It is important to establish reliable indicators of the
current state of school crime and safety across the nation—
and to regularly update and monitor these indicators as
new data become available. These indicators can help
inform policymakers and practitioners of the nature,
extent, and scope of the problem being addressed as they
develop programs aimed at violence and school crime
prevention. This is the purpose of Indicators of School
Crime and Safety, a joint eort by the National Center
for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Bureau of Justice
Statistics (BJS).
The 2022 edition of the Report on Indicators of School Crime
and Safety is the 25th in a series of annual publications.
Beginning with the 2020 edition, this report has been
redesigned with the intention of increasing its usability
for a wider audience. This report does so by highlighting
selected ndings from 23 indicators on various school
crime and safety topics. By synthesizing ndings in this
way, the report allows readers to gauge the breadth
of the content more eciently and make connections
across indicators. As in previous editions, the full set
of 23 indicators—with each indicator presented as an
independent, more detailed analysis of a crime and safety
topic—can be accessed in the online Indicator System.
Each indicator can be found on the website, and readers
can download PDFs of the individual indicators. Indicators
online are hyperlinked to tables in the Digest of Education
Statistics, where readers can obtain the underlying
data. The PDF version of the report, however, has been
transformed into the Report on Indicators of School Crime
and Safety, which highlights and synthesizes key ndings
from the full set of 23 indicators online.
This report covers a variety of topics on school crime
and safety. It rst examines dierent types of student
victimization, including violent deaths and school
shootings, nonfatal criminal victimization, and bullying
victimization. Then, the report presents data on teacher
victimization. This report concludes the section on crime
and safety issues at the elementary and secondary level by
examining data on school conditions—such as discipline
problems, gangs, hate-related speech, possession of
weapons, and use and availability of illegal drugs—as
well as data that reect student perceptions about their
personal safety at school.
To address these issues that students and teachers
could experience, schools across the United States have
implemented preventive and responsive measures.
This report covers topics such as security practices,
disciplinary actions, and whether schools have plans for
scenarios such as active shooters, natural disasters, or a
pandemic disease.
In addition to practices and measures addressing specic
crime and safety concerns, many schools provide mental
health services to promote student well-being and improve
school climate. This report examines the prevalence
of mental health services in public schools, as well as
the limitations to providing mental health services that
schools may encounter.
Finally, at the postsecondary level, this report discusses
the number of reported on-campus criminal incidents
against persons and property, as well as on-campus
hate crime incidents, such as those motivated by biases
associated with race, sexual orientation, and religion.
In this report, where available, data on victimization
that occurred away from school are oered as a point of
comparison for data on victimization that occurred at
school. Indicators of crime and safety are compared across
dierent population subgroups and over time. Across
indicators, the year of the most recent data collection
varied by survey, generally ranging from 2019 to 2021.
In 2020—and to a lesser extent in 2021
1
—schools across
the country suspended or modied in-person classes in
accordance with federal, state, and local guidance related
to the risks associated with the coronavirus pandemic.
Students might have spent less time at school than in
previous years due to these modied procedures. Thus,
readers are encouraged to interpret data since 2020 in the
context of these pandemic-related modications.
A variety of data sources are used to present information
on these topics, including national surveys of students,
teachers, principals, and postsecondary institutions.
Readers should be cautious when comparing data from
dierent sources. Dierences across these sources in
aspects such as data collection procedures and timing,
the phrasing of questions used to collect information
from respondents, and interviewer training can aect the
comparability of results across data sources.
Findings described with comparative language (e.g.,
higher, lower, increase, and decrease) are statistically
signicant at the .05 level. Additional information about
methodoloy and the datasets analyzed in this report
may be found online in the Reader’s Guide and Guide to
Sources.
1
For data on student enrollment by type of instruction (remote, hybrid,
and in-person) in spring 2021, see https://ies.ed.gov/schoolsurvey/mss-
dashboard/.
Introduction
Report on Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2022 | 1