School Climate & Safety Interactive

School Shootings in 2021: How Many and Where

Education Week’s 2021 School Shooting Tracker
March 01, 2021 | Updated: July 24, 2023 2 min read
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We are continuing to track school shootings. Click below to visit our latest tracker or explore year-by-year data on school shootings since 2018 that resulted in injuries or deaths.

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School shootings—terrifying to students, educators, parents, and communities—always reignite polarizing debates about gun rights and school safety. To bring context to these debates, Education Week journalists in 2018 began tracking shootings on K-12 school property that resulted in firearm-related injuries or deaths.

There were 35 school shootings in 2021 that resulted in injuries or deaths, 25 of which occurred after August 1. A shooting on Nov. 30, in which a student killed four people and injured seven at an Oxford, Mich., high school, was the deadliest school shooting with injuries or deaths since May 2018.

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Illustration of a gun and a school in the background.
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In 2021, we continued the heartbreaking, but important work of tracking school shootings. More information about this tracker and our methodology is below.

Injuries & Deaths

Where the Shootings Happened

The size of the dots correlates to the number of people killed or injured. Click on each dot for more information.

About the Shootings

A previous version of this table included the age, sex, and status of the suspect(s). We are no longer tracking that information.

Contact Information

For media or research inquiries about this data, contact library@educationweek.org.

About This Tracker

In the emotionally charged aftermath of school shootings, politicians, activists, news media, and ordinary citizens often cite statistics that can present a distorted view of how many of these incidents occur. Those statistics are used to fuel ongoing debates about gun control, arming teachers, and school security.

With this tracker, Education Week aims to provide a clear accounting of K-12 school shootings. There is no single right way of calculating numbers like this, and the human toll in the immediate aftermath and long term is impossible to measure. We hope to provide reliable information to help inform discussions, debates, and solutions.

Methodology

Counting Incidents

This page refers to incidents that meet all the following criteria:

  • where a firearm was discharged,
  • where any individual, other than the suspect or perpetrator, has a bullet wound resulting from the incident,
  • that happen on K-12 school property or on a school bus, and
  • that occur while school is in session or during a school-sponsored event.

We do not track incidents in which the only shots fired were from an individual authorized to carry a gun on school property, such as a school resource officer, and who did so in their official capacity.

The numbers of incidents, injuries, and deaths reported in this tracker do not include suicides or self-inflicted injuries. While suicides and attempted suicides are serious issues of health and safety, many of the critical questions and debates that those incidents raise for educators and the broader public are often distinct from those generated by school shootings.

Counting Injuries & Deaths

Injuries included in this tracker may be major or minor. While we only track incidents resulting in at least one bullet wound, total injuries are not necessarily the result of gunfire.

The total number of people killed or injured does not include the suspect or perpetrator.

Sources

In addition to our own reporting, we rely on local news outlets, school and district websites, news alerts via online search engines, the Gun Violence Archive, and the Center for Homeland Defense and Security’s Naval Postgraduate School’s K-12 School Shooting database.

How to Cite This Page

School Shootings in 2021: How Many and Where (2021, March 1). Education Week. Retrieved Month Day, Year from https://www-edweek-org.libproxy.smith.edu/leadership/school-shootings-this-year-how-many-and-where/2021/03

See Also

Sign indicating school zone.
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Reporting & Analysis: Lesli Maxwell, Holly Peele, Denisa R. Superville

Contributor: Stephen Sawchuk

Design & Visualization: Stacey Decker, Hyon-Young Kim

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