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.
To bring context to the polarizing debates that surround school shootings, Education Week journalists, in 2018, began tracking shootings on K-12 school property that resulted in firearm-related injuries or deaths. That year, there were 24 such incidents. On this page, we document where they happened, how many people were killed or injured, and other key information.
A Reflection
As 2018 came to a close, Education Week’s Evie Blad looked back on lessons learned from a year of doing the heartbreaking work of updating this tracker, an accounting of school shootings in 2018 where individuals were injured or killed by gunfire. “The process of updating our tracker, which involves six people, has become a regular meditation on the complicated nature of school violence,” she wrote in an essay. Read more.
Behind the Numbers
To better understand how gun violence impacted students, educators, and communities in 2018, Education Week created an at-a-glance view of school shooting data. Read more.
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.
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, 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 2018: How Many and Where (2018, February 1). Education Week. Retrieved Month Day, Year from https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-in-2018-how-many-and-where/2018/02
Contact Information
For media or research inquiries about this page, contact library@educationweek.org.
