School Climate & Safety Tracker

School Shootings This Year: How Many and Where

Education Week’s 2026 school shooting tracker
January 01, 2026 | Updated: October 19, 2026 3 min read
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School shootings—terrifying to students, educators, parents, and communities—always reignite polarizing debates about gun rights and school safety. To bring context to these debates, Education Week journalists began tracking shootings on K-12 school property that resulted in firearm-related injuries or deaths.

In 2026, we continue this heartbreaking, but important work.

There have been 27 school shootings this year that resulted in injuries or deaths, according to an Education Week analysis. There have been 268 such shootings since Jan. 1, 2018.

Latest situations

On Oct. 15, a 16-year-old shot and killed a teacher and three children, aged 5, 8, and 11 at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Ore. Another child, aged 7, and a teacher were also injured. The 5-year-old victim is the youngest person killed in a school shooting since Education Week began tracking school shootings in 2018.

On Oct. 17, two men and one woman were shot and injured in Laney High School’s parking lot following a homecoming football game in Augusta, Ga.

Injuries & deaths in 2026

27     School shootings with injuries or deaths

46     People killed or injured in a school shooting

17     People killed

9     Students or other children killed

8     School employees or other adults killed

29     People injured


Where the shootings happened, 2018-present

Number of school shootings by state


See how many school shootings have occurred in each state since 2018. Search for your state and/or filter by year. Click or hover over any state for data.

Where the school shootings happened


Here’s an at-a-glance view of where school shootings occurred across the United States.


How many school shootings happened since 2018? How many people were killed or injured?

See big-picture data on school shootings that resulted in injuries or deaths since Jan. 1, 2018.


List of school shootings since 2018

See the details for each school shooting incident that resulted in injuries or deaths since Jan. 1, 2018. Sort by date and killed/injured counts by clicking the respective column headers. Use the search bar to search by school/district name, city, or state. (Note: A casualty refers to a person killed or injured.)


Contact information

For media or research inquiries about this data, contact library@educationweek.org.

About this tracker

In the emotionally charged aftermath of school shootings, politicians, activists, news media, and ordinary citizens often cite statistics that can present a distorted view of how many of these incidents occur. Those statistics are used to fuel ongoing debates about gun control, arming teachers, and school security.

With this tracker, Education Week aims to provide a clear accounting of K-12 school shootings. There is no single right way of calculating numbers like this, and the human toll in the immediate aftermath and long term is impossible to measure. We hope to provide reliable information to help inform discussions, debates, and solutions.

Methodology

Counting incidents

This page refers to incidents that meet all the following criteria:

  • where a firearm was discharged,
  • where any individual, other than the suspect or perpetrator, has a bullet wound resulting from the incident,
  • that happen on K-12 school property or on a school bus, and
  • that occur while school is in session or during a school-sponsored event.

We do not track incidents in which the only shots fired were from an individual authorized to carry a gun on school property, such as a school resource officer, and who did so in their official capacity.

The numbers of incidents, injuries, and deaths reported in this tracker do not include suicides or self-inflicted injuries. While suicides and attempted suicides are serious issues of health and safety, many of the critical questions and debates that those incidents raise for educators and the broader public are often distinct from those generated by school shootings. Incidents may be added out of sequence as it can take time for verification.

Counting injuries & deaths

Injuries included in this tracker may be major or minor. While we only track incidents resulting in at least one bullet wound, total injuries are not necessarily the result of gunfire.

The total number of people killed or injured does not include the suspect or perpetrator.

Sources

In addition to our own reporting, we rely on local news outlets, school and district websites, news alerts via online search engines, the Gun Violence Archive, David Riedman’s K-12 School Shooting Database, and the Center for Homeland Defense and Security’s Naval Postgraduate School’s K-12 School Shooting database.

How to cite this page

School Shootings This Year: How Many and Where (2026, Jan. 1). Education Week. Retrieved Month Day, Year from https://www-edweek-org.ezproxy.baylor.edu/leadership/school-shootings-this-year-how-many-and-where/2026/01

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Reporting/analysis: Holly Peele, Hyon-Young Kim, and Matt Stone
Data visualizations: Maya Riser-Kositsky & Lynn Liu

This tracker was previously developed or maintained by: Stacey Decker & Lesli Maxwell

Education Week’s work to track school shootings is supported in part by a grant from William Talbott Hillman Foundation, at www.williamtalbotthillmanfoundation.org. Education Week retains sole editorial control over the content of this coverage.

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