Community members in Uvalde are still absorbing the loss of 19 children and two teachers after the killings at Robb Elementary School. But they will soon face a pressing issue: What awaits young people who survived the horror?

“A growing body of research finds that the costs of gun violence in American schools extend beyond the death toll,” said Maya Rossin-Slater, a professor of health policy at the Stanford University School of Medicine who has carefully observed the aftermath of previous Texas shootings. “The hundreds of thousands of children and educators who experience and survive these tragedies are likely to carry scars for years and decades to come.”

Rossin-Slater is the co-author of a newly released study looking at the survivors of 33 school shootings in Texas between 1995 and 2016, including those with or without fatalities. Using administrative data from the Texas Education Agency, and measuring the academic participation of individual survivors against students from a control group of demographically similar schools, the research team detected obvious short-term consequences from shootings: Affected students were more likely to be absent and chronically absent, and over 100 percent more likely to repeat a grade (though this probability rose from a relatively low baseline).

The authors next examined college enrollment and workforce records of students at eight Texas high schools that saw shootings between 1998 and 2006, comparing the trends of students enrolled both before and during the shootings against same-age students at control schools. Tenth and eleventh graders who lived through shootings became 3.7 percent less likely to graduate, 9.5 percent less likely to enroll in college, and 15.3 percent less likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree. Freshmen, sophomores, and juniors who experienced shootings were more likely to be unemployed between ages 24 and 26; those working by that age earned, on average, $2,350 less in annual wages than their peers, which implies a $115,000 reduction in lifetime earnings.

Read the full article about school shootings by Kevin Mahnken at The 74.