Seattle-area schools see spike in students caught with guns on campus

American schools hit a record last academic year with more than 340 shootings reported across the country. The high-water mark points to another troubling trend closer to home — more students were caught bringing guns to school.

This past academic year, school districts in the Puget Sound region reported the highest number of incidents involving interventions for students with guns on campus in at least a decade, a Seattle Times analysis of public records requested from the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction found. This peak follows a brief decline when campuses shuttered during the pandemic. 

The increase is not uniform, as some school districts have found far more firearms on campus than others. In 2022-23, among the larger school districts in the region, Seattle Public Schools reported 11 incidents, Lake Washington reported seven, and Kent reported four, while Tahoma and Northshore school districts reported none.

State and federal law require schools to report all known incidents involving students possessing weapons on school grounds, buses or other areas that are exclusively meant for schoolchildren. The Seattle Times filed a public records request for reported instances when weapons were found on students for the academic years 2012-13 to 2022-23, and analyzed those to assess how many involved firearms.

The data, collected from schools in King, Snohomish and Pierce counties, relies on school discipline records wherein officials have reported incidents of finding firearms with students. It is all self-reported. So if school officials did not find a gun, did not discipline a student or did not report the incident, it won’t show up in the database.

“The data that we have at the state level is only as good as the data that’s reported to us by school districts,” said Katy Payne, director of communications at the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, the state education department. “Our data team works really hard to follow up with districts to make sure that we have as high-quality data as possible, but there always is a little bit of margin of error.”

Highline, Seattle Public Schools, Marysville, Auburn and Lake Washington school districts reported the most interventions. 

Catherine Carbone Rogers, chief communications officer for Highline School District, which hasn’t reported an increase, said more reports of weapons indicate precisely that — there are more reports of weapons.

“We have worked really hard to create a safe space for students to come forward and say something when they see something,” said Carbone Rogers, highlighting the school district’s work over the past decade to foster an environment of trust and belonging so students feel unafraid to report concerns. 

“Data for other schools might not show as many incidents, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there are fewer students carrying weapons in their schools,” she continued. “It may mean they’re not getting caught.”

Officials at Seattle Public Schools and Auburn School District acknowledged the rising threat to student safety on campus and said they are working to address it through a variety of measures. 

“We did see an increase in students with weapons and firearms last year,” said Rhonda Larson, Auburn assistant superintendent for student engagement services. Since the increase, Larson continued, the school district has been refining its prevention and intervention programs.

“We’ve brought in training like restorative practices, hired a new director for safety and security, and now we’ve really increased quite a bit of conversation around that,” Larson said in an interview. Budgets haven’t increased for this, she added. “We just have to move money.”

Apart from promoting the schools’ safety tip line and locking doors once in session, the district has added more security staff, adopted a tiered threat assessment system and prioritized improving connections with students, families, staff and community partnerships. 

“Our numbers from last year really caused us to go, ‘Let’s double down on this,’ ” Larson said. “Our students and families need schools that they can rely on, learn in. We’re working toward that,” she added.

Seattle Public Schools, the state’s highest-enrollment school district, similarly is working to improve its safety concern reporting program, and is working on a partnership with health authorities and the city of Seattle’s Department of Education and Early Learning to expand access to mental health resources for students. 

Over the past 10 school years, about 540 incidents involving students and guns on campus were reported by school districts in the Puget Sound region to the state education department. 

While short-term suspension was the most common punishment, more than 120 incidents resulted in student expulsions, with the past year seeing the most student expulsions for possession of a firearm in the past decade. 

Most of these incidents involving students and guns took place in high schools and middle schools, though incidents involving elementary school students are increasing since an earlier peak in 2016-17. 

While the law states students are to be removed immediately when found with a gun, the decision to expel or suspend a student is up to the school principal or local school administrator, said Lee Collyer, former director of school health and safety at the state education department. 

Each incident is tied to other factors involving students, he explained. Identifying which student was involved, what else they were involved in, what is going on in their life and what support they might need is key to determining what action should be taken. “And those are all really different based on locality and local determinations,” Collyer said. 

Schools are safe, Collyer emphasized. A weapon is a symptom that something else is awry in a student’s life, causing them to feel unsafe.

School officials uniformly say the rising number of guns found on campuses reflects the proliferation of gun violence off-campus. 

Deterring guns on campus is a tender balance between instituting student safety and accountability. 

“Do kids feel connected? Do they feel welcome? Do they feel like they have a person at school they can talk to?” Collyer said. “These are things that keep school safe.” 

As part of creating that safe environment, Highline School District has tasked its security officers with building relationships with students first. Their uniforms are plain clothes, a polo shirt with the school district logo, for “an image of support and relationships, not of law enforcement,” Carbone Rogers said. At the same time, the staff explicitly communicates the consequences of bringing any kind of weapon to school.

“So in addition to following protocols, like calling the police and expelling the student, we explain the student is going to stay out of school for a full 12 months — not just that school year — that has a gigantic impact on a student’s academic trajectory plus their social life,” Carbone Rogers said. “They’re not going to be at school with friends, and kids don’t want that for themselves.”

She believes there is a lot of reluctance among students to pass weapons around. “Students don’t want to hold a weapon for someone else.”

In 2018, following a spate of mass shootings, the Washington Mass Shootings Work Group published a report with recommendations for improving student safety without increasing the presence of armed security officers on campus. 

The group recommended a slew of measures that included building a multilevel and equity-oriented threat assessment system, raising safety budgets, training staff and security to prevent unnecessary student incarceration, engaging families and communities, and improving access to mental health resources.

Those recommendations became law in 2019, laying out a comprehensive school safety plan for state education authorities to oversee, involving regional safety centers across the state to coordinate behavioral health supports and threat assessments.

Each educational service district has a threat assessment coordinator, and some even have more than one, to help with training and technical assistance, said Ella DeVerse, former school safety and student well-being program supervisor at the state education department. 

While threat assessment often involves responding to incidents when weapons are found, not all assessments have to do with weapons, DeVerse said. 

“We’re trying to look at a situation and say, ‘How do we support the student?’ ” DeVerse said. “We’re talking social, psychological, everything.”

Regional education officials were supposed to have the program in place by the 2021 school year, but the pandemic led to some delays in implementation. An audit from April found most supports were in place, noting that districts are mainly still lagging on billing Medicaid for students who are eligible for behavioral health services.