There are no easy answers for how to lead a school through the aftermath of gun violence. But a group of principals has worked to create a roadmap of sorts.
The Principal Recovery Network, a group of current and former school leaders who’ve experienced gun violence tragedies in their schools, recently updated its 2022 guide on how school leaders can support students and staff and make their schools feel safe again. The new guide includes added sections on how school leaders should focus on the needs of staff, in addition to students, after a violent attack.
“We wanted to be intentional about understanding that the adults in the building are still in the building,” said Patricia Greer, the director of the resource center for the Kentucky Center for School Safety, and a member of the PRN. “The students go from grade level to grade level. In some cases, at a high school, [they] will graduate. But your adults are still in the building.”
It would be “short-sighted” for school leaders to not provide counseling opportunities for staff, too, she said.
Greer was serving as the principal of Marshall County High School in Benton, Ky., in 2018, when a student opened fire, killing two classmates and injuring a dozen others before being apprehended by law enforcement. She was part of the 19-member team from the PRN that authored the new guide.
The guide also points to proactive measures principals can take—like working with their district to vet and organize offers of counseling support and establishing formal agreements with trusted national school behavioral health organizations, in case of a tragic shooting.
Though statistically rare, school shootings continue to scar the lives of students, teachers, and community members long after the violent incident. So far in 2026, there have been 19 school shootings, according to Education Week’s school shooting tracker, already more than the 18 shootings in all of 2025.
In the aftermath of a shooting, school leaders are often faced with navigating how to make school feel safe again, how to commemorate the lives lost, and how to address the mental health issues that stem from undergoing the trauma of gun violence. The PRN convened in 2019 to offer peer support and advice to these principals.
The PRN launched the updated guide on Sept. 24 at its annual meeting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., the site of the deadliest high school mass shooting in U.S. history, when a former student shot and killed 17 people, and injured 17 others in 2018.
Greer and other PRN members toured the new school building on Wednesday—which opened two years after the shooting—to see the memorials built for the victims.
Education Week spoke to Greer after the tour, about the new guide and how school leaders can build safe and supportive communities. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Did the PRN discuss how principals can try to prepare for and prevent violence?
As a group, we often use the word “hardening” to talk about the fact that schools do need to be hardened, need to have security processes in place. But you also have to harden your school [community].
Your kids need to know they are loved. We want all the kids to know that they are cared for. The adults in the building care about them, not just as a student, but as a whole child in their building. We need to look at social-emotional learning to make that school a truly effective environment for learning.
You have to do things to build that learning environment up back. And in some cases, the community feels like the best way to build that learning environment is to add weapons detection and screening.
If that helps the learning environment for your students and your staff, ... you need to look at the processes of how to run that efficiently and effectively.
Are there examples from the network that you can share?
At Marjory Stoneman Douglas, we watched how the students entered through the building and how the weapons detection process was set up. We discussed the process and how the students understood what was happening. We didn’t see kids being bottlenecked and stuck outside for long periods of time. They were very efficient and effective.
When I was at Marshall County High School, we took time to make sure we talked to students and listened to them [after the shooting]. There is a section in our guide about attending to the ongoing needs and listening to our staff and students. My students wanted it to be different. That was the key word I kept hearing over and over again.
They didn’t want to continue to go to school and [have the] exact same processes that were in place before the incident. We added in weapons detection—students’ bags were searched as they walked through a metal detector. Of course, this was several years ago, so weapons detection was not where it is now.
How can principals tackle the legal proceedings that follow a school shooting?
We all went through the criminal process to some extent, and then of course, there are the civil lawsuits that often come after these events. When all that is brought up, the staff and even yourself [can be] possibly questioned, or you have to give a deposition.
You go through some of your trauma responses again. We just want school leaders to be prepared. … It’s normal to feel your body going back into that sense of trauma when you’re going through that, and it will affect your school, too.
To just assume, when you’re talking about these events, it won’t have effect on your teachers is short-sighted. It will affect them because a lot of them will watch the news coverage or may be involved in that type of [legal] process.
