Violence in Schools: Social Workers Need to be Part of the Change
By Sue Coyle
At 13, eighth-grader Melissa* is no stranger to lockdown drills—drills where students and staff practice what they would do if an active shooter was on campus. She says the drills occur monthly, more frequently at the beginning of the school year, and are fortified by an assembly in the fall about active shooters. The assembly is led by the school resource officer and follows the ALICE Training curriculum. Melissa knows the name of the curriculum without being prompted.
There has never been a shooting at her small Catholic school in New Jersey, but school shootings are frequent enough that Melissa and her classmates know they need to be prepared. They often talk about the shootings that make the news and about their fears for what could happen to them, fears that are not alleviated by the drills and presentations.
“For a lot of my friends, [the ALICE lessons] make them more anxious, because usually people who shoot up a school have some type of relationship with the school. A lot of my friends are worried, because then [the shooters] know where we hide. But my thing is, if we don’t get taught, it’s going to be a lot of panic.”
Outside of the potential for gun violence, Melissa acknowledges that it feels like her school is in a bubble. There are no fights and there has only been one serious cyberbullying incident that she knows of. However, Melissa is aware that the larger high school where most of her classmates will go next year is different. “There’s three or four thousand kids that go there,” she says. “There’s always a lot of stuff happening there. It seems like there’s’ a lot of fights happening there. It seems hard to manage.”
Even within the bubble that is her school, it’s clear that Melissa is aware of the potential for violence. When asked if she feels safe at school, she answers neither yes nor no. Instead, Melissa cites the number of exits that each classroom has, the resource officer who parks outside, and the time it would take for the local police to reach her school in an emergency. She talks logistics, as it is likely so many other students in the United States would do.
Violence or the threat of violence has become a fact of school life instead of a hypothetical. For that to change, the adults in students’ lives—including social workers in schools and in the community—need to find the resources to make a difference.
Types of Violence
To understand how best to address violence in schools, one must first understand what that violence looks like. The most publicized form of school violence is gun-related, a fact that should come as no surprise. CNN reported that as of Nov. 11, 2024, there had been 76 school shootings in the U.S. that year, 52 of which were in K-12 schools. In 2023, there were 82 throughout the whole calendar year.
Juan J. Barthelemy, PhD, LCSW-S, associate professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, emphasizes there is likely more gun violence impacting students than most people realize. “When people think of gun violence, we have a tendency to focus on the mass shootings. Meanwhile, there are a lot of kids that get assaulted or shot where it’s a single victim. While that may be reported locally, it may not be reported nationally.”
Gun violence is not the only type of violence students encounter on a regular basis. Violence can be both physical and emotional and encompasses a wide range of actions. “What constitutes violence to me is any type of violence that is happening within the school properties or during school events—anything from physical aggression to now with kids so engulfed in social media, cyberbullying, as well as emotional bullying,” says Bathelemy.
Terriyln Rivers-Cannon, MSW, EdS, EdD, a school social worker in Georgia and president of the School Social Work Association of America, agrees. She lists threats and gang activity as well. She adds that violence can occur at all levels of primary and secondary education. It is not relegated solely to high school and middle school, as some may believe. Elementary-aged students experience it, too.
While gun violence may be the form of violence that most often appears in the media, “The most pervasive forms of violence currently are the bullying and the targeting of Latino youth, LGBTQIA+ youth, and Arab American and Muslim youth,” says Leticia Villarreal Sosa, PhD, associate dean for Research and Faculty Development and acting associate dean for Academic Affairs at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. “Those are the groups that are experiencing the most bullying.”
Bullying can and does occur in person, but an increasingly prevalent form of violence in recent years is cyberbullying. Cyberbullying occurs when an individual or individuals aim to scare, anger, intimidate or shame another person and do so via technology, such as social media apps. The Pew Research Center reports that “Nearly half of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 (46%) report ever experiencing at least one of six cyberbullying behaviors.” Those behaviors were offensive name-calling; spreading of false rumors; receiving explicit images not asked for; constantly being asked where they are, what they are doing or who they are with by someone who is not a parent; physical threats; and having explicit images of themselves shared without consent. While the online harassment may occur outside of school grounds/hours, it does not always. Regardless, the ramifications of it often are felt in school.
The Incidence of Violence
With the concept of violence encompassing so many different actions, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how often or how many young people experience it in school. In fact, the National Institute of Justice noted in 2020 that “there is no single data collection that captures the complete picture of the frequency, incidence, and trends in violent crime in U.S. schools. Rather government agencies and nongovernmental organizations employ numerous data sources and surveys.”
Some forms of violence have lessened in recent years. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, for example, the number of students reporting gang presence in their schools declined from 20% to 9% between 2009 and 2019. However, other types of violence have grown. Rivers-Cannon says she has seen school violence worsen since the pandemic specifically.
“The dynamics have changed so drastically. [Violence] was on the rise, but it heightened itself with COVID. All those things that were lying dormant, they rose to the surface and really magnified themselves when we re-entered into schools. We are supposed to be past the COVID stage, but we aren’t. All of our babies that were at home, all of those things that they were not able to have, it’s really surfaced, and now it’s coming to the forefront,” she says.
What’s more, even when a student is at a school with relatively few incidents of violence, like Melissa, the expectation for violence is ever-present, and that is also impactful but not necessarily recognized as such. Rather, the potential for violence has become normalized, as schools focus on preparing students for how to respond.
Villarreal Sosa reflects on conversations she had with social work students about active shooter drills. “Even with my students, there was a little bit of defensiveness when I challenged how traumatizing that is. Their perspective was ‘Well, this is for safety. This is what we have to do.’”
In-School Prevention and Intervention
Effectively addressing violence in schools, then, means approaching it at every level–working on prevention and intervention while also trying to shift the mindset away from the normalization of violence. Doing so, particularly from within the schools, can be an uphill battle for school social workers and other school staff. “A lot of schools are under-resourced in terms of having enough social workers and the protection to do mental health work. They don’t have the time to provide services,” says Barthelemy.
If and when they do have the time, the focus may be allocated toward curriculums, such as the ALICE Training that Melissa mentioned, to help inform and prepare staff and students for emergencies or violent situations. However, more is needed. Rivers-Cannon stresses that social workers need to determine what is going on when a student behaves aggressively or shows signs that their needs are not being met. She says children are like onions with many layers for a social worker to uncover. “When you get to the core of that onion, then you get to the core of what our children are really going through,” she says.
One step in being able to do that is simply making it known that the social worker and/or counselor is available in school. “We always talk about being visible in our buildings,” says Rivers-Cannon. “I am the school social worker. This is my role. I am here to connect those dots that individuals may not fully understand. My training provides me with that opportunity.”
When working with students, both individually and in groups, the school social workers can best prepare to address the needs of the students with the use of various resources. Villarreal Sosa says having clear policies and practices in place is key to addressing the issues of and associated with violence. “Create systems and structures where we teach children how to have empathy and hear each other. I think the more that we can create systems in schools where that can happen [the more we can effect change]. As a school social worker, it’s your role to facilitate and support that happening.”
She does not discount how difficult that might be, particularly given the recent general election and state of the country. “Here we are trying to set a tone around respectful behavior and addressing these issues of bullying that are so prominent in our society and doing it in a context where on a national level, we are rewarding that behavior,” Villarreal Sosa says. “That creates additional challenges when you are trying to set this tone.”
She said it also makes the systems and structures she mentioned even more important. “In the first Trump election, what was happening in a lot of schools was that some of the schools that didn’t have restorative practices in place struggled more when they had kids that were facing bullying. The schools that were able to manage the situations better were the schools that already had these practices in place.”
Community Change
Unfortunately, as Barthelemy noted, it can be difficult for school social workers to have the time, opportunity and resources needed to create impactful practices, structures and systems. That is why it’s not only up to school social workers and other school staff to prevent violence. The community also is needed on both micro and macro levels.
ommunity social workers support the needs of families and children through their services but in order to be most effective, there should be a continuity of care from school to community to home. The responsibility also should not only fall on that of the service professionals, says Barthelemy.
“It takes a village to raise a kid,” he says. “That village has fallen apart. People don’t trust their neighbors the way they once did. We need to go back to changing the norms in communities, getting to the point where we recognize that violence is not the norm. It does not have to be normalized.”
On a larger scale, social workers can help communities and the country at large better understand school violence and what actions would truly benefit students. A part of that means changing the narrative about what leads an individual to carry out a violent act. When a mass shooting occurs, for instance, mental health often takes the blame and that is a disservice, says Lyssette Galvan, MSW, public policy director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) Texas. “When we link mental illness to violence, especially in the context of mass violence, it creates harmful stigma,” she says. “Mental illness alone is a minor factor in overall violence rates. Environmental influences pay a more significant role. In fact, she emphasizes, “Evidence suggests that even if serious mental illnesses were cured altogether, nine out of 10 violent acts would still occur.”
That’s not to say, however, that mental health resources aren’t necessary. Mental illness may not be the sole factor leading to acts of violence, but students still need support—before and after experiencing violence. Galvan emphasizes the need to advocate for mental health resources in schools and communities so children and their families can access the help needed.
Rivers-Cannon agrees that advocacy is a must for keeping schools safer. “Our advocacy in all of this work that we do is key. We play a pivotal role when we talk about preventative measures. When we share real stories, such as ‘This is what happened throughout the day. This is a child that I gave hope to today. This was a child that was discouraged,’ we bridge those gaps between the students and the lawmakers.” She encourages every social worker to try to effect change in this way. “Shout it from the rooftops, she says.”
But don’t get discouraged when that shouting seems ineffectual at first, says Galvan. “It takes three to five sessions to pass a bill,” she explains. “That first time you file a bill, [it may not pass], but you’re starting the conversation. You are going in the right direction.”
And for all, whether in the community or the classrooms, try to find room for hope, especially now. “I have a lot of anxiety and fear,” confirms Villareal Sosa. “But in terms of hope . . . I guess when I look at it over a longer trajectory, I have hope. I graduated with my master’s in 1995. At that time, these kinds of things were very new. So I do have hope that we have more awareness and potentially more tools in terms of creating more places of safety in the schools.”
“The other thing that gives me hope is the fact that youth continue to look at schools as a potential place of safety and continue to re-engage,” she says. “It’s us as adults that often miss those opportunities. But the youth are wanting to be listened to and to be heard.”
Sue Coyle, MSW, is a freelance writer and social worker in the Philadelphia suburbs.
*Melissa’s name was changed for anonymity.
References