2007). But just as worryingly, SSWs themselves—their well-being, their sense of safety, their professional satisfaction—matter. Like the students we serve, we too deserve better.

A Call for Leadership and Action

While we are specifically school social workers, we are social workers first and foremost. As such, the NASW (2021)  Code of Ethics serves as our ethical North Star. According to the code, social workers are unique in the profession’s “dual focus on individual well-being in a social context and the well-being of society” (p. 1). Moreover, as described in the code’s Ethical Standards, social workers are compelled to “advocate for changes in policy and legislation to improve social conditions to meet basic human needs and promote social justice” (p. 30).

In the days of our field’s inception, the reform and redesign of unjust, oppressive, and exploitative societal policies was a clear priority of social work pioneers. Today, social workers—including SSWs—indubitably wear many hats in an increasingly complex societal context. Given the current post-COVID mental health needs of youth, not to mention those of the general population, our role as direct practitioners is certainly one of tremendous importance. However, our professional heritage as challengers of oppression and injustice, combined with our unique skill set as effective advocates for change, must not be lost in the crucial moment in U.S. history. It is essential for us, as a collective, to reconnect with this brave tradition of speaking up, demanding change, and moving the societal needle forward.

And we are poised to effectively demand better. Our advocacy skills are fine-tuned, our voices are powerful, and we are uniquely qualified—perhaps more so than any school professional—to tell the story of how unchecked gun violence and the societal failure to control it wreak havoc on our children’s well-being, development, and learning. Therefore, we urge a shift in the SSW response to gun violence, from one that centers individual healing and reactions to gun-based trauma to one that advocates collective action, specifically in the form of demanding gun control. At first blush, such a course of action may appear overtly political and thus potentially uncomfortable or divisive. However, if we return to the Code of Ethics as our compass for action, our mission is clear. Gun violence in schools significantly impairs the quality of life for perhaps our society’s most vulnerable population: children. Gun control, therefore, is not a question of left or right, conservative or progressive, blue or red.

To be clear, we do not believe that the onus of demanding sweeping policy reform should fall on SSWs as individuals. For all SSWs, and particularly for individuals from historically minoritized communities, the psychological cost of advocating for widespread social change in deeply societal institutions cannot be underestimated. Therefore, we look to our national professional advocacy organizations, SSWAA and NASW, to act as emboldened facilitators of collective action. The price of inaction, for both SSWs and the communities of youth we serve, is incalculably high.

Specifically, we have the following recommendations:

• We encourage SSWAA and NASW to more publicly address and educate on the effects of systemic dynamics, specifically school-based gun violence and the broader failure to enact legislation pertaining to gun control on SSW mental health, burnout, and desire to remain in the field.

• We implore SSWAA and NASW to take courageous positions in the form of policy statements condemning school-based gun violence and demanding a federal ban on assault weapons. We ask that SSWAA and NASW, like our colleagues at the National Education Association and the National Association of School Psychologists, advocate for sane policies and legislation that prioritize gun safety measures. Our professional lobbying bodies can also look to gun safety organizations as partners for inspiration and concrete strategies. Everytown for Gun Safety offers evidence-based solutions to reduce gun violence, including enacting sensible gun laws, background checks, and red flag laws.

• It is essential that SSWAA and NASW advocate for research-based policies, including the creation of safe and equitable schools, creating crisis intervention programs, informing parents about secure gun storage, and evaluating the impact of active shooter drills. We also ask that SSWAA and NASW use research publications to tell our stories, and to share the critically important perspectives of school social work practitioners as well as the perspectives of those working in academic and research capacities. We urge NASW, SSWAA, and our colleagues working in academia to prioritize the collection and dissemination of research that contributes to the knowledge bases related to the impact of school gun violence on not only child-related outcomes, but also SSW well-being, ability to perform professional duties, burnout rates, and desire to remain—or perhaps more likely, to leave—the field.

• We call on SSWAA and NASW to advocate against initiatives that would actively make our schools more dangerous, such as the bill recently passed in Tennessee to allow teachers to carry guns in schools (Tennessee Senate Bill 1325, May 2024). Research has shown that despite the funding that has gone to “hardening” schools, gun violence in schools persists (Hilaire et al., 2023).

• We encourage our elected officials to allocate the resources needed to effectively meet the mental health needs of the communities of students we serve, not simply in response to the societal crisis of school gun violence, but to proactively and preventatively support student well-being before crises unfold. To meet these needs, school social work caseloads and staffing ratios must critically be addressed for feasibility. This most recent school shooting, at the time that this piece was written, in Apalachee, Georgia, highlights the glaring discrepancy between recommended and actual ratios, and the overall lack of allocation of resources to student mental health support. According to the Hopeful Futures Campaign (n.d.) data for Georgia, the SSW-to-student ratio in the state of Georgia is approximately one social worker per 5,272 students. This figure is in stark contrast with the SSWAA-recommended ratio of one SSW for a maximum of 250 students (SSWAA, 2013).

We all deserve better than to live in a country that acts as though this is “normal.” Gun violence is not “just a fact of life.” Although we know that the next school shooting is practically inevitable, we refuse to simply “get over it.”

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