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Citation
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Stuart-Cassel V, Nuñez B, Chung Y. U.S. Department of Education. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Department of Education, National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments, 2022. |
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Abstract
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The federal Gun-Free Schools Act (GFSA) enacted in 1994 requires U.S. public school systems to report any incident of a student bringing a firearm to school or being in possession of a firearm on school property. The law applies to all states and jurisdictions funded under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, which include the 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico; the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE); and the insular areas of American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Under federal law, states must also enact their own laws that require local education agencies (LEAs) to expel students for firearm offenses for a period of no less than 1 year. School administrators, in compliance with the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), 20 U.S.C. § 1400 (2004), may modify these expulsions on a case-by-case basis for students with disabilities. State education agencies (SEAs) must submit data to the secretary of education on an annual basis, reporting the number of students who were expelled for firearm offenses under the law during the 12-month reporting period. The GFSA also mandates that states and LEAs enact policies to refer students to the criminal justice system when they are in possession of a firearm on school property.
Information about firearm offenses is compiled by the Office of Safe and Supportive Schools (OSSS) within the U.S. Department of Education's (Department's) Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. The data collection falls under the Student Support and Academic Enrichment Program authorized under Title IV, Part A, of the ESEA. States submit GFSA data through the Department's EDFacts Submission System, a centralized information management system for obtaining and validating K–12 performance data used for education planning, policymaking, management, and budgeting.
For the past 5 years, OSSS has been collaborating with the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments (NCSSLE) to establish a data quality review and state feedback process to provide technical assistance to SEAs to help enhance data quality and completeness. The School Year (SY) 2019–20 GFSA state implementation report is a product of that effort. The report describes the GFSA review process and results and includes a summary of how the quality of data submissions improved as the result of the data review and feedback process with states. The report also summarizes compliance with GFSA reporting mandates and data on firearm incidents for SY 2019–20 and includes detail about the number of incidents reported by student grade level, weapon type, and disciplinary action resulting from violations of the law.
The report also presents comparisons to incident counts and rates from prior school years to explore changes in incident rates across time. However, it is important to note that data for SY 2019–20 are not comparable to prior school years of reporting, because of widespread school closures that occurred nationally beginning in March of 2020, which were prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. These school closures had the effect of truncating the reporting timeline, because students were not present on campus for in-person instruction for approximately a quarter of the school year. Any year-to-year comparative data should be interpreted with caution ... |