PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
School shootings are increasingly frequent in the United States. While public attention focuses on victims who
were killed, many more people experience a shooting and survive: More than 240,000 students have been on
school grounds during a shooting in the last two decades. A large literature characterizes the pathways through
which trauma from exposure to violence during childhood can adversely impact individual wellbeing, and existing
studies show that exposure to violence is correlated with higher rates of adverse outcomes in later childhood
and adulthood. But this literature can only offer suggestive evidence, as other differences between exposed and
non-exposed individuals could confound the documented relationships and weaken causal inference. And there
is limited knowledge on how these impacts translate into other behavioral and educational outcomes and long-
term economic wellbeing, or on interventions that can buffer against the negative consequences and promote
adjustment, resilience, and positive development for youth in these high-risk environments. This project aims to
advance knowledge on these issues by studying the causal effects of school shootings on children's short- and
long-term behavioral, educational, and economic outcomes, using 25 years of administrative data on all public
school students in Texas, linked to data on the dates and locations of 64 school shootings. The project will use
difference-in-difference models to estimate the effects of school shootings on a range of student outcomes,
including attendance, suspensions and expulsions, transitions into special education for emotional disturbance,
test scores, dropout, high school graduation, college enrollment/graduation, and adult employment and earnings.
For outcomes observed before and after a shooting, the analysis will compare the before/after change in
outcomes of students at schools that experience a shooting, relative to the before/after change over the same
time period for students at control schools without shootings. For long-term outcomes only observed post-
exposure, the analysis will compare students enrolled in schools at the time of the shooting to those who have
already graduated or not yet enrolled, relative to the difference between these cohorts at control schools without
shootings. The project will also identify groups of children who are most severely affected by shootings through
sub-group analyses that compare effects by shooting severity, student race/ethnicity, grade level at exposure,
and socioeconomic status. The project will additionally determine whether and which types of school resources
can buffer against negative effects of school shootings through sub-group analyses that compare the effects of
exposure across schools that do and do not have school resource officers, school psychologists, and school-
based health centers with mental health services. Results will help policymakers, schools, and parents
understand these impacts, identify sub-groups of children most in need of resources to mitigate adverse effects,
and learn about effective resources for helping children who have experienced a school shooting.
