What do parents think about school security? Results from a national survey

168 parents from across the country completed my non-academic survey to get a better understanding of the landscape of school security.

There are some basic questions about school safety that I would like to know the answers to:

• How many times does a school go on lockdown?

• Is there a police officer on campus each day?

• How often are kids carrying guns to school?

• What types of security equipment are being used?

• How safe do kids feel at school?

As simple as these questions seem, this information is not available. These seem like the type of questions for an academic research article, but I’m disillusioned by the peer-review process for projects like this. I took the time to get Institutional Review Board approval for a survey of school police officers in 2020 and my paper about assessing school shooting threats still sat in the peer-review for more than 2 years. When parents and school officials need answers about school safety, we can’t wait around for years for academic reviewers to pontificate over a draft manuscript.

To get a better understanding of school safety, I created an informal survey about:

• Characteristics of Schools

• Campus Layout

• School Policing and Security Systems

• Frequency of Lockdowns

• Student and Parent Perceptions of Safety

Link to the survey

168 parents responded to this survey from all sizes and levels of schools in rural, suburban, and urban areas across the country. I wish that thousands of parents responded to it, but I’ll take when I can get and this information is still useful with a fairly small sample size (note: in general, more than 100 responses is a representative sample with statistically significant findings).

Characteristics of Schools

Roughly half of the respondents have kids in elementary school. This makes sense because kindergarten through 5th or 6th grade makes up roughly half of the total public school population.

A weakness in this survey is that most responses came from suburban schools. Social media was the primary method that I used to solicit feedback and most of the people in my social networks live in suburban areas.

The responses come from all over the country. I broke down California and Texas separately from other regions because they are the two most populated states, and each have a huge impact on national education policy.

The parents surveyed also represent a diverse mix of school sizes ranging from schools with less than 1,000 students (average k-12 school size in the US is 651 students) to larger schools with 1000-2000 or more than 2000 students.

Campus Layout

A challenge with turning schools into fortresses is that schools are generally campuses with multiple buildings and lots of doors that students and staff need to use throughout the day to move between classes. Recently I wrote an article about using data to design a safer campus.

Less than 30% of schools have a single door that is used for students to enter and exit the building. The other 70% have two or three primary doors, or doors all over the campus.