The School Shootings: Why Context Counts.

The images are horrifying. Children are wheeled out of school on stretchers, while medical workers chase them down pathways with oxygen masks, bandages, intravenous drips. A security officer is slumped in the hallway, his face bloodied by bullet spray. A gangly fifteen-year-old is HANCOCK marched

This numbing scene was replayed on March 5 from Santana High School in Santee, California. After a young student there allegedly killed two classmates and injured thirteen others, Dan Rather led the CBS broadcast with a sweeping introduction: "School shootings in this country have become an epidemic." Within hours of the California tragedy, MSNBC. com posted a package of stories, including a map of the U. S. that allowed readers to click onto each state's previous violent school incidents. The cover of Time trumpeted, "The Columbine Effect," illustrated by a bright blue schoolbag packed with pencils, notebooks, and a revolver.

A national sense of dread took hold, again. Within days, more than thirty children, from New Jersey to Georgia, were either arrested or suspended for making threats that targeted kids or teachers. And beyond threats, a fourteen-year-old Pennsylvania girl shot another student on March 7 in her school cafeteria. At the end of the month, a sixteen-year-old in Gary, Indiana, was shot and killed by a former classmate in their high school parking lot.

It seemed as if no school, no child, was safe from an enraged classmate with a gun and an urge to kill. Every American teen ambling down the sidewalk with a book bag became a suspect; every student a potential victim. An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey post-Columbine found that 71 percent of the people who were polled believed that school killings could occur in their communities.

Is the public's heightened fear based in reality? Or is it exaggerated, fed by saturation media coverage that is painting a distorted picture?

Despite the frightening shootings, from Paducah, Kentucky, to Littleton, Colorado, the numbers support the latter view. From 1992, when the National School Safety Center began keeping records, to 2001, the number of people shot and killed annually in elementary or secondary schools declined from forty-three to fourteen. The drop is not a straight line. During the tragic 1998-99 school year, for example, twenty-four were killed -- more than half at Columbine. But the trend clearly shows that death by gunfire in schools is on the decline.

The downward trend also holds true for other school violence statistics kept by the center. When the numbers for total school deaths since 1992 are broken down, the categories for deaths by suicide and deaths for "reasons unknown" hold fairly steady. But "gang-related" and "interpersonal disputes" -- the largest categories of causes of death outside "unknown" -- show striking declines. Gang-related deaths drop from thirteen to one over the measured years, while deaths from "disputes" drop from eighteen to one. Bullying, an apparent factor in some of the recent shootings, was a factor in only twelve of the total 295 violent deaths recorded by the center since 1992.

It should be noted, meanwhile, that these 295 deaths occurred in a national school population of 52.7 million. Each American child, then, has only one chance in two million of getting killed on school grounds. With those odds, a student has a greater chance of being exterminated by a stray comet that wipes out the earth.

Other research groups support the argument that schools are safe and getting safer. The federal National Center for Education Statistics found that 25 percent fewer children brought weapons to school in 1997 compared to four years earlier. The study reported that "serious crimes" such as rape and sexual and aggravated assault declined 34 percent during the same period. Federal agencies from the Secret Service to the U.S. Department of Justice have released reports saying schools are one of the safest places for children to be.

"Stories about school shootings should mention these trends," argues Vincent Schiraldi, president of the Justice Policy Institute, a research and public policy group based in Washington, D.C. "You wouldn't write a story about Mark McGwire's home run streak without mentioning Roger Maris."

This is a simple matter of context. In its absence, "journalists are scaring the life out of parents and school officials about their violent kids," Schiraldi says. "The truth is, kids are no more violent today than they were twenty years ago. And schools are not the locus of homicide that the media portrays."

Certainly, media coverage of school shootings has significantly increased in column inches and broadcast minutes over the years.

* In 1974, a seventeen-year-old Regents scholar carted guns and homemade bombs to his upstate New York school, then killed three adults and wounded eleven others from his sniper post on the top floor. Newsweek carried only a 700-word story about the mayhem, well inside the magazine.

* In 1978, a smart, tormented fifteen-year-old in Lansing, Michigan, killed one bully and wounded a second. The story was front-page news in the local State Journal. But ninety miles away, the Detroit Free Press ran a much smaller story inside its pages.

* In 1988, a Virginia Beach sixteen-year-old armed himself with a semiautomatic weapon, 200 rounds of ammunition, and three firebombs before entering his Baptist school. He killed one teacher and wounded a second. The Associated Press sent a brief story about the murders over the wire that was picked up without much fanfare by a handful of papers around the nation. The San Diego Union-Tribune, for instance, ran a 360-word story on page three.

Neither MSNBC nor CNN existed when those teens opened fire. The national and international media did not descend on victimized towns and schools. Words like "rash of killings" and "epidemic" were not mentioned in the stories." `Epidemic' is exactly the wrong word to use when it comes to school crime in the nineties," says Lori Dorfman, director of Berkeley Media Studies Group, which urges reporters to add context and perspective to every violent-crime story.

Experts like Dorfman argue that real epidemics, which pose far more serious dangers to children than school shootings, go under-covered. Consider child abuse, for example. An average of five U.S. children are killed by their caregivers every day, according to the National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect. Life is clearly more dangerous for children outside school walls than within. National education statistics show that, at most, thirty-five children were murdered in school during the 1997-98 academic year, while 2,752 were killed beyond the campus.

Yet the volume and intensity of coverage of modern school shootings focus public attention on children's safety inside school buildings. Many schools respond to this by adopting strict "zero tolerance" policies. New rules require kids to be expelled or suspended for everything from carrying a gun to carrying a nail file. In the wake of Columbine, a six-year-old from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was suspended for bringing a toenail clipper to school. A first-grader in Jonesboro, Arkansas, was suspended for aiming a chicken nugget at a teacher and saying, "pow, pow, pow." The Harvard Civil Rights project found that suspensions increased from 1.7 to 3.1 million from 1974 to 1997, and that black and Hispanic children were punished at far greater rates than their white peers.

Not all the coverage has had a punitive effect. Many of the stories led to constructive soul-searching on the part of schools, parents, and communities. Features following the Columbine massacre often tackled the root causes of violence. "More reporters asked why, not just what," says Dorfman, who studied juvenile violence stories for a year after Columbine. The community discussions went beyond improving law enforcement to such subjects as establishing open school environments, controlling guns, and increasing mental health services for adolescents. Schools developed emergency plans that included aerial maps and a network of counselors.

Santana High School was one of these. Yet after the two children died there, The New York Times reported on the following Sunday that Santee's citizens, and the public at large, had become strangely inured to the specter of teens mowing down their fellow students in a hail of gunfire. Reporters James Sterngold and Jodi Wilgoren wrote that public consciousness had shifted from disbelief to "a macabre sense of expectation and routine." In Santee, police and school officials reportedly were already planning a training video, "to help them get ready for next time."

If the people of Santee believe that the statistically improbable horror that visited them in March is likely to occur there again, then the media have already wreaked significant collateral damage.

SCHOOL VIOLENCE WEB RESOURCES

The National School Safety Center (www.nsscl.org), a nonprofit organization founded in 1984 to prevent school violence, offers a list and analysis of school shootings since 1992.

The National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (www.cdc.gov/ncipc), an arm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, includes a report, "Youth Violence in the United States."

The National Threat Assessment Center (www.treas.gov/usss) published "The Secret Service Safe School Initiative," a report analyzing thirty-seven school shootings involving forty-one perpetrators since 1974.

The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (www.cjcj.org), a nonprofit organization, analyzes school violence and the media's coverage of it and advocates for alternative solutions to incarceration.

LynNell Hancock, a former reporter for the New York Daily News and Newsweek, writes on education and children's issues and teaches full time at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Her spring seminar on Covering the Youth Beat can be found at www.jrn.columbia.edu/ children/.