When Superintendent Kenny Rodrequez first heard about last week’s fatal attack on a Nashville elementary school, he immediately ached for the three children and three adults who were gunned down.

The data confirms that school gun violence is pervasive — and spreading. The number of guns seized in schools and fired on school property has skyrocketed since before the pandemic, according to gun violence databases.

In response, schools have taken steps to mitigate safety risks and soothe anxious students, teachers, and parents. A Pennsylvania district is preparing to install metal detectors in its elementary schools, while students in a Maine district have learned how to barricade classroom doors and confront would-be attackers. Other districts that had cut ties with school police are bringing them back, while still others are teaching families how to safely store their firearms.

Many schools are trying to walk a fine line, seeking to enhance security without turning their campuses into forbidding fortresses or funnels into the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, a national debate over gun control is raging around schools, with Tennessee students walking out of schools Monday to demand tighter gun restrictions — even as some lawmakers propose loosening the state’s gun laws.

The debate can be exasperating for school officials, who cannot control students’ access to guns yet are expected to protect them from gun violence.

“Many times when there’s a shooting or a gun found in a school, people are like, ‘You’ve got to keep guns out of the schools,’” Rodrequez said. But he believes the conversation about guns must be broader: “We have to keep them out of our communities.”

Gun violence in children’s homes and neighborhoods is far more common than school shootings, which account for less than 1% of all gun deaths among American children.

Yet school gun violence has become more prevalent. Guns have been brandished or fired on school grounds more than 230 times this academic year, according to the K-12 Shooting Database, which tracks all gun-related incidents on school property, including those without injuries. The number of such incidents is down slightly from the same period last school year but up nearly 170% compared with that period pre-pandemic.

Read the full article about school gun violence by Patrick Wall at Chalkbeat.