Are Schools Safer Post-Columbine?

ByABC News
April 24, 2006, 2:19 PM

April 24, 2006 — -- With two foiled school shootings in the past week, the question remains whether students are any safer than they were before the violence at Columbine High School that left 13 dead and 25 injured seven years ago.

Those who work with schools to prevent violence say they get high marks for increasing awareness and reporting threats, but they note that schools face budget and time cuts that could make further safeguarding difficult.

"The best news is that there has been a change since Columbine by adults working with kids to change the mind-set that reporting incidents is not snitching," said Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, a school safety consulting firm. "It could be saving somebody's life, including their own. More and more students are coming forward," he said.

At the same time, Trump's organization has tracked 10 thwarted school violence plots since March 1 of this year, as well as 78 nonfatal school-related shootings, up from 52 during the entire 2004-05 school year and 68 in the 2003-04 school year.

"Even though we tend to see more incidents at this time of year, the spate of incidents since March 1 seems to be a lot," Trump said. "The good news is schools and law enforcement partner agencies are doing a better job at preventing these incidents. Any one of these incidents could have been the next Columbine if students hadn't reported [threats] and adults hadn't responded."

Two of those incidents include a middle school in North Pole, Alaska, where six students were arrested and nine others suspended Saturday for allegedly plotting to kill students and teachers with guns and knives. And another plot, in which five teens in Kansas were arrested for allegedly planning to shoot up their school on the Columbine anniversary, April 20, before details were discovered on the Web site MySpace.com

"The only thing that really scares me more than kids with a plot to cause harm to a school are adults who believe it couldn't happen here," he said. "Nobody wants to be alarmist ... but we've seen an uptick in school-associated violence over the past three years."