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Violent incidents, such as shootings, and threats of such violence, have become relatively common occurrences in kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) schools across the United States. One common way that schools help their staff and students train for the possibility of an active shooter or other threats is by conducting practice drills. The prevalence of these drills -- combined with the mixed results of how these drills affect staff and students' feelings of preparedness, safety, fear, and stress -- highlights the need for more research. To better understand what teachers across the United States think about school safety generally and active shooter drills in particular, RAND researchers administered a survey to a randomly selected sample of 1,020 K-12 teachers using the American Teacher Panel. The survey focused on teachers' perceptions of school safety, including their main safety concerns and their experiences with incidents of gun violence and with drills designed to prepare students and staff for school shootings and other violent incidents. The survey specifically asked whether such drills made teachers feel more or less safe and prepared to respond to active assailant events and teachers' perceptions of their students' feelings about such drills, as well as whether supports were available to students and staff during and following drills. Survey results indicate that more work is needed to understand the impact of drills on staff and students and what schools can do to better support the well-being of students and staff who are required to participate in these activities.

This is the second in a series of five briefs published by the U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Technology on the key considerations facing educational leaders as they work to build and sustain core digital infrastructure for learning. These briefs offer recommendations to complement the fundamental infrastructure considerations outlined in the 2017 update to Building Technology Infrastructure for Learning (ED589999). They are meant to provoke conversations, challenge conventions, and deepen understanding. These briefs have been purposefully designed to be easily consumed and shared. The needs, capabilities, and expectations of technology infrastructure vary significantly by context. A rural outdoor learning school in the mountainous American Southwest will face challenges and have needs much different than a district within an urban center along the East Coast with an all-digital curriculum. The recommendations within these briefs are meant to help build, augment, and sustain digital infrastructure supportive of learning no matter the location. America has made incredible progress in closing the digital access divide, providing an ever-greater proportion of students with access to broadband connectivity, devices, and digital resources. At the same time, we must acknowledge the last frontiers of connectivity can also present the most wicked problems of closing that divide. To help readers build solutions for their own contexts, these briefs offer examples from the field of those who faced pernicious challenges to connectivity, accessibility, cybersecurity, data privacy, and other infrastructure issues and designed solutions for their challenges. Education's digital infrastructure is officially considered critical infrastructure, and just as we work to provide physical infrastructure that is safe, healthy, and supportive for all students, we need to align resources to create digital infrastructure that is safe, accessible, resilient, sustainable, and future-proof.

Shooting events and threats of shootings have come to shape the educational environment of many schools across the United States in recent years. Between 2021 and 2022, the number of threats alone rose by 60 percent, and most of these threats were made anonymously on various social media platforms commonly used by youth. While the overwhelming majority of these threats are meant to be jokes or to create havoc across a school or district, the resources that schools and law enforcement partners must devote to investigating and tracking down the source of each threat are significant. The resulting lockouts, lockdowns, and school cancelations that schools are often forced to implement have a severe emotional toll on students, teachers, and school staff. Seeking to shed additional light on how K-12 schools in the United States are being targeted by social media-based threats, the authors of this report examine what schools are doing to investigate each threat's credibility, ensure the safety of their communities, and work with local and other partners in these areas. To this end, they conducted a literature review to identify existing practices for assessing and responding to such threats, analyzed over 1,000 news reports about threats from 2012 to 2022 to identify trends, and interviewed more than 60 K-12 stakeholders representing 17 school districts in 12 U.S. states about the challenges these threats pose and the decision-making processes and active steps they take to respond to them.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to significantly affect the American workforce -- both civilian and military personnel -- through job displacement, augmentation, and the need for widespread upskilling. President Biden's October 2023 executive order on AI emphasizes the government's commitment to upskilling the federal workforce in understanding, adopting, deploying, and using AI. Many federal agencies and U.S. Department of Defense entities have published AI guidance documents. Congress is also exploring the implications of advancements in AI in both the general and federal U.S. workforces. This publication is intended to inform the policymakers and leaders who are tasked with preparing civilian and military workers to create, use, and deploy AI in their jobs. The essays in this publication provide overviews of technical and organizational issues, challenges, and actionable insights to help organizations effectively integrate AI and equip personnel with AI-related skills.

Graduating high school students are a critical source of new recruits for the U.S. military, and federal statutes require that military recruiters be given the same access to high schools that colleges and employers receive. Despite this, many schools are unclear about their obligations to provide military recruiters access, and enforcement mechanisms are not well understood. As a result, recruiters' access to schools varies widely. In this report--the first systematic analysis of issues that recruiters face in accessing secondary schools and their students--the authors seek to provide the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) with analysis and recommendations on how to improve recruiters' access to high schools and the process for gaining compliance from noncompliant schools. The authors analyzed public data on high schools and DoD data on the challenges recruiters have faced, and they interviewed recruiters and school representatives. [This research was sponsored by the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Military Personnel Policy, Accession Policy.]

Shooting incidents at kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) schools in the United States have sparked calls to increase security or adopt altogether new approaches to school safety. These approaches include allowing teachers or staff to carry firearms in some schools. To learn what teachers across the United States think about school safety generally and about specific proposals to enhance safety in schools, such as teacher-carry policies, RAND researchers administered a survey to a randomly sampled set of 973 K-12 teachers using the American Teacher Panel. The survey focused on teachers' views of safety in their schools, including their main safety concerns, perceptions of security measures in place, the effect of those measures on school climate, and whether they were concerned for their own safety and that of their students. On the specific issue of firearms in school, the survey asked whether allowing teachers to carry firearms would make schools more or less safe and whether teachers would personally carry a firearm if given the choice to do so. Findings note that teachers, like the U.S. population as a whole, are divided about armed teachers at school: Fifty-four percent of respondents reported believing that teachers carrying firearms will make schools less safe, 20 percent reported believing that it will make schools safer, and the final 26 percent reported feeling that it would make schools neither more nor less safe.

In response to the February 14, 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, President Donald Trump established the Federal Commission on School Safety to review safety practices and make meaningful and actionable recommendations of best practices to keep students safe. The Commission conducted field visits, listening sessions, and meetings with hundreds of Americans all across the country. The input of these individuals--state and local policymakers, administrators, principals and teachers, law enforcement and healthcare professionals, students and their families--was critical in identifying best practices and the recommendations contained in this Report. The recommendations are predicated on the policies already working in state and local communities. They outline steps families, communities, schools, houses of worship, law enforcement, medical professionals, government, and others can take to prevent school violence and improve recovery efforts following an incident. The recommendations are organized under three broad categories that represent the Commission's work: (1) Prevent--preventing school violence; (2) Protect and Mitigate--protecting students and teachers and mitigating the effects of violence; and (3) Respond and Recover--responding to and recovering from attacks. An extensive list of federal resources for school safety is also included.

A core responsibility of the local education agencies (LEAs) that operate kindergarten-through-12th grade (K-12) schools across the United States is creating safe and secure environments that support effective teaching and learning. To help them meet this obligation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's (DHS's) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) asked the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center to review the policy landscape and relevant literature to provide an overview of the challenges and facilitators related to school physical security. The authors synthesized the literature on physical security planning from school-specific sources and related disciplines to discuss the policy and other challenges that LEAs face in developing and implementing protection and mitigation measures for K-12 school campuses. The authors found that LEAs face pressure from families and community members and are also often constrained by limited resources (e.g., equipment, personnel), as well as a lack of expertise around physical security best practices. Few K-12-specific risk assessments exist to guide LEAs on how to choose and integrate various physical security measures, and information on the effectiveness of various solution is sparse, at best. In this report, the authors conclude with implications for policymakers and LEAs. [For the companion report, "A Systems Approach to Physical Security in K-12 Schools. Research Report. RR-A1077-1," see ED615796.]

School leaders across the United States face the challenge of creating safe and secure environments across their campuses in a way that helps promote the achievement of schools' educational objectives. To help them meet this challenge, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency asked the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center to conduct a review of the literature on physical security in kindergarten-through-12th grade (K-12) schools and other, comparable sectors to improve school leaders' understanding of how system-based security operations and physical elements can protect school occupants and mitigate the impact of threats and risks. In this report, the authors define and present a systems approach to school physical security in which five protection and mitigation elements--security equipment and technology, site and building design, people and personnel, policies and procedures, and training and exercises--integrate and work together to provide layered security benefits. Specifically, the approach to protection and mitigation elaborated here emphasizes that the policies, procedures, and training developed around school physical security tie together people and personnel with equipment, technology, and design choices to build a coherent system. School leaders need to think about how the protection and mitigation options they have in place affect the broader school mission, operations, and climate. Schools with diversity in student bodies, campus locations, and other traits will approach physical security in unique ways that match their unique needs, recognizing that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to protection and mitigation. [For the companion report, "Challenges in Implementing Physical Security Measures in K-12 Schools. Research Report. RR-A1077-2," see ED615799.]