School Safety and Violence: Drawing on a Public Health Approach

There is extensive research in the area of school violence prevention that has collectively helped to illuminate trends, identify disparities in experiences with school violence across various subgroups, drawn connections between the implications of these experiences to health and learning outcomes across childhood, and subsequently informed specific safety policies and practices that schools have been able to adapt and implement in their efforts to keep their students not only safe from violence but also promote schools as a space where children are able to thrive. This paper draws on a rich set of recent literature and seeks to further this critical discussion by highlighting a conceptual framework at the intersection of public health and education and its role in shaping conversations on school safety. A discussion on the emergence of trauma-informed school spaces and the ways in which attending to a child's mental and physical health are tied to learning outcomes is also presented. Moreover, this work draws connections to how other public health issues that also exist in school spaces have been addressed as effective examples for how to speak about, study, and respond to the issue of violence in K-12 schools. Given the unique ways in which school gun violence has more recently shaped safety decisions in schools across the United States, implications specifically for school gun violence prevention are also presented.