Parents’ school safety concerns dip slightly: Gallup

MIRANDA NAZZARO

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Parents’ school safety concerns have dipped slightly in the past year, though concern still remains higher when compared to years past, according to a poll.

The survey results, published Thursday by Gallup, found 38 percent of parents polled fear for their child’s safety while at school, down slightly from the 44 percent measured last year after the deadly school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 children and two adults.

While it is slightly lower, the new data exceeds Gallup’s measurements after the 2006 Amish schoolhouse shooting in Pennsylvania, the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in Connecticut and the 2018 Parkland, Fla., high school shooting.

Gallup noted that Thursday’s results mark one of the highest’s percentages since the organization began tracking the measurement in 1977. The historical high is 55 percent, which was measured immediately after the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado where two students shot and killed 12 students before committing suicide. After a dip in 2000 to 26 percent, fear spiked back up to 45 percent following a March 2001 school shooting in Santee, Calif.

The organization added that its measurements have shown parental concern has typically risen following a “prominent mass shooting.”

Parents were separately asked about their children’s safety worries, with 1 in 7 — or 14 percent — parents saying their child expressed fear about school safety, which Gallup said is higher than the historical average of 12 percent. The statistic, however, is down from last year’s 20 percent, which was one of the highest percentages since Gallup tracked the trend to 1999.

“Though memories of the tragic Uvalde shooting have faded somewhat, parents are still more likely to be concerned about their children’s safety than before the attack,” Gallup’s analysis wrote. “Moreover, perhaps indicating these events are having a cumulative effect, parents are more concerned now than they were in the aftermath of other high-profile school shooting tragedies.”

The results come from Gallup’s annual Work and Education survey conducted Aug. 1-23, which randomly sampled 219 adults aged 18 and older and living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia who have a child attending grades K-12. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 8 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.