Updated: This article was updated Jan. 5, 2026, after EdWeek learned more information about a shooting that took place Dec. 12, 2025, at Stephenson High School in Stone Mountain, Ga. With the additional information, EdWeek determined the shooting—in which a person was accidentally shot while in a car during dismissal time—meets the criteria for inclusion in our tracker.
The overall number of U.S. school shootings in 2025 that resulted in injuries or deaths was lower than in any year since 2020, according to Education Week’s school shootings tracker.
Eighteen school shootings this year met the criteria for Education Week’s tracker—fewer than half the number that took place in each of the previous three years.
Seven people died in school shootings this year—down from 18 last year, 21 the year before, and 40 in 2022.
This year also contained the longest period with no school shootings—111 days, between May 7 and Aug. 27—since the first six months of the pandemic, when the vast majority of U.S. school buildings were closed.
There’s no immediately available explanation for the sharp decrease in the number of school shootings this year. Other sources have also noted drops this year in the number of mass shootings and killings that take place in any setting.
Gun violence in and around schools weighs heavily on students and staff, close families and extended relatives, nearby neighbors, and the entire nation. This is true whether the event generates weeks of headlines or a stray news article, whether no one dies or many people do, and whether it’s been 25 minutes since the last incident or 25 years.
Education Week began tracking school shootings in 2018, just two weeks before the mass school shooting in Parkland, Fla., in which 14 high school students and three adults died.
Since then, EdWeek has counted 239 school shootings, as of Jan. 5, 2026. The tracker counts incidents in which at least one person other than the individual firing the weapon is injured by gunfire on school property when school is in session or during a school-sponsored event. Other efforts to track school shootings may offer larger numbers if they use broader criteria to determine which incidents to include.
Number of mass shootings dropped this year
Two school shootings this year met the Gun Violence Archive’s definition of a mass shooting—in which four or more people other than the shooter died or were injured by gunfire.
That’s two less than last year, one less than in 2023, and seven less than in 2022, when nine mass shooting incidents took place—the most in a single year since EdWeek began tracking school shootings in 2018.
The first mass school shooting of the year took place April 15 at Wilmer-Hutchins High School in Dallas. Six people were injured; no one died.
Two people died and another 21 were injured during the second of this year’s mass school shootings, on Aug. 27 during a Mass for the student body of Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. That’s the largest combined number of injuries and deaths for any school shooting event since the 2022 Uvalde massacre in Texas.
This year’s death toll was smaller than last year’s
Nationwide, seven people died, and another 44 were injured in school shooting incidents this year.
Only one year since 2018 has seen fewer school shooting deaths than 2025. In 2020, when the pandemic shuttered school buildings nationwide for much of the year, three people died in school shooting incidents.
In total, 147 people have died in school shooting incidents since Education Week began tracking them in 2018. Of those, 106 were children.
Another 420 people were injured in school shooting incidents between 2018 and 2025.
