Image by Ivan Aleksic.

Shot through her hand and into her chest, first grade teacher Abby Zwerner shuffled her class of six-year-olds to the school’s main office before she collapsed there. One of her first graders had just shot her in January 2023 with a 9 mm handgun he brought to school in his backpack. In November 2025, a jury found school administration negligent in not providing a safe work environment and awarded 10 million dollars in damages to Ms. Zwerner. Her injuries were life-threatening.

Ms. Zwerner and other teachers in the Newport News, Virginia school district had told administrators that the child may have a gun that day, according to news reports and trial transcripts. Other children told their teachers that the boy had a gun.

The day he shot Ms. Zwerner, the six-year-old had just returned to class after being suspended for slamming down and breaking her cell phone. Previously, the child had also tried to choke a teacher and had threatened other students.

How and why did public school administrators choose to ignore what was right in front of them? How did they ignore dire warnings and teacher complaints?

Researchers are studying recent rises in school violence. In an American Psychological Association (APA) study published in May 2024 in which 15,000 teachers were surveyed, sixty-five percent reported at least one incident of verbal harassment or threatening behavior from a student prior to the pandemic. Those numbers decreased during the pandemic when students were in their houses on computers. After the Covid period, 80 percent of teachers in the survey reported students’ violent and threatening behavior.

School violence is a crisis, not being addressed.

A July 2024 Education Week article reports that teachers are quitting the profession, citing violence towards them and lack of support from administrators as reasons. Edyte Parsons, a 4th grade public school teacher in Kent, Washington sustained bruises on one side of her body and a concussion after one of her students slammed her into chairs, desks, and cabinets, she said. Before the assault, Ms. Parsons reported the student’s threatening behavior to administrators and to school counselors, she said. Ms. Parsons recalls prior instances of being cursed out, threatened, screamed at, and assaulted. She entered teaching because she felt it was her calling. She was named teacher of the year at her school in 2023-2024. Now, she said she is considering leaving teaching.

Ms. Parsons said she is on her own to deal with student violence.

“I know for a fact for the rest of my career—and I have 17 years left—the office and administration [are] not an option. … I’ve got to handle it in-house, in my classroom, because [the] administration will not be assisting me,” she said in the Education Week interview.

Researchers with the APA project have been studying school violence since 2008, and it worsened after Covid lockdowns closed schools. Researchers recommend computer registries to track student violence; they recommend teacher trainings; more forms and paper work; computer programs and apps for teachers and principals, among other measures.

Researchers’ recommendations also include plenty of bureaucratic, abstract language and vague generalities, such as “shifting the mindsets and work experience” and “a comprehensive and integrative approach.”

Such bureaucratic language proves woefully inadequate when juxtaposed with these stark, recent realities: in an American public school, a six-year-old pointed a 9 mm handgun at his teacher and fired. Administrators were warned, and they failed to act. In addition, a fourth grader assaulted his teacher, after she had asked for back-up from her administration. Will computer registries, more forms, and more paper work help?

Researchers in the APA study also advise against “zero tolerance” policies or “punitive strategies” in schools.

One of the researchers stated, “School leaders should steer clear of training their teachers in zero-tolerance, or punitive strategies because research shows that these exclusionary strategies are ineffective in promoting school safety and can be harmful to students of color.”

How would “zero tolerance policies” toward school violence “be harmful to students of color” or “exclusionary”? Does this recommendation assume that African American students or students “of color” act more violently, thus a “zero tolerance policy” would single them out? This is a troubling and unfair generalization. Student violence occurs across all socio-economic and racial groups. African American, “students of color,” and Caucasian children should be held to the same behavioral and learning standards. All students, their families, and their teachers, white or black or brown, want safe schools.

There should be zero tolerance for violence in schools. We can have zero tolerance for school violence along with strategies for rule-breaking students to repair harms, fix what they broke, and rejoin the school community. I have taught for many years, and the best schools I have worked in combine approaches. The best schools put safety first, however, as a non-negotiable.

Schools nationwide had an almost 30 percent absentee rate, in 2022-2023, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The rate was at its worse during the Covid period and has not recovered. Why? Do students feel safe at school?

Do students want to attend a school, like the one in Newport News, Virginia, where a first grader shot his teacher? Those first graders, who were in the room during the shooting, are now third graders at that school. They live with the trauma of what happened as do the other students and teachers in the building.

Schools should be oases of goodness, learning, and creativity. They are worth protecting.

Teachers enter the profession because they love children and young people – reading with them, solving puzzles, playing learning games, guiding projects, laughing with them, comforting them.

Abby Zwerner left teaching and got a cosmetology degree. She should have been safe to remain in her classroom.

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